martinzoo

Definitely the most fun we ever had with a unit, was when we did our Iditarod unit last Spring. A few weeks after we finished the unit, I got an email from our local homeschooling group to see if there was interest in having a genuine Alaskan musher come to Virginia and give us a lecture. Whoa! How perfect was that? It took this long to get it all to come to fruition, but today we met Doug Ruzicka.

He brought all kinds of musher equipment and even an adorable little husky puppy. He couldn’t bring a full size dog because they are all in training right now for the Iditarod race. This man was a fabulous speaker and he had every kid there, young and old, enthralled. This is his web page, MushHusky, if you ever want him to speak to your group.

Doug really liked GB’s t-shirt, and kept calling him gee-haw boy. Those are the turn signals for the dogs while they are running.

This is heaven for GB…. if he could have walked out the back door with this pup, he would have.

Here is the sled

These are snowshoes. All mushers are required by race officials to carry them in the pack, but he says he’s never had to use them, and that they are an awful lot of work. Hmmm, maybe the next exercise trend….

The most useful piece of equipment in his pack is the ax.

This is a musher’s hat. Keeping your head warm is imperative. Coats are worn that have a tunnel around the hood to create a no-wind-zone before air can reach your face. He wears a beard to help keep his face warm, too. I’m laughing because the first thing he told us is that Virginia is HOT (we’ve been having unseasonably warm weather). He said he talked to his wife yesterday and told her that it was 90 degrees here, and she told him it was 17 degrees there. He grinned and said he likes that. I shivered in spite of myself.

These are the musher mitts. Funny story…. See the fur along the top portion of those mitts? You know what they are for? Snot!….. No kidding. When you get really cold, the first thing that happens is your nose runs. Well, when you are guiding a dog sled, you don’t want to take off your mitts, and expose naked skin to the weather, to wipe your nose with a tissue. But if you don’t get rid of the snot, it turns into snot-icicles! Ewww! So they use the furry part of the mitt to wipe away the snot. *** hate that word, but it IS descriptive, and the kids were roaring laughing! Then, this is funny too, to get the snot off the mitt, you just bang on the sled and the icicles break off and fall to the ground.

Here is another amazing story. He was explaining how cold it is in Alaska, and he said that on some days it’s so cold that if you take your coffee outside and toss the contents into the air, it explodes! The kids loved that one, too.

GB was a little intimidated by the crowd, but couldn’t resist one question. He asked the musher how the dogs eyes were protected. Doug had already explained that the mushers wear goggles because eyes are wet, and anything that is wet freezes. So I could understand GB’s curiosity. Doug told him that the dogs have three eyelids, and that when they blink, one of the eyelids has a chemical, kind of like anti-freeze, and wets the eye and protects it from freezing. Fascinating!