The Mighty Tawatinaw River Clearing - Bet

Howdy Ho Everybodies!

It's your roving nature reporter, Bet, here!

If you've been following along on the Facebooks, you'll know that the fantabulous Julia was here visiting, helping out, and learning the ropes about mushing.  We love having Julia visit, she's very good at opening and closing gates.

She was also very good at helping train the Pretty Curly Tails, and the lessons they learned on this visit was "water crossing".

Now you may be asking yourself: "Self... why would Pretty Curly Tails need to learn how to cross water, or get in water, or even have anything to do with water when they race in the snow???"

Well, there actually is water on the Iditarod sometimes, icy icy water, and gushy watery conditions and such, and the Pretty Curly Tails need to know that water is fine, it's good, they can just run right through it, and they need to find out that information during training, not unexpectedly like while they race, so running them into and through water is a vital training thingie.

Here they are running and then oopsies, there's water:


See how easy they make it look?

Unfortunately, the icky beavers of the MIGHTY Tawatinaw River have built all of their icky dams and have made the level of the river very MIGHTY for the Pretty Curly Tails, as you can see here:

You can clearly see that the Pretty Curly Tails were NOT at all thrilled with the prospect of jumping into the MIGHTY Tawatinaw... and who can blame them.

My favorite part is when Ryka body slams Boo into the river... way to go, I taught her so well.

Anyhooooo, it was pretty clear that we had to do something to lower the level of the river, so that meant Supervisor Border Collie time!

Yes, clearly the river is too deep

I was slightly disappointed that I was not allowed to wear my high-viz jacket... or given a floatie coat... I could have fallen in or something... at the very least given some waterproof booties for my delicate feets... but I digress again.

We sent the muscle out to determine just how high the river was, and to scope out the icky beaver dam things.

Go out farther, Bear... farther!!!

No, I was only joking about the sharks, there aren't any sharks, get out there!

Once Bear found the icky beaver dams, we set about destroying them...

Ok Bear, push this out of here, move this over here, and squish all of this down and stuffs

Yes, yes, it smells and tastes like Beaver poo, I get that, just squish it down so the water can flow!

OH, OH NO, SERIOUSLY???

Clearly we needed someone with opposable thumbs to help with this bit of a mess, so we had Julia come over

She used her stompy boots to get the water flowing

Ok, Bear, test out the waters to see if its getting lower...

I said TEST the waters, not TASTE the waters... oh euw, that's gonna make me hurl

urp

After a lot of icky, sweaty work, we finally declared victory over the stupid beaver dams... take that you icky beavers!

Now the Pretty Curly Tails can do their river crossing training without getting dunked... until the stupid beavers build more dams... sigh.

Bet