Dog Sledding in the Chamonix Valley - Huskies in Chamonix
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Dog Sledding in the Chamonix Valley
These dogs have been bred and perfected, as all working dogs, over many generations. They want to pull you and they want to go off in a straight line over the far horizon. It's a sport that's becoming more and more popular and local dog mushers are heavily booked.
If you like dogs even just a little bit, then dog sledding is exciting.
Not for the speed - it's just a little more than walking pace - but for
the pleasure of being with such animals. They're normally Alaskan
Huskies or sometimes the bigger and stronger, but much harder to manage,
Greenland Huskies.
Bred from wolf/domestic dog crosses, they are wonderfully affectionate animals and are increasingly popular as pets.
As people moved into the flat northern expanses of the continents of Europe and America they brought with them the dog. They needed new methods for traveling over snow and one part of the solution was the crossing of their domestic dog with the wolves that were plentiful in those regions.
Huskies are still kept at about 1/8th wolf cross for stamina and endurance.
The other development was the sled.
This works really well and is still regularly used, for example, by
climbers traveling along Greenland's huge glaciers to access new
mountain routes. There you travel on skis and pull the sled yourself.
Dogs
pulling sleds was the breakthrough. Now modern materials, especially
plastics and lightweight alloys, allow modern dog sleds to be very
light and strong, with a low-friction gliding surface.
There is one dog sledging company operating around the Chamonix valley. They
offer everything from the chance to sit in a sled, to learning to mush
a team (usually of 3 to 4 dogs to start with), to long distance treks
in Norway and Croatia.
