As Winter Snows Disappear, Sled-Dog Racers Are Trading Skis for Wheels

This story is being co-published with InsideClimate News as part of Finding Middle Ground, an original I.C.N. series by Meera Subramanian on perceptions of climate change across the country.

Pogo pressed her paws into the ground impatiently, the sound of her yelps joining with those of the three other Alaskan husky mixes that Mel Omernick and her husband, Keith, were hooking up to their tug lines. It was the first weekend of November in Pearson, Wisconsin, and mushers had come from all over the region, and as far away as New Hampshire and Quebec, to race their dogs. They had parked their vehicles across the field at the Ma-Ka-Ja-Wan Boy Scout Reservation—the young women in a Prius, the Trump supporter in a huge trailer emblazoned with “To the victor the spoils.” All year, the mushers had fed and watered and trained and cleaned up after their teams, awaiting the moment when they could let them loose across the starting line. Now the big weekend had finally arrived, though it had gotten off to a rocky start. Once again, the weather was to blame.

Northern Wisconsin is still a frigid place come winter. But, as climate change has warmed the state, the certainty of snow has gradually vanished, leaving traditional dogsledding races frequently cancelled for lack of good powder. Enthusiasts have responded by adapting the sport itself. The Redpaws Dirty Dog Dryland Derby was the first competition of its kind in the area, created in 2006 to extend the racing season into the spring and fall. In lieu of sleds, dogs pull three-wheeled rigs and modified bicycles; in some cases, a musher simply lashes herself by bungee cord to a single dog and runs behind him. (The event is called canicross.) Unlike the long-distance sled races, such as the Iditarod, which covers a thousand miles of Alaskan wilderness, dryland competitions tend to be short sprints of a few miles.

As November approached, the Dirty Dog organizers had been worried that the warm weather Wisconsin was experiencing—temperatures still hitting seventy degrees on some days—would force them to cancel. Since the only means that dogs have to release heat from their bodies is through their tongues and the pads of their paws, mushers won’t run them if there’s a risk that they’ll get “fried.” But, by the time the derby arrived, on November 4th, the organizers were pining for a little heat. The race grounds, including several miles of carefully groomed trails, had been blanketed in nearly three inches of snow. The first day’s contests were cancelled. The mushers kept their spirits up but weren’t finding much humor in the irony. Some made their way back home, dog trailers in tow, while others—usually those who had travelled greater distances—hung around, eating chili in the open-air lodge and taking shifts by the fireplace as they waited to see whether conditions would change.

By the second day, the snow had melted just enough to turn the trails into a muddy but navigable quagmire. When the organizers announced, early Sunday morning, that the race was on, the grounds erupted in excitement and movement. The Omernicks headed to their truck to get the team hooked up, and soon Pogo and the other dogs were straining at their lines. Keith positioned himself in a wide-legged stance on his rig, fingers curled around brakes that would stop working when he hit the first big puddle. Then the team was off.

A week after the Dirty Dog Derby, Mel’s father, Ron Behm, stopped by her place from his home next door, as he frequently does. Still fit from his thirty years as a mail carrier, Behm now devotes himself to the Wisconsin Trailblazers Sled Dog Club, the Lions, and a one-acre market garden that he tends with Mel’s mother. He had signed up to marshal the second dryland race of the season, but it had been cancelled (more snow). As he entered the house—a long green metal building divided into a utilitarian shop and a capacious, wood-ceilinged living space—he set down his coyote-fur cap on the kitchen table. Mel, who had just gotten off her all-night shift as an E.R. nurse, fixed some coffee. Keith was outside in the kennel, preparing some of the family’s nineteen hounds and Alaskan huskies for a run. Only six of the dogs are allowed in the house, and they drifted in and out.

Mel and her father have been running sled dogs for more than twenty-five years. They entered the sport by an accident of canine lust. When Mel was in junior high school, a neighbor’s Malamute wandered over and found Ron’s hunting dog, a Labrador mix. The Lab gave birth to a lone pup, which the family kept and named Tiny. The following year, the Malamute got loose again, and a litter of four was born. Now the Behm kids had a team. Jan Bootz-Dittmar, a champion sprint musher and a friend of their parents, gave them some harnesses, and they hooked up Tiny and the other dogs to their red Radio Flyer wagon. As the animals grew, the children taught them commands—“gee!” for right and “haw!” for left—and swapped the wagon for an old lawn mower, engine removed. Mel’s brother Adam was the first to enter a formal dogsledding race, with Ron joining him a few years later. By the time she was in college, Mel had started racing, too. Her mother, Gail, an avid ice fisher, kept the mushers supplied with fresh perch.

For all the family’s closeness, one thing divides Mel and her father: politics. At first, Mel told me, she was a Republican because he was. But then, when she was in college, she discovered a love for science and the worlds it opened up to her. Many of the ideas that she embraced, such as evolution, were at odds with her father’s beliefs, and they argued fiercely. Though they spar less these days, political subjects do occasionally come up—climate change in particular. As Mel wrapped her hands around her coffee cup, she said that the winters of her youth seemed to have disappeared. What happened to ice skating at Thanksgiving, which she remembers from her grandma’s when she was a kid? It was a trick of perception, Ron said. Back then, there was no insulation, none of the high-tech clothing and efficient snowplows of today. “Probably that was a part of it,” Mel said, nodding thoughtfully. A dog wandered in and gave the coyote-fur hat a sniff—it’s roadkill, Ron told me—before venturing off again.

“One thing about weather—we can all comment about it, but we can’t change it,” Ron said. He sees shifts in the climate as cyclical, and points to the fact that, long before humans were contributing any sort of emissions to the atmosphere, Wisconsin had “gone through three major warming trends, and also three major freezing trends.” He mentioned the nearby Ice Age Trail, which marks the edge of the last glaciation, ten thousand years ago.

But even as Ron referred to deep time and geologic history, he expressed his strong skepticism of science. “I still don’t believe that man has been given the ability, no matter how proud they think of themselves, to completely control something that they’re only on its surface for a very short time,” he said. It was “a blade-of-grass scenario.” He offered a long list of familiar counter-arguments to climate science, including some I had heard from other mushers. The current warming can be attributed to volcanoes, they had told me. And sunspots. And solar winds. And the media doesn’t report these things. None acknowledged that climate scientists account for these variables in their studies and readily accept the planet’s natural climate fluctuations.

While Mel politely agreed with her father that her childhood recollections might be a trick of the mind, the data backs up her impression that Wisconsin winters are milder than they used to be. Starting in the nineteen-eighties, the frequency of winter freezes began to decline. By the mid-nineties, when Ron and his kids were running with the Radio Flyer and Tiny’s team, the cold autumnal spikes had nearly vanished. Ed Hopkins, Wisconsin’s assistant state climatologist, told me that winters continue to be highly variable, with lots of snow some years and bare ground in others, but he recently tallied up the length of the frost-free season since 1971 and found that, in some parts of the state, it has increased by as much as three weeks.

Dryland racing is by no means the only transformation that modern-day mushers have had to contend with. The first hit came with the advent of snowmobiles, in the nineteen-sixties, which replaced sleds as the standard form of transportation among many of the world’s northernmost inhabitants. Mushing became recreational, one of those activities that meld sport, hobby, and life style into one obsessive pastime. In the ensuing decades, a host of other changes followed. The cost of dog food and truck fuel went up, making large teams more expensive to sustain and haul to races. New developments encroached on wilderness areas, and long trail systems grew harder to find. Now the idealized image of dogs, a human, and a sled careening silently across snow is facing a new challenge as the climate warms and the weather weirds. Not even the Iditarod has been spared; in the past three years, it has been rerouted twice, its organizers forced to chase snow-covered terrain wherever they can find it. The event’s tag line—the “Last Great Race on Earth”—may turn out to have a meaning its founders never intended.

Changes in the weather have contributed to another significant shift in dogsledding: the loss of sponsorship. “This is a weather sport,” Ron said. “Your sponsors are expecting this much viewing of their product name, and if the weather is not conducive to that, you don’t get the viewership.” He noted that the North Star Mohican Casino Resort, in Bowler, Wisconsin, had once sponsored a race with a huge purse. “Then someone says, ‘We can make more money with a polka band,’ ” he said. “Bowler started to bring in live entertainment at the casino instead of doing the race.” The prizes for long-distance snow sled races can still be substantial—the Iditarod winner takes home seventy-five thousand dollars—but as the purses have shrunk, sprint mushers are lucky if they win enough for gas money home.

The move from dogsledding to dryland racing to casino polkas is enough to make you wonder whether we’re doomed to become an indoor species, seeking collective escape from an unpredictable world. Many sports are suffering from extremes in the weather. Just as sled dogs have their window in which they can comfortably and safely compete, so do we two-legged athletes. It’s difficult to play tennis when it’s so hot that your sneakers are melting on the court or you start hallucinating that you’ve seen Snoopy, as happened at the Australian Open a couple of years back. A study from 2014, by the University of Waterloo’s Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change, found that, unless carbon use plummets soon, a third of past Winter Olympics cities will be unable to host the event in the future because they won’t get sufficiently cold.

Mel and Ron and I had talked enough. There were dogs outside, eager in waiting. Ron donned his hat, its tail falling between his shoulder blades, and Mel slipped on her Carhartt jacket. We headed out to the kennel, where Keith had prepped the lines to run the dogs with an A.T.V. It was too snowy for a rig and not snowy enough for a sled, so a motor would have to suffice. The dogs were rowdy with anticipation, ready to bound through the whitened forest, past Ron and Gail’s garden, so recently put to bed, past the neat lines of the neighbor’s fields, crisp in sepia tones. “I love to watch them run, and run with them,” Mel had said expectantly before we headed out. “We’re out there in nature whether it’s a beautiful sunny day, twenty below, raining, icing. We’re appreciating what the planet has given us.”