Warren Palfrey, competitive sled dog racer in Yellowknife

30.06.2008 18:00 Shopping - Source: cbc.ca

If you thought going on a road trip is a major endeavour, consider what it's like to drive about a dozen barking huskies thousands of kilometres to a big race in Alaska or the Yukon.

That's how Warren Palfrey of Yellowknife, N.W.T., spends the first few months of his year. Palfrey is a competitive sled dog racer who most recently finished 26th in this year's Iditarod. He plans to run the Iditarod again next year, as well as the Yukon Quest. He and his wife Kate run Northern Star Kennels in Yellowknife.

Canadian musher Warren Palfrey of Yellowknife, with Virginia's Tucker Baily in the sled, drives his team down Fourth Avenue in Anchorage, Alaska, during the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on March 4, 2006. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)CBCNews.ca: So how do you get to races like the Iditarod from Yellowknife?

Warren Palfrey: You know, being from Yellowknife and the North in general, there's not really a lot of options for transportation. And the races that we end up travelling to are ending up being many, many miles away. So our main [mode of] transportation is driving. And it's a lot of miles that we end up putting on our vehicle each winter to travel to races.

How far do you travel during your racing season?

I would think that probably the total mileage we put on from, oh, say, early January to mid-March was probably around 25,000 kilometres.

That sort of encompassed driving from Yellowknife down to Montana — Montana's where I did quite a bit of training last winter and did a couple races down in that area as well — and from Montana, driving to Alaska for Iditarod in late February, and then driving back home from Alaska to Yellowknife after Iditarod.

How do you transport your dogs to races?

What we've done is converted a sort of typical enclosed cargo trailer into sort of a souped-up fifth wheel … so we pull a 24-foot goose-neck trailer that the front part of it has sort of living quarters, and the back 16 feet of it holds the dogs and all of our equipment and things that we will need for two or three months while we're on the road.

We have a diesel truck — you sort of need a diesel truck to pull something like that. It's a full-sized pickup, and we definitely, even last winter, felt the pinch as far as fuel prices go. When you're filling up your tank a couple or three times a day when you're driving, you definitely notice when the price has gone up 50, 80, 100 per cent in the last year.

With our vehicle, we probably average about 14 or 15 litres per 100 kilometres, so I guess you could figure out the price per kilometre pretty easy.

How has the price of fuel affected your livelihood?

The price of fuel is obviously a large portion of our budget in our kennel for the year. Definitely, even before it's hit the levels where it's at now … we've already been talking about devising a plan where we don't have to do quite as much distance of travel. We're cutting it down to a minimum.

Iditarod racer Warren Palfrey. (CBC)So for instance, [next] year, as opposed to going down to Montana to train and do some preparations for Iditarod, we've decided to focus on doing both the [Yukon] Quest and Iditarod this year. And the way the Quest is being run this year, it's starting in Whitehorse and ending in Fairbanks. So if we start in Yellowknife, we only have to drive to Whitehorse for our first race. And then from there, we're sort of going in the same direction as we would be going to Iditarod anyway.

So it's probably the most economical way of racing that we can come up with for this season, and we'll be able to at least mitigate our fuel costs. It's still going to be very high, but we're trying what we can to keep it to a minimum.

How would your livelihood be affected if the price of fuel were to double?

You know, the reality is I think everybody will manage somehow.

One thing we've done in Yellowknife is we've actually converted another vehicle of ours to run on waste vegetable oil, which is not to be confused with biodiesel.

Biodiesel is a chemical process that they use for vegetable oil to change into a fuel. Waste vegetable oil is basically a virgin oil, vegetable oil … you could either use new oil or used oil, and we're using used oil to run in our vehicle.

So by doing that, we've cut our local transportation cost to basically zero, which is very nice. That's our sort of "around town" fuel.

It is something that we could conceivably do for our larger diesel vehicle as well, but with the amount of driving that we do and sort of the timelines that we have to keep, it would be somewhat difficult to try to find supplies of used vegetable oil while we're on the road, and especially being in the depths of winter, too.

How do you think other mushers will be affected?

I do think it's going to affect some of the mushers that sort of go out to some of the more weekend races, and probably some of the more recreational mushers that do it for fun and the camaraderie and just the joy of racing and running sled dogs.

I would venture to say that those types of mushers will be, generally speaking, sticking closer to home. Who knows?

But for us personally, in our kennel and our family, we've made a conscious decision of converting our one vehicle to waste vegetable oil.

If we can save hundreds of dollars over the summer in our local driving costs, it just adds to the divvy that we can add to our winter driving costs.

Crude Awakenings

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