Wednesday 28 March 2012

Alta: Finnmarksløpet

Finnmarksløpet is the world's northernmost sled dog race and it ran for the first time in the year I was born. There are two routes, both starting and ending in Alta, the longer of which goes across to Kirkenes, a town which lies north of Finland and just west of Russia. People come from all over to take part in the race, and this year we were in Alta to see it start too.





We booked a suite in the Park Hotel, a place so nice we decided to stay an extra night, and it turned out that our hotel room had its own roof-terrace overlooking the main street. On Friday night and Saturday morning people brought in and laid extra snow, cordoned off the street and made a track for the dogs with a big inflatable starting gate. Just around breakfast time the race officially opened and a warm-up man came out and did a set of weird and unfunny, somewhat adult oriented jokes to the child-heavy waiting audience.



At around 11 the sledges and dog teams made their way out from the nearby car park, crossed a road and lined up along the track. One thing was clear: while the atmosphere was pretty good on all sides, nobody was quite so excited as the dogs were. These dogs really wanted to start their running. I was surprised at how normal they seemed. Some of the dogs looked like you might expect a husky to look, but many others looked more like a dog I would expect to meet in a local recreation ground than in the pages of Call of the Wild.




For much of the afternoon the competitors took off one by one. I can't claim we saw them all, but we watched a fair few. The longer race went on for around a week and was won this year by Inger Marie Haaland. This made her the second woman to win. You can see a couple of pretty amazing images from one of the chekpoints on Jan Georg Svane's Flickr.

2 comments:

  1. Why do the dogs have bootees on? Is it so that the snow doesn't ball up on their feet?

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    1. I'm not totally sure about this, but I think it's because they can cut their feet on frozen snow. Apparently they change their socks each time they stop for a rest, which suggests that the going can be pretty rough. My wife tells me that the cost of those socks for a single team is equivalent to 600 British pounds!

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