Who can join?

Anyone who wants to experience nature in winter and want to challenge themselves. Some conditions to pinpoint are:

  • Good mood, sense of community, sense of responsibility and willingness to help,
  • Empathy for the dogs’ abilities and characters,
  • Physical condition, and sportiness as it is necessary for a bicycle tour with luggage in the low mountain range. Average sportiness is enough – average unsportiness is not enough!
  • Age between 16 and 65 years
  • Outdoor experiences help immensely to find your way into the everyday tour life
  • Previous knowledge in dog sledding is not necessary. Mostly faster than expected the newcomer is in his element and laughs about the difficulties he expected at the beginning.
  • For those who just want to get a taste of dog sledding and don’t want to go on a stage tour yet, our Huskyfarm vacation with day stages from the Huskyfarm would be the right choice.

Expeditionsstyle – what is it?

We conduct our tours in expedition style. This means no support and accompaniment of snowmobiles or the use of other technical aids.

We believe that dog sledding can be experienced most intensively when there is the greatest possible dependence on the dogs, the weather, and the snow conditions. It should come down to the dogs and the interaction between dog and man/woman, not the functionality of the technology.

On our guided tours we try to bring you as close as possible to dog sledding. That is why it has proven to us to let each participant lead his own team during the entire tour.

Our experiences have shown that only in this way the unity of man/woman, dog and nature can be experienced properly. In addition to the confidence in the power of the dogs, the focus is on getting to know one’s own abilities and limits in dealing with the wintry nature.

Mastering this task and experiencing a freedom whose limits are set only by nature itself with its tremendous forces is one of the last adventures in our thoroughly civilized world.

Accomodation on our tours

Before and after each husky tour you will stay overnight at the husky farm, where a guest house is available for this purpose. The guest house has four bedrooms, a bathroom with shower and a fully equipped kitchen.
Bedding and towels are provided.

On the tours we stay in simple mountain huts, lavvus – which are the traditional tents of the Samí – or mountain tents.

The mountain huts have no electricity and no running water. But all of them have the most important thing: a decent wood stoves, with which you can quickly get your four walls warm.
Snow often has to be melted for water. Some huts are located at a river or a lake. Here you can get water in open places, or you have to drill a hole in the ice with an ice auger to be able to draw water.
The huts have a very different level. Our hiking club DNT or TT (Den norske turistforeningen or Troms Turlag) has built many huts in daily intervals along the Norwegian/Swedish border. We like to use them especially in the Dividal National Park. On the Swedish side we can use the very simple huts of the Samí in some places.

Near the Dividal National Park and at Lake Altevatn/ or Leinavatn, the “rangers”, i.e. the nature wardens, have some overnight accommodations that we often use. They cover the entire level spectrum: from highly comfortable large cabins to the cabin that is very cozy but not too much space.

Only 30 kilometers from the husky farm we have set up a lavvu. A lavvu is a cone-shaped tent like many Indians use. In the scouts it goes under the name Kote, in the Indians under Tipi.
Our lavvu – we use the name of the Samí – is modified: Instead of an open fire, our lavvu is fired by a wood stove and the sleeping places are elevated. Both for a more comfortable sleep – because the heat is used much better. No one needs to freeze here.

The same is true for overnight stays in the tent, which occur mainly on the longer sled tours. Since we are fans of comfortable overnight stays, sleeping pads and reindeer skins insulate us from the cold of the ground, and the tents are also heated.

On tour, we always spend the night in a sleeping bag.

Food

We want to introduce our guests not only to the huskies and the mountain landscape, but also to Scandinavian cuisine – or better: Scandinavian food.

What is really good up here, if not world class, is the ingredients. Here nature is still relatively untouched and the food is clean. That’s why we like to use ingredients from the area on the tours: reindeer and moose meat, salmon and other fish. Besides, we only use meat from animals that have grown up outside.

We produce all meat, sausage and bacon products ourselves on the Huskyfarm.

The potatoes come from our own garden. The bread is home-baked and many herbs are home-grown. In the fall we harvest multeberries, the raspberries and blueberries – and not to forget: Mushrooms!

Only for pasta we prefer Italian.

On our sledging trips we move around in a huge freezer, so to speak. We like to take advantage of this fact by being able to take easily perishable food with us on our tours without any problems. Because: nothing spoils with us!

We pre-cook the food at the Huskyfarm and then simply defrost it on the tour as needed. This allows us to have a pretty good variaty of food.

CO2 emission

When you visit us for a family vacation or a husky tour, your CO2 footprint will be small – most likely smaller than in your everyday life at home. This starts with the transfer: if possible, we will pick you up at the airport or bus station with our electric vehicle (depending on temperature and group size).
Once you arrive at our house, we produce very little CO2: We heat only regenerative – either with wood or electric. The electricity is 100% regenerative in Norway, because here the electricity is mostly produced with hydroelectric power and a little bit with wind turbines.
We use almost no energy consuming dry food for our dogs (only about 1%). We produce our own food from slaughter waste from animals of the surrounding area.
On our husky tours, CO2 is produced to a small extent, only during cooking and lighting with kerosene. On the way we heat with wood.
The food on the husky tours is mostly locally produced.
You can save a lot of CO2 on your trip to the north by taking the train and not the plane. Then you travel to the north and are not catapulted there. So the vacation starts earlier!

Included in the price of our husky tours is a Co2 compensation for your arrival to the huskyfarm. This means we compensate your travel by plain from and back center Europe and northern Norway.

Own dogteam