WildYooper Stories
Dog Sledding in the Upper Peninsula: UP200, CopperDog, and Sharing the Winter Trails
The dogs were here first. Before the first snowmobile ever coughed to life, dog teams were the mail route, the supply run, and the ambulance service of the Upper Peninsula. They never left — and come February, they take the whole peninsula back for a few weekends. Plan a sled trip right and you'll be standing trailside for some of the finest racing anywhere in the country.
The two weekends to build a trip around
The UP200 runs out of Marquette every February — two hundred miles and change, an Iditarod qualifier, starting right downtown where you can stand close enough to hear the dogs singing in the chute. They are loud, and they are happy, and if it doesn't get your blood going you should check for a pulse. The Midnight Run and the Jack Pine 30 share the weekend, so there's racing at every hour. Then in March the CopperDog takes over the Keweenaw — a night start under the lights in Calumet, headlamps bobbing off toward Copper Harbor. Nothing else in winter sounds like a hundred dogs ready to run.
If you meet a team on the trail, do this
Short and plain, because it matters: stop. Pull to the side. Shut your engine off. Stay on your machine and let the whole team go past before you even think about the key. A sled idling and revving can spook a team sideways into the trees, and a tangled team with a freight sled behind it is nobody's good day. Mushers remember the riders who stop. So does everyone standing at the next checkpoint.
Riding the runners yourself
Kennels around Marquette and up in the Keweenaw sell visitor rides and hands-on mushing days — book early in race season, they fill. Me? I'm content on the warm side of a windshield most days, cheering at checkpoints with the rest of the crowd. But I'll tell you this: every rider I know who's taken a team out once has the same look afterward. Try it once.