Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 29, 1987)
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For great savings, for a great tan, ask about morning tanning and special packages. membership not required BEST HOURS • BEST PRICES 6am-11pm 7 days a week 485 1624 1475 Franklin Blvd Across from campus Out of Bounds Mush! Mush! A man, his sled dogs and fresh-fallen snow. “Haw, haw. haw. Crick, haw a little, Crickett,” the man croons to his lead dog on an eight-mile training run on unploughed Forest Service roads m the Cascades. The dog drifts over to the right; gee means right, haw means left “Alta kid. atta kid " The hacks of 12 dogs arch up and down in a stream of gre\ and black and white. Heavy, wet snowflakes fly in their faces Rig snow-covered ponderosa pines slide by The dogs arc trotting The man whistles at them with the low. quick whistles a cowboy would use on a round-up. and the dogs break into a bounding lope. Alter a while he calls them to a halt They crane their heads around and look at him good naturedly. The sound of 12 pan ting dogs fills the silence. The snowstorm has drained the color out of the landscape and the only color is the pink tongues hanging far out of their mouths The dogs are tired. After a moment, he whistles them on again and they enthusiastically bound ahead. Alaska, Minnesota. Michigan. Sled dog racers are born and raised in those bastions of snow. But dogsled champion Jerry Klatt of Sisters — a small town near Bend learned to dogsled in Southern California, togging behind his first husky in the streets of Riverside at night Klatt had read about dogsled ding in books. Twenty-one \ears ago. his girlfriend’s piano-tunei sold him a husky pupp\. Russia, and he harnessed her. hooked her up to 10 feet of rope and taught her the commands a lead sled dog needs to know “She was the only dog I had. so she had to Iv the lead dog.” iic sa vs, cnuckimg. A friend of his who ran an AK( Siberian husk> kennel in Riverside gave him some tips on training The friend also in spired Klatt with a night ride in a stripped down eai frame pulled by lb sled dogs. "Oh, it was wild." Klatt remembers. However. Russia wasn’t his only dog for long. Tonka came from the dog-pound "and |ust happened to be a husky." He hooked the two dogs up to a line attaehed to a bicycle frame. "I was going to pedal, but as soon as I said ‘go’ there was no pedalling, they went!” he says. Klatt worked for a humane soeiety in Riverside for 14 mon ths. It left him w ith a soft spot in his heart the size of a football field tor dogs that were to be put to sleep Nino was one of those dogs. Nino had been the mascot for the Riverside High School foot ball team — the Huskies before Klatt adopted him. "Once he got loose you couldn’t catch him. He’d been tackled by football players, so he was reallv Photo by Laurie Schwartz Besides having won a number of dogsledding championships, Jerry klatt of Sisters, Oregon also has received two best conditioned team awards, klatt and his team race six to eight times a year. good at evasive action,” klatt sa\s. “But 1 liked him, he was a good hoy. He went on to become my leader. ” klatt has always liked animals His parents bought a small ranch in Riverside when he was a teen ager He liked working with the stock and learned about training horses. Unlike people, animals are consistent, he says. ”1! an animal is mean and ornery, he’s mean and ornerv all the time.” One summer klatt and his wife took a vacation and went to Sisters. They liked it so much they stayed there, bought a small ranch, some catttle and horses, klatt got a job with the Forest Service as a heavy equipment operator, and the slow construc tion season left him w ith time to devote to running the dogs — on real snow. I he dogs have to like to run. That's one of the requirements, he says He believes in interval training and started using it long before there was a name for it Start with the right dogs, breed them right, feed them right, train them right and. if you're lucky, you go to races and you win. klatt says. In the 2()-odd years klatt has been involved in the sport, he has racked up some impressive wins: Western Canadian A m c r i c a n c h a m p i o n s h i p, Oregon Championship, Califor nia Championship, Pacific Coast Championship. He has raced against the top racers in the world. Klatt has raced everywhere form Montana, to Colorado, to C alifornia. He loads his dogs in to a I ton pickup, each dog in its own cubicle in a home-built camper built onto the back of the pick-up. There’s a long narrow space for Klatt to sleep, too. You have to like doing it. he says I he days of glory come only about eight to lb days out of the year. The races are divid ed into classifications of three dog, five-dog and seven-dog teams, and an open class where the number of dogs on the team is left up to the driver. Klatt prefers the open class races and usually runs 12 dogs. The typical race in the open class is anywhere from eight to 30 miles, although longer races are now becoming popular. The starts are staggered. The dog races are on a machine-groomed track 6 to 8 feet wide, and sometimes there’s a little trouble when one team passes another. “One time a dog started to go for for my dog. and I slapped him in the face with a mitten,” Klatt says. Continued on Page 12
