Dog sledder offers camps over Christmas breakDate: 12/12/2023 WEST CHESTERFIELD — Marla Brodsky raced her team of sled dogs in Alaska, Canada, the Midwest, New England and Europe. Now she’s home for Christmas and offering a camp for kids, a chance for a child to develop an intuitive connection with a dog.
“The dogs and I, we really read each other’s emotions and body language,” Brodsky said. “There’s a very subtle, intuitive connection that happens … It’s very meditative and I love that time with my team, and being out in the winter.”
Brodsky, also known as Marla BB, offers camps in summer and winter, on wheels or runners, for a couple days or a full week. The camps are designed for kids to experience an emotional connection to a dog. Brodsky makes sure a pair, dog and child, spends a lot of time together.
A camper chooses an Alaskan husky to be their partner. The children feed and water their dog, scoop their poop, groom and massage them and do tick checks. They read books to their dog and hike with them, learn to “meet their energy.” In summer, the children take their charges for a swim in a nearby river.
The sled dog Christmas camps are out in the cold. Dogs and campers are together, in the weather, all day. Brodsky, the mother of a daughter in college, requires parents to properly gear out their kids so they don’t suffer the cold. Much of dog sledding is about gear, being prepared for cold temperatures, cutting winds, blinding snow.
This year’s Christmas camps, scheduled for Dec. 27 and 28, probably won’t see frigid temperatures — but Brodsky went for a run in Alaska once, when it was so cold the local mushers wouldn’t take their teams out. The 20 mile run was the most beautiful time in the woods Brodsky can recall. It was 45 degrees below zero.
“When it’s that cold everything just sparkles,” Brodsky said. “It was like mushing in a world of crystals. It was so magical.”
Few people experience being out in nature when it’s that cold. Few people experience a bond with a pack of dogs. Brodsky finds it a unifying experience, but talks about the tight connection she has with her team as commonplace, an intimacy often achieved between musher and sled dog.
Dog sledding sounds a lot like meditation.
“You gotta be aware, you gotta pray, and you gotta listen to your dogs and pick up the cues they’re telling you,” Brodsky said. “It’s very much about being present in the moment. You have to be hyper aware, in the moment.”
No two runs are the same, even on the same trail. For a dog, a moose and a squirrel may be equally distracting. Dogs go lame or pull a muscle. Lines get tangled and the knots are hard to pick apart with numb fingers. At the end of a race, a mid-distance run or the Yukon Quest International, a dog sledding championship, the dogs know the difficulty of the journey just finished and feel a sense of accomplishment.
Brodsky does too. Her journey into dog sledding began 15 years ago when she apprenticed with Quest and Iditarod champions Allen Moore and Aliy Zirkle. The famous mushers retired a dog to Brodsky, who returned years later to breed her first female with a leader male. The West Chesterfield resident built her first sledding team; but it wasn’t until her second full team was in the lines that she managed the long championship races.
“When [I do] my dog sled rides around downtown Northampton, there’s nobody else like me,” Brodsky said. “But in Alaska, when my daughter came during COVID … she finally got to see that her mom was not this oddity. In Alaska, where we lived, I was the norm.”
Most mushers don’t write books. Brodsky will publish her first book of non-fiction next June, to be titled, “The T’s, the U’s, the V’s and Me.” The letters refer to the litters of dogs she raised while building her team. For Brodsky, each litter has a theme, which the letter refers to.
“I’ve done everything on two skis,” Brodsky said. “Being on a sled, standing on runners without bindings to hold me in, and being powered by dogs, to me is the ultimate of being in the moment with nature, animal nature and human nature.”
Brodsky still has openings for the Christmas sled dog camps scheduled for Dec. 27 and 28. Information can be found at hilltownsleddogs.com.
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