I moved to the Seattle area from Buffalo in 1989 in an attempt to find a place where I could enjoy the culture of a city and the adventure of the outdoors at the same time. It worked for a while. Then it started feeling like there were too many of those people from the city on the hiking trails in the mountains. So, I decided to pursue more winter camping, guessing there would be fewer people out there. After a collision of several fateful events I ended up with two Malamutes and the desire to learn about dog sledding, which in turn led me to several yearly dog sledding trips into Denali Park with Jon Nierenberg and Earthsong Lodge. And I kept returning home from those trips with Alaskan Huskies. Next thing I knew, I had a dog team. While my intent for several years was recreational sledding, it became apparent relatively quickly that there’s just too much private land in the lower 48 – at least in Washington – to travel any great distance by dog team, and I realized I needed to start racing to do the distances and adventurous trips I wanted to do with my dogs. More fateful events hooked me up with Mark Stamm, and with the dogs and education he provided, my recreational team morphed into a racing team in a few short years. And all that led naturally to an interest in experiencing, together with my dogs, long-distance racing.