One Team – One Dream!
Cold-Nose-Huskies is a project full of adventure, challenges, and important insights. We live in Swedish Lapland together with our huskies. We raise them, train them, and explore the wilderness of the north with them. We want to tell people about our experience – and what it’s like to make a shared dream come true.
In the wilderness, through the wilderness
We live with our sled dogs on a husky farm in the middle of the northern Swedish forests. The beautiful Lake Hemsjön is on our doorstep, and behind us looms the enchanting Krutberget mountain. We’re surrounded by endless forests, broad marshlands, and crystal-clear lakes: We couldn’t imagine a better place for our project.
Only a few people live close by and the nearest large supermarket is 50 kilometers away. But it’s precisely this expansive and splendid countryside that offers our dogs and us the very best conditions. From here we embark on trips into the wilderness with our husky team: in the short summer on foot or with the training carts, and during the long winters with the dog sleds.
The huskies and us
The stars of our project are the dogs! They enable us to have unique experiences and take us to places we would otherwise never have discovered. We survive extreme adventures together: roaring snow storms, arctic temperatures, and long journeys through complete wilderness. We can only succeed because we have earned the trust of every single dog and have grown together to form a team.
Each of our dogs has their own character and particular strengths – and we love them all! We are acutely aware of the fact that we are responsible for our four-legged partners. This means their wellbeing is paramount, and comes before all sporting ambitions and any thirst for discovery. Find out here what this means for us.
Sled dog racing: the big adventure
For thousands of years, people in the Arctic regions of our earth have been using dog sleds as a means of transport, and sled dog races have probably been held for just as long. The basic technique – a team of between eight and 16 huskies harnessed with ropes to a sled, with a musher standing on the runners – hasn’t changed. And the harsh winter conditions in the northern hemisphere are still a great challenge for dogs and people, too.
The most important sled dog races are held in northern Europe, Canada, and Alaska, with distances ranging from between several hundred kilometers to almost 2,000 kilometers. The individual competitors are completely on their own and have to take everything with them that they need for the stages through unpopulated regions. Surviving such extreme races is a huge challenge. And it’s a challenge that fascinates us.
Successes so far
We’re working with complete dedication toward competing with our own husky team in the really long races in northern Norway or Alaska and we’re getting ever closer to our goal all the time. Our first husky puppies were born in Risede, a remote hamlet in northern Sweden. There, at the farm of Malin’s Grandpa Arne, is where our adventure began. (There’s a short video about those days at the bottom of the page). After two years, we found an even better place for our project further north, and we moved with our dogs to Gargnäs in the county of Västerbotten.
Our achievements over the past years show that we’re making good progress and are putting together an excellent team. In 2017, Malin won the Swedish championships in long-distance sled-dog racing. In 2018, Lars came 13th in the 650 km Femundlöpet (and was accompanied by a German TV team). And in 2019, Malin again won the Swedish championships, while Lars was runner-up!
Follow us – online or on a husky tour together!
With this project, we also want to tell a story. It’s about the relationship between people and animals, responsibility, the growth of trust, the importance of untouched nature, awareness, and passion.
And if you’d like to get to know our sled dogs or glide almost silently through the wilderness on the runners of a sled, come and visit us in northern Sweden. Every year, we’ll offer opportunities to experience the huskies and the wonderful landscape of Lapland first-hand. Because all of us– guests, dogs, and ourselves – go on real sled dog tours and want to share unique experiences, the number of dates and the size of the groups is very limited.
See you soon in Lapland –
Malin & Lars.