Sam the Sled Dog

Here's a story we heard at Wintergreen to tide you over until our next post (which will be soon, I promise)!

Sam the Dog

On our Friday night at Wintergreen, we went to the main lodge where Paul Schurke told us this amazing story about Sam.  Paul Schurke is the owner and operator of Wintergreen Lodge.  He has traveled to the North Pole via dog sled.  This story begins on a training run he took with Will Steger in preparation for the North Pole trip.  The training run took them from Ely, Minnesota to Alaska over a five or six month period.

Apparently, along the route they were traveling, were small bunkers that were manned by US soldiers to monitor for missiles from the Soviet Union.  Life in these small bunkers was dull and boring, but they made great places for the expedition team to stop and have a cup of tea and rest a bit before traveling on.

At one bunker, the two soldiers had a special routine.  After their evening meal they would hold their bowls of food outside the window and dump the remains.  A solitary dog would appear night after night to eat the food and then disappear again.  They had tried to engage the dog in other ways, but he was very skittish and standoffish, but would still appear like clockwork nightly to get his treat.

After the expedition team had moved on and gone quite a distance, Will looked back and saw a small dot in the distance that seemed to be following them.  They realized that they had unwittingly distracted the dog from the barrack and he had been following them.  Will and Paul felt badly for a bit for taking the soldiers fun from them, but they decided that the dog was going to do what the dog wanted to do no matter what.

Slowly over days and weeks, Will engaged the pup, offering him food and finally got the dog to eat from his hand.  After a bit longer the dog, which they had by now named Sam, was running up beside the team of dogs.  One of the team dogs got injured and was taken off the line, and Sam sort of fell into the open spot and ran with the team.  

Will was able to get him harnessed in and he pulled and pulled just like a member of the team!  As time went on they experimented with putting him in different positions.  He did great as a wheel dog, great as a swing dog, and then one day just for fun they put him in lead position.

Well, to everyone’s astonishment, it turns out that Sam was an amazingly able voice command lead dog!  From that day on he led the team and was in the lead position when the pulled into their final destination.

He was also in lead when the team pulled into the North Pole on their main expedition.

And then later, he pulled his team into the South Pole, becoming the only dog to have reached both poles!

Hope you enjoyed the story!
Mrs. Reiter