Mushing to Moscow

Irkutsk is the jumping off point for Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest and weirdest lake. Water gushed into the space between two tectonic plates and created a huge crescent-shaped water that runs over 600km. It’s apparently more than a fifth of the world’s fresh unfrozen water. The tectonic plates are slowing moving away from each other and may one day split so that this could be the world’s fifth sea. Isolated within these depths is a unique ecosystem that serves as a sanctuary for freshwater seals, the nerpa, and the omul fish.

You get omul thrust at you as you get off the train at Slyuyanka, but the nerpa are hiding out under the ice. The frozen water lives up to its Pearl of Siberia nickname. As we walk along the lakefront there’s a curl of ice jutting out where the ice has shifted. Because spring sun is coming in you can hear the ice tingling and cracking around the curl. It’s still possible to walk out on the ice though as it’s more than a metre deep. Locals drive their cars out there and there’s regular traffic of hovercrafts and skidoos. Guidebooks are snooty about locals getting holiday snaps in front of the curious ice formations so we ‘fight the cold with cold’ by eating ice cream and posing for even cornier shots.

We shy away from the lake to find some old-school dog sledding. Our trainer Alexander introduces us to each of the dogs – Winston (named not for Churchill but for a favourite cigarette brand) is the leader, Mishka is a blue-eyed girl and then there’s a white dog that Alexander explains is a “crazy dog we usually don’t take him out with the others. He is trouble.”

Bundled up in a neck to toe camouflage ski suit, I hop into the sled. It’s a slower pull than I thought, but still whistles through the snowy birch forest at speed. The snows are melting so the trails are getting muddy and Alexander yells the dogs on. The crazy dog does a good job of crapping as he runs, his legs scattering around the faeces as he scrambles on. Alexander cuts across some little peaks and the sled does short jarring jumps. We swap drivers and the dogs wolf down snow to cool off. On the way back I take Alexander over a couple of jumps and he laughs “Okay, okay” as we slide back home.

Over a post-mushing cup of tea, we look at other dog sports like Canine-cross that harnesses a human behind a fleet-footed pup in an example of dog walking that won’t make your osteopath very happy. There’s also the story of Nicholas Vanier, a modern day adventurer who took a team of dogs from Baikal all the way to Moscow and almost froze to death several times in Siberia. We prefer the train.