MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2019

WINTER 2019 ML BLUE 55 words and photos :: Colin Field When Hank DeBruin asks my eight-year-old son if he wants to drive the five-dog sled team, my son shyly, but happily grabs the handle bar. He hops on the foot boards, yells “hike,” and off they slide. The sun pokes out of the sky and my wife and son slip across the snow-covered ice of the small lake in the Haliburton Highlands. The dogs run happily and my son is obviously thrilled with the experience. We all are. I’d never considered it before, but you know what? Dogsledding is super fun. Hank DeBruin’s Winterdance Dogsled Tours is a lifelong labour of love. Hank and his wife Tanya McCready got into the sport innocently enough when they bought a Siberian husky puppy at a pet store in Guelph. It was the late 1990s. “We had no intention of getting a dog,” he recalls, “but after several trips back to the store to visit her we couldn’t leave her behind.” Then, to keep their first dog company, they bought a second husky. Then they became interested in dogsledding, so they bought two more to make a team of four. Realizing five was a better number for sledding, they bought one more. But the store owner convinced them to take two more dogs. Hank and Tanya suddenly had seven dogs. That growing passion sparked the creation of Winterdance Dogsled Tours and a move to Haliburton near the southern edge of Algonquin Provincial Park. That was in 1999. As we circle the lake the beauty and the intensity of the sport seduce my family. We ride and run through the Canadian Shield, up over hills and through evergreen forests. BACK YARD Winterdance Dogsled Tours is a lifelong labour of love HUSKY POWER