Our kennel is located in the Kam Lake Industrial Park of Yellowknife. As it may instantly occur to you, an Industrial park is probably not that attractive of an area. Well, you are correct, but it does have its benefits. Yellowknife, Kam Lake in particular, is a unique town in that we have lots of dog kennels here in our neighborhood. There are roughly 600 sled dogs in a mile radius of our kennel. For those of  you in Yellowknife, we invite you to make an appoinment and come have a personal kennel tour and meet us and our amazing athletes. For those of you that are far from Yellowknife we will attempt to create the look, energy, and feel of the kennel for you here. 

We live with all of our dogs here at the kennel and we wouldn't have it any other way. Where many of you may look our your front window and see your gardens or lawns, we look out and see colorful dog houses and even more colorful dog characters. Our lot is  a long rectangular plot with the house sitting at the far end from the road. The house faces the road, and Kam Lake just beyond it, and our dogs are in front of the house.

Looking out of our front window, on the left side of the dog yard we have a series of  four smaller covered pens for dogs in heat and then a large fenced in free run area the length of our lot for dogs to play in. As we do live in town and on a road we use the free run pen as a matter of safety for the dogs, and piece of mind for the mushers! While we do run the dogs in the free run pen, all of our dogs are trained to be loose around the yard as well. The first place we train our puppies to go is to the house and the backyard so we rarely have any issue of dogs going off down the road. More often than not, when a dog gets loose ( which usually seems to  happen when we are not at home) we find them hanging out in the backyard, and often a favorite spot to wait for us to come home is sitting on the wood picnic table on the back porch.

In the middle section of our lot is the main dog yard, set up for 70 dogs at the maximum. Each dog has his own insulated dog house with a water can attached to each house. Our dogs are on 6 foot chains which give them a radius of twelve feet for movement. All our dogs can touch the dogs in the circles surrounding them which allows for lots of play time, but not so close that their chains will get caught on one another. Behind the main dog yard with a 8 foot tall wooden fence running along the road, is another free run pen with  four covered larger pens for dogs. This is where the majority of our dog boarders spend their visits with us. We also use it  as another area to exercise our dogs and a larger safe pen for the puppies to hang out in. 

Again looking out our front window, on the right hand side of the driveway we have a garage where we work on sleds and have all our extra dog and Iditarod gear stored. Soon it will be filled with different piles of stuff for Warren's checkpoint drop bags for Iditarod. Down the driveway from the garage, we have another series of five covered pens which we use for the females in heat and our mamas with puppies. Past the pens are our various shacks, the food shack, the straw shack, and the harness shack. It is past all of the shacks that we have our hook up area. We are fortunate to be able to run right our of the yard here. In the Fall we head out onto the road system to get to our main training trail and in the Winter we cross the road and then we are on the extensive lake system. We have a large seacan storage container at the end of the driveway where we keep all of our extra FirstMate dog food safe from the little unwanted critters. It also provides a nice shaded area to the free run pen at the end of the dogyard.

We hope this gives you all a good idea of our kennel. More photos to come soon!