For Park City native Fernando Ramirez, dog-sledding is an art form. That belief is entwined with his mindset at Rancho Luna Lobos that dogs are dogs first and sled dogs last.
“It’s a work of art, and it’s something that they can truly express themselves in an artistic way,” Ramirez said. “That’s a way we celebrate their fitness or their art. With that being said, a lot of the dogs that we do get, sometimes they don’t want to be sled dogs. And if they don’t, it’s OK.”
Ramirez and his team at Rancho Luna Lobos are getting ready to represent the United States and compete against the best in the world. The world championships were originally slated to take place in France from Jan. 24 through Jan. 28. Ramirez also believes he’s the first Mexican-American to represent the U.S.
However, Rancho Luna Lobos faced a slight curveball on Thursday when the International Federation of Sleddog Sports announced the world championships were canceled due to higher temperatures and “very limited” snow conditions and would try finding an alternative venue. After a conversation with the United States’ captain, Ramirez is optimistic the show will still go on.
“As far as I understand, we’re still on the team, and there’s a 95% chance we’re going to be out there and still competing against the best in the world here in February,” Ramirez said.
The journey to the world championships started with an email. Ramirez said he received a message from the United States Federation of Sleddog Sports highly encouraging him to apply for a spot on the national team. He sent in his application. Within a week, he got a call back saying he was on the team.
“It’s so hard to be selected,” Ramirez said. “That governing body will actually ask a musher to go to a different race to compete just to see if they’re actually eligible and they can throw it down, and then they’ll make their final decision. Our resume alone just got accepted. I was completely floored, I was shocked.”
Ramirez’s routine to prepare for world championships is extensive. It’s much more than just leashing the dogs together, going for a run and calling it a day. Ramirez estimates his dogs need to eat 10,000 calories per day during the winter, and their regimen is very thorough.
Starting at 6 a.m., Ramirez feeds them protein shakes and gives them some active playtime before loading them up to drive to wherever they’re training. The trail choice depends on what kind of training needs to be done, like hills, flats or longer distances. The dogs have a cooldown, a massage and a stretch afterward. A lot of love and care goes into it, too.
“A lot of ointments and oils,” Ramirez said. “We also have canine chiropractors that will come in and align them as well. We just kind of make sure that they’re moving a lot. We have a kennel system, but they’re not sitting in there for too long. They get little spurts of downtime, I guess you could say.”
The postponement of the world championships hasn’t changed that much for Ramirez. It pushes back training some, but that’s it.
“I have to peak the dogs at the right moment, so right now, we’ll still do the bulk of our training, and then I’ll kind of taper them off the first week of February,” Ramirez said.
A total of 94 dogs reside at Rancho Luna Lobos, and Ramirez said the majority of them are rescues. That ideal dates back to his childhood when his mother said he had to rescue his own dogs if he wanted to compete.
“I come from a long line of vaqueros – of horsemen – down in Mexico,” he said. “That’s just the way they did things. They train their animals and they brought their animals up to become what they needed them to be. That was sort of the mindset my parents had, and they’ve instilled that in me since I was a young boy. That’s part of the reason why we do that still to this day, rescue the majority of our dogs.”
But only eight can make the trip for Ramirez’s eight-dog world championships team. Ramirez said he started the fall with 20 and has since whittled it down to 11.
Ramirez runs an Alaskan husky team that are huskies mixed with greyhounds. Ramirez said greyhounds have a higher red blood cell count and compared it to a marathon runner training in Park City for the Los Angeles Marathon.
“(The marathon runner) has an extra oxygen tank for a couple of weeks – the greyhounds have that all the time,” he said. “You get that with the husky, (and) you have this super athlete that can run 20 miles an hour for the 10-mile sprint that we need to race at. It comes down to the second for a gold medal down to sixth place, even.”
Dana Ramirez is Fernando Ramirez’s wife, and they run Rancho Luna Lobos together. She enjoys watching her husband navigate the sled.
“His skill in a sled is beautiful to watch,” she said. “It’s pretty impressive. He can take some sharp corners really, really fast and not flip over. He’s beautiful on a sled.”
There are no days off for the two of them at Rancho Luna Lobos. And in a classic case of irony, Dana Ramirez is actually allergic to dogs. She grits her way through 16-hour days and all sorts of allergy shots and pills, but she says it’s all worth it.
“The dogs don’t let you take an off day – they still have to be fed and taken care of – but it’s a true blessing at the same time,” she said. “You get to really watch all of these dogs come into their own and find their best life and overcome so much, and it’s such a blessing to your soul to see them do that. It’s definitely worth every ounce of hard work and care.”
Dana Ramirez also hopes people will draw inspiration from their dogs.
“Our ultimate goal is just anybody that kind of comes across our story or what we’re doing here, I hope that they would want to know more about our dogs and where they’ve come from and what they’ve been through because it could change their life,” she said. “It’s so inspiring, the kinds of things that they’ve overcome and where they’ve come from. To see them living their best life, there’s no reason that we as people can’t do the same.”