Casey Ann Randall
Photo by Tyler Bell
“I'm Casey Randall, and I've lived in Alaska for 25 and a half years now. I'm a dog musher.
For us, dog mushing is a family adventure. We're going into our sixth season of having a dog kennel. We have 45 sled dogs. We started with six or seven, and that multiplied very quickly. We do it together. My husband, Matt, and our two kids.
The care that we give to our dogs, it really is a 24-7 job. It changes with the seasons. In our winter schedule we wake up and we already have had meat and chicken prepared the night before because we're going to get up and water and give the dogs a meal in the morning. Let them have some time to digest that before we're going to go on our runs for the day. And there's always scooping. We always have a lot of scooping of the kennel. Giving more straw to the dogs. Sometimes they have something that needs more massaging, or more attending to hands on. So we're doing that multiple times a day. And then we homeschool our kids. So that schedule changes as well throughout the year.
Pretty much all day long, we're doing things that involve our dogs.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner
Photos by Tyler Bell and Ryan Astalos
“We’re a family team — our name is Rock On Racing — to help bring in money for the dogs’ food. It costs a lot of money to have a dog team. And so we run sled dog tours. It's really fun because, you know, we're just a small family of four. It's just us. So when people come to our house for a tour, they're getting to learn about the dogs. They leave with a lot more knowledge about what an Alaskan Husky is and what it's like to live off grid and have 45 dogs. We give them instruction and teach them about how to get on a sled and then run a team of dogs.
They get four dogs and we're ahead of them on a snow machine and behind them on a snow machine, but we put two people at a time, each on their own team of dogs, and we take them out. It's about 25-30 minutes where they're actually mushing their own team. Most people, they've never had an experience like that before. They may have gone for a sled dog ride, which is awesome. But when they actually get to get on a sled themselves and mush their own team, they leave with just something they're going to remember for the rest of their life.
We've met wonderful people. We love educating people on Alaska state sport and we love having them see how much the dogs love to do this, because they are born and bred to run. That's what they want to do, most of all.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner
Photo courtesy of Casey Randall
“Something that I really love about dog mushing here in Alaska is doing it as a family. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money and we wouldn't do it unless we all did it together.
It’s just a ton of joy to be out there with my family, especially watching my kids grow up doing this. They have gained so much confidence when they have to take care of dogs out in the wilderness.
My husband grew up on a farm. He likens it to being on a farm and taking care of everything.
I really think my kids will be able to go out in life and tackle challenges better with the skills that they have. For me, that's the best part about it. That, and seeing how much the dogs love to run.
And it's fun to go out on trails that have been used for all sorts of things in the past — to deliver mail. To deliver life-saving medicine. To be out there doing that just really feels like you're really part of Alaska.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner
Photos by Tyler Bell, Ryan Astalos, and Casey Randall
“With 45 dogs, when people come and meet our sled dogs, it's kind of an overwhelming thing. One of the questions people ask is, do they all have names? And then we all laugh because they all have names and they all have like six or seven nicknames on top of that. They also all have different personalities. They all look a lot different because sled dogs are a mixture of a lot of different breeds of dogs. That's what makes them more resilient and tough. And they all have different sounds. So we can be lying in bed at night and we'll hear one of them howling, or one of them barking, and we can yell out the window, ‘Hey, Stripes, time for night night!’
We oftentimes can tell what they're barking at — like if a moose has come in the yard or if someone's pulling into the driveway. We have some pesky foxes that like to make their rounds and visit.
We spend so much time with our dogs. We know what they look like when they're going 10 miles per hour, when they're going eight. If something's wrong with them, like they have snow in a booty or, you know, maybe their gait changes. And that's what is also so much fun is being so connected, and moving as that unit down the trail.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner
“My very first experience with the West Su region actually has to do with dog mushing. It was the early 2000s, and one of our friends had a bush plane.
Our friend had to fly us out one at a time, because we can only fit so many people on the plane, and dropped us off right there on the river. We didn't have any snow machines. We didn't even have a chair to sit in. We were just standing there and there was nobody else around. And it's really funny because the mushers were coming by. We didn't know any of them, and we didn't have dogs or anything. We had a few of them ask us if we were okay and if we needed to ride. But we fell in love with that area and thought, this is really neat.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner
Photo by Casey Randall
“We feel really blessed where we live right now because we can get up, have breakfast, think about ‘okay where are we going to go for the day?’ and we can hook up our team and we can really go from here as far as we want to. There's so many networks of trails, or you can make your own path.
We also sometimes load our dogs up into dog boxes and take a truck and trailer. And so we've trucked them to Deshka Landing. We can hook the dogs up right there at the landing. From the parking lot you go right down onto the Susitna River, and then you can go from there down to the Yentna River. There’s some sloughs that go through, and then a pretty famous spot called Scary Tree.
When you pull on to the Yentna River there's always this big blast of wind that hits you. It always gets a little colder there. It feels a little more wild. And then we mush on about six miles up to our place.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner
Photo by Ryan Astalos
“We really love Alaska. There's just so many places to explore. I always say you need a lot of lifetimes to be able to do all the things that we want to do here.
What's nice about the West Su region is, living here right now it's close, but yet you get out there and it's just wilderness. This big river system. There's no roads. The people love being out there and being remote. I mean, that's why people like us bought property out there — because it is remote. We want to be able to get out there and get away.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner
“People who don't have property go out too. Wintertime is such a magical time out there on the river. Now it's a whole other highway that you can access, especially if you don't have a boat, and you want to go access the area in the winter. People don't have to have a snow machine. People ski out there. People bike. There's races that are human powered. That's what's just really neat, is seeing all different people. We've even seen horses out on the river pulling a carriage on a sleigh. People will go out and have bonfires out on the river. It just becomes this whole little city out there of people just recreating together, having fun.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner
Photos by Tyler Bell, Ryan Astalos, and Casey Randall
“Years ago, we'd sit on that riverbank and we would dream about having kids someday. We'd even think about what their names would be and what we'd be doing out there with them. And now we're doing that.
One of my favorite memories being out there is the first time we took our own dog team out there. We had seen so many other dog teams and dreamed about it. And then, it was a number of years ago, we mushed all the way up to Susitna Station, and then turned around and came back and camped the team right out in front of our property. And I just remember curling up in the straw with the dogs and thinking, ‘This is such a great day. Here we are out here with our dog team, doing the things that we've been dreaming about for years.’
I hope that road doesn't go in out there. I hope that people are able to still enjoy the way of life that they have now. I hope that more people are able to go out and recreate. The way it is right now, the river becomes its own highway. River travel is wonderful.
You’ve always got to be careful. Alaska has a million ways that you can get hurt or die out there. But people are out there marking the trail and so if you're cautious and careful and you follow, they'll even mark the hazards.
All of Alaska is real Alaska. But when you get out into an area where there aren't roads, you really do feel like you can be more by yourself and experience that real Alaska.”
—Casey Randall, musher, Rock on Racing co-owner and West Su cabin owner