Have Your Holiday Cards Mailed By A Professional Dogsled Team

MOUNTAIN, WI — This holiday season, sending holiday cards via "snail mail" just got a whole lot more interesting after a Wisconsin woman says she will deliver your holiday cards via her professional dogsled team — for free.

Don't forget to put stamps on your envelopes, though.

"We'll be carrying your holiday cards by dogsled! Just for fun! And because we love the dogs and we all need extra joy! Please share widely," 29-year-old Blair Braverman posted on her Twitter Account.

Braverman and her husband Quince Mountain live in the tiny town of Mountain, Wis., a community of about 500 people who live about an hour-or-so north of Green Bay. Together, they own and operate the BraverMountain Mushing, a professional dogsled team that cares for and employs 21 Alaskan huskies.

Here's how to do it:

Send your addressed and stamped cards in a bigger box or envelope to:

• Blair Braverman, c/o BraverMountain Mushing
• PO Box 26
• Mountain, WI
• 54149

They will collect the letters, mark the envelopes with a special dog-shaped stamp that reads "This Letter Was Carried By Dogsled," and then transported them the two-and-a-half miles to the Mountain, Wis.-area post office. "We'll probably take the long way, about 10 or 20 miles," Braverman said.

That's no sweat, Braverman said. Their professional dogsled team is training for the 400-mile John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon in Duluth in January.

Love of a Lifetime

Braverman's love of dogsledding endured from her childhood in sweltering California, to the frozen tundra of Northern Wisconsin — with a twist.

"I love animals, and it just seemed like the exotic magical thing to be a place where there was snow," she said. "I just read a lot of books about it when I was a kid."

After graduating from high school in California, she attended a yearlong folk school in Norway - 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Stops in Maine, Alaska helped her practice mushing a dogsled team and picking up tips and tricks along the way.

She met her husband Quince while in graduate school in Iowa, and moved to his farm in rural Wisconsin, where they built a dogsled team of their own over the last four years.

Braverman says her team of 21 Alaskan huskies love the cold and are deeply bonded as a pack. "They're the working mutts of the dogsled world," she said. "They all have their friends in the group. We try to make sure all their social needs are met."

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To learn more about BraverMountain Mushing (and to see some cool dogsled photos), visit their website.

Giving Back

Braverman said delivering mail by dogsled is a very traditional way to deliver mail up north, and said it's a reflection of the way her working-class town of 500 people gives back.

"We love kids. Every year we take every single kid in our town on a dog sled ride. Every single kid in town gets a backpack and a coat and a book at their reading level," she said of a community-wide effort to provide resources to the town's young students.

Enjoying the Cold

Braverman is a freelance writer and has drawn from life's lessons to author her book, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North," which is available online.

In her book, Braverman describes what it has been to carve out a life in some of Earth's most unforgiving climates and landscapes. "I think the book is about grappling with being a woman in the wilderness and how people act in extreme landscapes," she said.

Dogsled Photo by James Netz Photography, Published With Permission

Article Photo by Christina Bodznick, Published With Permission