Top Dog: Frank Teasley

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

By Teresa Griswold

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Frank Teasley has ratcheted 100,000 miles or more behind a dog team, sometimes racing in 70 degrees below zero temps with 100 mile per hour winds blowing in his face.

He has been a professional dog musher for 28 years, has competed in the legendary Iditarod eight times and has raced sled dogs all over the world.
In 1996, he co-founded the International Pedigree Stage Stop Sled Dog Race, which kicks off from Jackson and ends in Park City, Utah after a total of 10 stages, nine days and around 300 miles.

Though Teasley does not race in IPSSSDR, his dogs do. He’s had a team, sometimes two, in the race since its inception. This year, as in the last four, his wife, Stacey, will run his team.

She has taken every training run with the dogs this season, because Teasley is recovering from major injuries sustained in a motor vehicle accident this past fall, which has forced him to stay off the sleds.

He has had surgery for an injured collarbone and three brain surgeries due to the accident as well as the subsequent discovery of a mass on his brain that was removed. He is healing quickly.

176 Personalities
An array of silver cups, engraved plaques, and a hand-carved trophy fill a tall, glass case in his touring office in Hoback Canyon near his home and kennel.

A bulletin board is pasted full of yellowed newspaper clippings, headlines of his adventures and accomplishments. Race photos of Teasley from the 2005 inaugural La Grande Odyssée in France are featured prominently on two walls. One is a close up of him wearing a headlamp with his trademark blonde goatee, caked in ice. Another is of his dogs bedded down on hay, surrounded by the Alps.

In an archival collection of scrapbooks that Teasley’s mother carefully put together, a clipping from 1987 shows a 20-something Teasley training his race team for the Iditarod on Spring Gulch Road. He is standing on an old Volkswagen chassis pulled by his dogs on the road, sans snow in May.

When Teasley started his sled dog tour operation here in 1982, he was “broke and skinny,” and had nothing to lose. He didn’t come here to ski. He came with a dream, he said. He was off and running with seven dogs and eight customers that first year.
“I had an idea, and fortunately after a lot of sweat equity, it worked out,” Teasley said.

Today, when guests visit Teasley’s home and sled dog touring headquarters, 176 of his enthusiastic “kids” throw their heads back and howl alertly with a mix of keen curiosity and guarded shyness. A sea of wooden utility line spools used as dog houses dot the flat landscape. Forest-lined canyon walls provide a fitting backdrop. Snow is everywhere. This is their world.

“Some people wonder how we get to know all of them,” Teasley said. “They’re constantly communicating with each other. There are 176 names and 176 personalities. No two dogs are alike.”

He bonds with the dogs, Teasley said, because they are family. He “eats, breathes and sleeps” with them, and in return, they trust him as the leader of their pack. As a distance musher, part of his job is to manage his own emotions. He raises the dogs to have complete faith in him no matter where he takes them. It could be France, Switzerland, Italy, Russia or Alaska, and it doesn’t matter to them.
 “They don’t look up at the start and say ‘Wow, we’re running the Iditarod.’ They just know they are going somewhere with me,” he said. “The trust is imperative.”
Teasley knows his dogs so well that he senses their enthusiasm to race, and he takes special pride in taking good care of his teams year round.

“Half of getting to a finish line anywhere, is getting to the starting line,” Teasley said. “And you can’t get to the starting line, if you don’t take care of them.”
 
Humanitarian Award
He peers out from beneath the rim of a ball cap in focused concentration, and his eyes light up with a mischievous twinkle as he relays stories from the trail. Teasley’s eyes are as steely blue as those of some of the Alaskan huskies that comprise his racing teams.

He reminisces about the time he was coming over Topkok in the Alaska Range, 120 miles from the Iditarod finish in Nome. He had traveled 1,000 miles of the race before meeting up with a series of three challenging mountains on the coast of Norton Sound.

“At that third hill, a lot of teams quit because it is such a struggle to get the sled to move,” he said.
The old snow blew back and forth over the sea ice and nothing would glide over it because of the salt in it. The runners on his sled laboriously squeaked across the sticky brine, and the eyelids of his 38-pound lead dog were freezing shut.
Teasley stopped often, removing his gloves and covering her eyes with his bare hands to warm them open. Shadow was leading 17 other dogs across this challenging slope. He called out to her, “On up,” which meant for her to give him her low gear.

“She turned back to look at me. Her eyelids were ready to freeze shut again, but I could tell when she looked directly at me that she said, ‘I’m giving you everything I’ve got,’ and over the top we went,” he said. “It is a team sport, from the tip of the lead dog’s nose to the back of my head.”

That was the year he won the Leonhard Seppala Humanitarian Award for the best cared dog team. Out of 76 teams (comprising 1,400 dogs), Teasley set the standard for care, according to a panel off 32 veterinarians.

Teasley’s best finish in the Iditarod was sixth in 1991, and he won the Most Improved Musher Award that year, but his most rewarding honor was receiving the Humanitarian Award in 1989, he said.

Competent and
Reliable Team
Watching him interact with his dogs, one can see Teasley shares a kindred spirit with them, and he has both physical drive and willingness, the same qualities he looks for in his racing dogs. He and his dogs are in sync, in an easy way that makes it appear this was a lifestyle Teasley was born into. Instead, he segued into it.
“My mother being a musician and teaching music and my father being a musician and teaching jazz composition, theory and improvisation, I would say that’s how I got into dog mushing,” he said.

To him, it has always come naturally to communicate with the dogs. A musher who yells, he said, is the one who needs to be trained, not the dogs.

There’s a psychology to leadership, he said. Whether it is people or dogs, he works to set up teams to be successful, mentally and physically. With his dogs, it is knowing what they can do and not asking more of them than what they can deliver.
He can read people and dogs, and Teasley said he knows instinctively when they are competent and when they have the right motivation. He focuses on how good a team he can build.

“I’m always looking to surround myself with competent individuals and let them do their thing,” he said.

This philosophy has proven to be a winning formula. Teasley gives an example from a Minnesota race he was in about five years ago. He started with 14 dogs when everyone else took off with 16, because two members of his team were coming off minor injuries from a race the week before. He started with fewer dogs than the others, but finished with them all while the others who started with 16 finished with eight or less.

Teasley not only won the race, he also set the all time record for it. The second place finisher was seven hours behind him.

“It’s not how many dogs you have. It’s how many good dogs you have and how good you take care of them,” Teasley said.

He said a crucial component of leadership is maintaining a positive attitude. To him that means addressing a problem instead of cursing about it. After the Christmas rush in his touring business this season, he overheard one of his guides making a negative comment. A few days later before the guests arrived, the septic tank had backed up. Teasley was down on his knees with a snake going back and forth in the drain; and he called his guides over.

“You see what I’m doing. It looks like a nasty job,” he told them. “I hope you understand what I’m talking about. I can say ‘damnet,’ but it doesn’t fix anything.”
He was up to his knees in sewage, but he was smiling.
“I had a good attitude about it, and I got it fixed,” he said.
Even the dogs pick up on a good attitude.

“In all the races I’ve run all over the world, the most competitive I have ever been is when I was having fun.”

Teasley’s natural team building ability and positive attitude helped him establish what has now become a world-class race in Wyoming. As co-founder and director of the IPSSSDR, he will celebrate its 15th start in Jackson’s Town Square on Friday (see sidebar). Fifteen years ago, they didn’t have a race. They had an idea, he said.

He is proud of the fact that he has had zero turnover from the 16 officials and 14 chair people who started with him in 1996. That includes race marshal Mark Nordman, who officiates the Iditarod, his only other race.

IPSSSDR
Teasley said his wife, Stacey, shares his philosophy of racing: she will not ask anything of the team that it is not trained and conditioned for, mentally and physically.

She has finished IPSSSDR at a higher place every year, and Teasley said this year’s team is the best she’s ever trained.

Soon after the IPSSSDR finishes in Park City, Teasley is going to head somewhere warm with his wife to finish his recovery. He doesn’t normally take off during his peak touring and racing season, but he said part of being a leader is trusting his guides to run the business while he is away.

What’s next? Teasley doesn’t know for certain, but without a doubt, dogs will be involved.

“Every decision I make is based on the welfare of my dogs. And because I’ve been doing it for so long, I don’t consider it a burden. It’s my way of life,” he said. “And I’m still enjoying it.” JHW

Courtesy photo
Frank Teasley by Garth Dowling

PERMALINK:
Top Dog: Frank Teasley | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

Leave a Comment