By CRAIG FREILICH

SOUTH COLTON -- If the idea of flying down a trail in a dogsled behind a team of huskies in the deep winter gets your juices flowing, you might like doing it without snow, in the spring or summer.

“The nice part is you’re not freezing,” said Spencer Thew, proprietor of Call of the Wild, who is offering dry-land sled dog tours through his 600-acre property.

The common image of Siberian huskies is one of a team harnessed together, pulling a sled, smashing through snow drifts with their tongues out.

We might not think of those huskies pulling a John Deere side-by-side or a wheeled cart through the woods in the spring, but that’s what’s happening in South Colton, and the dogs don’t mind it a bit, said Thew.

“We hook them up to carts we manufacture here. There is room for two people and the musher. There wasn’t much snow this winter, so we’ve been training with the dogs pulling a John Deere Gator,” Thew said.

The “dry-land” sled dog tours will happen “almost every day it’s below 60 degrees. Forty to fifty degrees is fine, so we can do it on a cool summer morning. We take frequent breaks, and stop to water and snack the dogs on the trail.”

As Fun As a Sled

“The carts are just as much fun as the sled. The nice part is you’re not freezing.”

Thew knows what it takes to run a team along a winter course, too. He has 27 years of racing behind him, including one run at the legendary Iditarod dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, in 1993, but he has competed in many more mushing contests around the U.S. and in Canada, particularly in Labrador and the Yukon.

But what was a hobby has become a business for the founder of Atlantic Testing Laboratories in Canton.

Thew grew up in Peru, near Plattsburgh, and graduated from Clarkson University in 1963 with a civil engineering degree. He worked for a year in New York City, spent two years in the military with the Army Corps of Engineers, and came back to the Potsdam-Canton area in 1967 and started Atlantic Testing Laboratories. That original “home business” developed into a comprehensive engineering testing and monitoring services business with 11 locations in New York and Pennsylvania.

Since selling the company o his employees in 2007, he has remained busy.

He’s still an adjunct professor at Clarkson, where he was recently appointed to direct the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s undergraduate concentration in construction engineering management, mainly for engineering and business students.

And he has made his love of Siberian huskies and dogsled mushing into a business at his kennels and Club Rocky Top B&B in South Colton. He is offering the club as a corporate retreat and an out-of-the-way resort for people looking for either relaxation like a walk in the woods and a tour of his kennels or the excitement of ripping through the woods on a cart pulled by a team of eager dogs.

His kennel now houses 22 huskies, but when he races he might have as many as 60. Kennel managers Natalie and Andre van der Merwe came all the way from South Africa to tend Thew’s dogs, and host daily tours of the kennel. And Terry Lamora of Madrid, another worker at the kennels, has a great love of the dogs, Thew said.

Likes Outdoors

“I was sitting in the office one Sunday afternoon thinking I should be outside,” Thew said as he recalled the inspiration for his run at mushing.

“My uncle had sled dogs,” he said, “and he had been in an exhibition competition at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. He used to talk about famous mushers.” Those thoughts gave him his start.

“I enjoy very much working with the dogs, and Mother Nature. It’s an excuse to get out in he woods every day.

“The bonds between a musher and his dogs are important in different situations in a race. You depend on the dog team to get you home and the dogs depend on you for food.

“And there’s nothing like a moonlit winter night, light snow, out on the sled. It’s quiet and exhilarating and you’re enjoying Mother nature to the fullest.”

As for the new trail ride enterprise, Thew says it is “going probably a little better than I expected.

“You can tailor the rides to how you want them,” he said. They’re usually 15 minutes to an hour and a half. A short run will be $25 per person, and 45 minutes will cost about $50 per person.

There are also kennel tours where people can spend a couple of hours with the dogs and seeing how the carts and the harnesses work, and watching a mushing video.

The lodge is used as a bed-and-breakfast, and a base for activities in all seasons.

Call of the Wild and Club Rocky Top are about four miles south of South Colton, at 3019 St. Rt. 56. Southbound, it’s on the right.

You can get more information and book a sled dog or kennel tour or a stay at the B&B by calling 262-2145 or 212-8871, sending a message to info@callofthewild-kennel.com, or by visiting www.callofthewild-kennel.com.