Adventurer and world-record musher Peter Kay-Kujawski has completed his first Husky race of the 2016 season – all made possible by a Honda snowthrower.
After a quiet Christmas with heaps of snow blowing, Peter took his place in the Alta 2-Dagers race at Alta in the Finnmark region of Norway, some 2,000km north of Oslo.
Handling Huskies for British Husky Racing Champion Emma Cowell, Peter chose to run the short race, as building the dog yard had taken precedence over autumn training.
‘The race was run over two 50km legs, with the aim of putting more training miles into the dogs,’ the 11-time class title-winner said. ‘We were also running to gain Emma more mountain experience. The race went well, and the weather was kind – fortunately for Emma, as at times this area can be lethal with the weather changing minute-to-minute.
‘I found this out in 2013 when I got caught in an ice storm, with 50mph winds lashing me with freezing rain during a blizzard. Luckily that time, I managed to lead three teams to safety and out of the snowstorm. Emma finished the race with all the dogs returning home and happy, ready for more training miles in the coming days.’
The Honda HSS 970 Snowthrower enabled the pair to prepare and train in the face of some of the worst snow they had yet to see in the region.
‘If we didn’t have the Snowthrower, we wouldn’t have been able to run this training base,’ Peter said. ‘It’s as simple as that. It allowed us to get the dog yard clear quickly and easily. The yard would have just been impassable at this time of year with the incessant snowfall. Without time to train and somewhere to base ourselves, it’s pretty obvious that we’d wouldn’t have been racing at all.
‘With Honda’s little gem, we were able to make a route where even tractors were struggling to cope with what have been pretty extreme conditions this year.’
Honda 9 Series Snowthrowers
Against layers of thick, heavy snowfall, Honda’s 9 Series Snowthrowers are right at home. Shifting up to 50 tonnes an hour, throwing snow up to 16m and tackling depths of up to 51cm, these mighty machines are the ultimate power product for snow clearing. They can shift an area the size of two tennis courts – 30cm deep – in under ten minutes.
It would take many people with shovels to do the job; even so, the Honda 9 Series Snowthrower with the GX270 4-stroke engine will do it in no time at all. This engine is as reliable as it is powerful and is designed with low noise, low vibration and low emissions in mind. It’s perfectly happy to start in the cold, too. As a result, they’re the quietest, most comfortable snowthrowers to use. And because they consume so little fuel, the time they save is a real bargain.
