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Filmmaker tackles a Dog Gone Addiction

Becky Bristow’s film tells the story behind the women mushers of the Yukon Quest
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Standing on American Summit, a windswept, snowy mountaintop sparsely colonized by mangled and stunted ice-plastered trees stuck in the frosty Alaskan air at 3,420 feet, Becky Bristow panned the landscape with her video camera to capture the pastel mauves and pinks of the northern sunset.

From a distance she heard the jingling of dogsled harnesses, and as they drew closer, the panting of 14 huskies and their musher’s exerted shouts as they crossed over the cold, lonely summit en route from Fairbanks, Alaska to Whitehorse, Yukon.

This was but one of 31 such teams that bounded from the start line of the Yukon Quest sled dog race — known as the toughest sled dog race in the world. One thousand miles of frigid northern wilderness. Ten thousand feet elevation gain. No substitution of dogs. If a racer kills a moose en route, they must salvage the meat before continuing. Fastest time the race has ever been won: 7 days, 7 hours. On average, one out of three racers doesn’t finish. Some years it’s half the field.

“On American Summit, the sun was setting, you could hear the dog teams coming from a long way away,” Bristow recalled. “I watched the sun set for a long time, there was ice on the trees. It made me realize the beauty of the place they were seeing with their dog teams, and why they do it.”

Why they do it was a question that drew Bristow to spend six cold weeks of the 2004 winter capturing the racers’ journey on camera to create Dog Gone Addiction: Inspired by the Women of the Yukon Quest , a 67-minute adventure documentary that’s part of the 2007 Whistler Film Festival lineup.

The film features three women — seasoned veteran Kelley Griffin, and rookie mushers Agatha Frankzac and Michelle Phillips, who is cheered on by her four-year-old son Keegan — and their four legged teammates who answer to such names as Ferdinand, Malachi, Daisy, Zippo and Denali.

The film also showcases the unfettered northern landscape, a frozen world of sturdy forests, bare willow bushes and icy riverbeds through which the sled teams pass, so tiny amidst that wilderness that when filmed from a helicopter the only clue to their presence comes with their movement.

“I wanted to make a movie about women who were inspiring — inspiring to other women, and to other people,” Bristow explained. “And I wanted to make a movie about the north. I keep getting drawn to the north. I was curious about the mushing community, about the race, and I was also really interested in where they got to go by dogsled — they got to see a lot.”

Bristow too, saw a lot, and her film bursts to life with dogs yelping and tugging at their harnesses with their pink tongues dangling, while a Bearfoot Bluegrass soundtrack augments the excitement like the fluffy powder snow kicked up behind the huskies’ bootie-wrapped feet.

But it’s in the quieter details that Bristow captures the remoteness, the devotion and the flavour of northern life — mushers gently massaging their dogs’ paws in minus 50 Celsius temperatures; mushers’ swollen faces framed by frosty white hair and fur trimmed parka hoods; Phillips hacking frozen salmon meat with an axe to feed her team; spirited Frankzac recalling how as a child in Poland she told her sceptical mother she would grow up to live in a cabin in the woods with lots of dogs.

“I totally lucked into her,” Bristow said of Frankzac, the film’s most colourful character. “She’s passionate and she’s hilarious. She was really candid in front of the camera, just so herself. As a rookie, people can relate to her. No matter how many times I saw her on the screen during the editing, she still made me laugh.”

Released earlier this year, Dog Gone Addiction won Best Adventure Sport Film at the Taos Mountain Film Festival in October, and was runner up for the People’s Choice Award at the Wakana Mountain Film Festival in New Zealand.

" Dog Gone Addiction is adventure filmmaking at its very best,” says Les Guthman, a New York based producer of award winning adventure documentaries. “It gives us poignant and sharp portraits of the mushers and their dog gone addictions, along with majestic, bone-chilling coverage of what must be the coldest race on earth. In the lives of these three women, Becky shows us an essence of the raw human will to compete and the drive to test oneself that transcends class and gender and adventure celebrity; for those who know not too much about sled dogs, the film is a revelation about a powerful will to compete that transcends species as well.”

• • •

Growing up in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, Bristow was an active 4-H member who jumped horses and showed cattle and steers. She loved embarking on multi-day canoe trips with her dad, and cherishes memories of a 10-day pack horse trip through the Canadian Rockies in celebration of her 11 th birthday.

In her second year of university — she graduated from the University of Calgary with a Kinesiology degree in 1999 — Bristow spent her summer guiding for Blast, an inflatable kayak tour operator running trips on the Red Deer, Sheep and Highwood Rivers.

“It was more about being on the river, sharing my passion with people,” Bristow, 31, said. “I like teaching people how to do something they’ve never done before, and watching them realize they can do it. It’s pretty rewarding.”

For her first multi-week road trip, she loaded up her camping and kayaking gear to paddle the Quesnel and Cariboo Rivers in the Williams Lake area. She’s been exploring ever since.

In 2000, she travelled with friends for three months in Ecuador, climbing, backpacking, surfing and kayaking. Before long they had paddled all the known rivers, so a local acquaintance suggested they explore the river behind his papaya farm.

“There was a gorge that led to a 40-foot waterfall that led into another gorge,” Bristow recalled. “I got to do the first descent of a 40-footer. We should have planned for two days, but we didn’t, so we paddled the rest in the dark and camped on the rocks under a space blanket.”

Smitten by expedition life, in 2003 she travelled to Bhutan for a month, a trip she remembers as her favourite.

“That country is so magical,” Bristow said. “We got to do a first descent there, and we took some local Bhutanese with us. We hiked up and over three mountain passes. We took horses and carried boats for three and a half days to access the river. Then we paddled down some awesome whitewater — some of the Bhutanese were quite talented. Just the hiking to get to the river was quite an experience.”

A trip to Iran in 2005, however, via France, Greece and Turkey, was her scariest.

“It was the hottest climate I’ve ever been in, and we had to wear headscarves and long pants all the time,” she said. “We had lots of stuff stolen, including film footage. We had to be really smart about where to camp, and about things like whether to show our camera or not. But then we met people who were totally awesome, who were nice and giving and wanted to share.”

Shortly after her Ecuador trip, Bristow encountered a Teton Gravity Research film crew while she was paddling in Revelstoke, which she now calls home after purchasing a small house in 2006. The guys asked her for some local beta, and then invited her to appear in their film.

“At first it was just a bunch of us boating, paddling together, and I was really excited to paddle with a solid crew,” Bristow said of appearing in kayaking films. “Then it was cool trips to Norway it was neat to go to all these different countries and see all the different cultures — and I got to paddle awesome whitewater. I didn’t really think about the camera aspect of it. There’s a certain connection with people at that level of your sport, all amped up about paddling the next river together. It’s great having a solid crew to go do first descents with.”

While her determination and apparent lack of fear are impressive, says Jeff Croft, a long-time friend and paddling partner who worked with her as a B.C. forest fire fighter, Bristow is a thorough planner and competent leader.

Becky's sense of adventure, spirit and outdoor skills are truly legendary,” Croft said. “She’s a picture of determination, natural ability and infectious positive energy in all stages of planning a trip, whether it’s for a day or many days. She’s not overconfident or bragging, but quietly confident setting up and running a drop and then exuberant afterwards. And she’s a friend to everyone on the river, safety conscious and aware, very likeable and totally self sufficient.”

That same determination and self sufficiency served Bristow well in Alaska and the Yukon, as she arranged helicopter flights to access remote locations and filmed Phillips on training runs from a sled speeding along trails winding through snowy bushes and in night time temperatures that dropped to minus 51 Celsius.

“A lot of the race is at night, there’s only six and a half hours of daylight,” Bristow explained. “I met people at the start banquet weeks before the race, and arranged skidoo and vehicle rides to wait with photographers for the mushers. I wanted to capture what they were going through. It (the cold) was fine until my camera crapped out one night. It got down to minus 51, and it started tweaking out, the audio wasn’t working. It was really frustrating, it was right after Michelle had had an accident on the descent from Eagle Summit.”

As soon as she finished feeding and caring for her dogs, an excited Phillips took shelter inside the check stop building to talk about her crash, but Bristow couldn’t immediately follow her into the warm room with a camera that was solidly frozen.

The cold, however, was a challenge Bristow took in stride, which only reaffirmed her love of the north. Although she’d never been to Alaska in winter, Bristow’s previous trips to paddle world class whitewater included starring in a Nissan TV commercial in October 2006.

“It was great — I got to go to Alaska!” Bristow commented. “I hadn’t been there in the fall or winter. When we got there, the waterfall they wanted me to drop was frozen, so I seal launched off the canyon wall. They were pretty happy, the shot looked pretty dramatic with snow on the canyons walls.

“But I love going to Alaska for any reason. The proportion of wilderness to people — there’s a lot of unexplored territory. It’s so raw, the landscape, the ocean, the way people live. You feel like you’re going back in time the further north you get. Dog sledding is one example of that; people seem to still value the simple, beautiful things in life a lot more, like their relationship with their animals (dogs) and the beauty of their surroundings and the natural world, over the newest computer gadget.

• • •

It was a trip to Russia in 2003 that started Bristow thinking about stepping behind the camera. When an uncle who trades with Russian businessmen was asked to suggest someone to assess rivers in the far northern Chukotka region for commercial whitewater potential, he recommended “just the right person.”

Realizing “not everybody gets to go to Russia,” Bristow recorded the experience she and fellow paddler Dunbar Hardy found. The resulting film, A Russian Wave , which captures the alternately hilarious, heart warming and thought-provoking ups and downs of their journey to remote Siberia at the invitation of aspiring Russian eco-tourism entrepreneurs, earned awards at several film festivals, including People’s Choice for Short Films at the 2004 Whistler festival.

The experience, she said, had a learning curve as sharp as dropping her first 40-foot waterfall.

“I learned you can do a lot with a little bit of footage if you have the patience,” Bristow said. “I learned that making a film is a tedious and time consuming process, to create the story and the characters. And I learned it’s a challenge to sit in front of the computer for long periods of time.”

For A Russian Wave , Bristow edited eight hours of footage to produce a 27-minute film.

For Dog Gone Addiction , she had 62 hours of footage. Editing the film took 14 months.

Part of that time was spent living in Pemberton, paddling the Callaghan, Ashlu and Cayoosh Rivers, the rest sitting in front of her monitor. To help her complete the project, she received a Banff Centre grant — prior to finishing A Russian Wave she also participated in a Banff Centre filmmakers’ workshop.

“It’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Bristow said. “The story was there, it was a matter of how to tell it with what I had — and how to ditch 61 hours of footage that wasn’t the best shot, and didn’t tell the story the best way. I stuck a lot of it in the special footage, things I still thought were important. Mostly, I was trying to learn patience, and realizing it’s not a quick process. But I like how it turned out — I’ve gotten e-mails from people who say they love it. The community does seem to appreciate that the story is told from their perspective.”

Telling the story from the mushers’ perspective was especially important to Bristow, who felt that was missing from her own appearances in kayaking films.

“It was just all about the images, about what I was doing in my kayak,” Bristow said. “They didn’t talk to us as athletes. I think I was inspired to make a film that did. My whole goal was to tell the story from their perspective.”

Capturing the perspective of a musher who happened to be a mother was something Bristow also felt was important.

“I think a lot of women forget about their passions and their dreams and goals for themselves when they have kids,” Bristow said. “I like the way Michelle shares her passion with her son, and gets him excited about her wanting to be in the race, and wanting to win. She’s showing him you can still commit to yourself and your own goals and be a mom at the same time.”

For Griffin, the film simply succeeded in capturing the nuances of the north and the mushing culture.

“I think it does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the Yukon Quest, and shows how different each musher's story and motivation are from another,” Griffin said. “The humour of the sport and race is right on target, as is the respect and awe that mushers have of their dogs. I also like that she didn't put a feminist stamp on it. Becky simply films three women mushing dogs in an unforgiving and fantastic part of the world and touches on their stories, and I think the common thread of all of us is that we are living our lives and dreams and hopefully we can pass on inspiration to others.”

Bristow will appear in person to introduce Dog Gone Addiction at the Millennium Place theatre on Thursday, Nov. 29, at 3 p.m.

To see more, check out www.wildsoulcreations.com



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