Olney couple's dog-sled business is booming

By NANCY KIMBALL/Daily Inter Lake

The winter sporting world's eyes were focused on sled dogs as Alaskan musher Lance Mackey's team pulled him through Nome's burled arch to win the Iditarod in the dark morning hours on Wednesday.

He'd pulled a fast one on four-time Iditarod champion and fellow Alaskan Jeff King, who awoke to see Mackey had pulled out of the final checkpoint on the quiet. King crossed the finish line an hour after Mackey's nine-day, 11-hour, 46-minute and 48-second finish.

Back in Montana, Jack and Pam Beckstrom's world was focused on making race wins like Mackey's possible.

Wednesday morning, while Mackey and King probably were getting some sleep, the owners of Adanac Sleds and Equipment fielded phone calls from friends announcing the champion mushers' accomplishments. But they never missed a beat in their work day, counting out harnesses and tying tail loops on them for the next order, boxing up spare parts for shipping, talking with their custom sewers, faxing out information well into the afternoon.

Their home office in the woods just north of Olney, where the snow still is piled high, is a hopping place.

"I can get 150 e-mails a day, especially in the busy season," Pam said. "And I take them seriously, [making sure] to answer and help all of them - especially with beginners."

Every year, she said, they sell a lot of how-to books to beginners, then work closely with them over the phone or by e-mail as they learn to measure their dogs for custom-sized harnesses. And as beginners learn more, "we don't have to sell them a lot of stuff they don't really need," she said.

The Beckstroms, after all, remember what it's like to be a beginner.

JACK STARTED training and racing dogs in 1972, entering the field with a two-dog team in Cle Elum, Wash., but quickly graduating to five-dog and then nine-dog teams. He never slowed down until four years ago, when the couple's growing business called for him to get his trail satisfaction from training runs in the Montana woods with Pam.

His last race was in Elkford, British Columbia.

"I'm perfectly happy being a recreational musher now," he said with a slow smile.

He's run hundreds of competition trails in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and all the Canadian provinces. And, he modestly admitted, "I've won a fair number of races."

He's one of the founders of the 350-mile Race to the Sky from Helena to the Seeley-Swan to Lincoln, and twice placed second. He and Pam, a long-time race organizer who raced for one season, met when organizing Race to the Sky and have been married the past seven years.

Twenty-seven years ago Jack founded the Root Beer Classic in Polebridge, naming it after his homely but much-loved lead dog who mothered puppies that now race in teams all across Montana. He won that race three or four times and, with Pam, just organized this year's successful running early this month.

He's never raced in "The Last Great Race," the locals' name for the Iditarod, but was race marshal one time. For some time now, a lot of Iditarod competitors have been customers of the business Jack stepped into in 1976.

HE TOOK that step a year after moving to Montana in 1975.

Not long after a friend died in 1976, Jack got a call from his widow, Mel Fishback, asking if he could take over the handmade-sled portion of their Zima Sleds and Harnesses business. They found enough parts in his shop to piece together one sled, so Jack took the challenge.

"I was a sled builder before I was a carpenter," he said. "I'm mostly self-taught the hard way. I broke a lot of runners." He used to steam-bend all the bent wood pieces, but now uses a lamination process.

He still hand-crafts all his own sleds - toboggan, middistance and sprint-race sleds, touring sleds for passengers or freight, kit sleds for kids and beginning adults - but a friend across the road builds all the laminated runners.

Then in 1983, Fishback asked Jack if he could take on production of her patented Zima dog racing harnesses. She had designed them in 1954 as the world's first X-back harness, designed to stay centered comfortably on the dog's back and distribute the force evenly. It's a design that has been copied internationally ever since.

"That was a no-brainer," he said. He added that to his business and hasn't looked back.

Updates and refinements over time have improved the performance of the Zima harnesses now made by two contract sewers, with a third contract material-cutter, in a wide variety of styles with fleece, padding and quick-dry nylon. They introduced a multisport harness last fall to use with skijoring, bikejoring and scootering.

They contract with two more sewers who make their dog boots, and work with a Whitefish upholstery shop for their sled bags and skijoring belts.

With the exception of one worker in Great Falls, everything is done locally - with U.S.-made materials - keeping the dollars in the Flathead.

AND BUSINESS has been booming lately.

They've consistently advertised for years in the major trade and special-interest magazines, but a recent spate of stories in those magazines has brought customers in droves.

Their busy production season used to run from around the first of August until April, with both Jack and Pam putting in 16-hour days. Summer was spent taking orders and restocking inventory.

But they found themselves in the unfortunate position this spring of running out of harness and even sled inventory when the unprecedented level of orders kept mounting. They have vowed to never let that happen again.

"We have thousands of harnesses to make this summer," Jack said, in part because of the new harness size they will add this fall.

They're taking a hard look at growing the business, which is fed through 18 retail outlets around the world and their Web site. They've already doubled the number of sewers and may repeat the decision.

Adanac Sleds and Equipment has kit sleds, sprint and middistance sleds, toboggan sleds and tail-draggers, and touring sleds. There are plastic runners, aluminum quick-change systems to convert your old runners, brake systems and parts, rope, towline parts and snow hooks to hold the sled in place while you're tending to tangled lines on impatient dogs.

They have bags to wrap up an injured or tired dog. And dog boots, wrist wraps, jackets, collars, bowls, leashes, harnesses, feeding ladles, emu products to help heal the furry athletes and something called Algyval to massage into dogs' legs to help muscles before and after a run.

For the human behind the team, there are headlamps, sleeping bags, a parka, bibs, mukluks, alcohol-fired cookers, gifts and metal art.

Their catalog lists 34 categories, but they put out close to 100 products.

Reporter Nancy Kimball may be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com