Photographers Blog

Race into the cold

By Petr Josek

Mountains, snow, wind, cold, sun, dogs, sleds and mushers. Those are elements you meet in various combinations when you go to cover the Sedivackuv long dog sled race in the Czech Republic’s Orlicke mountains. It’s a beautiful place. I’ve been covering the race since 2005 and I always look forward it. You need to get well dressed for that, we call it double-full-full. I remember temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) with strong winds.

There is always the obvious problem of how to cover the same event differently every year, especially as we don’t have giant mountains with high summits and there’s not always bright sun. But I think that nice pictures showing the event and describing its atmosphere can’t hurt once a year.

You go to the start line and take some pictures of excited dogs. They already know what’s going on, what is ahead of them. They bark as they rush up the hill and disappear in the horizon to face the next stage which over four days counts more than 240 kilometers (149 miles).