A dog on Dena Wannamaker's team jumps up in the air while running the trail with his team. (Nate Chute/Daily Inter Lake) - Kalispell, Montana 
83-Mile Flathead Classic Sled Dog Races this Weekend
Twenty-one years ago, he thinks, Steve Riggs was flipping through the Thrifty Nickel and saw an advertisement for a used dog sled.
Then a 40-year-old with two young Siberian huskies, Riggs had a thought.
“You know, I’ve always wanted to try that,” he recalled. “So I bought the sled and I was hooked.
“And then two dogs turned to three dogs, and then to four dogs, and then to six dogs, and then to nine dogs.”
As the years went on, Riggs kept adding dogs; dozens and dozens of them. And while he kept adding dogs he kept sled dog racing, moving eventually to generations of Alaskan huskies, a breed engineered for the sport.
Today the 61-year-old Olney resident still races, and this weekend a more than 83-mile sled dog race, the Flathead Classic, will take off from nearly his own backyard. When it does, Riggs and his team will be right there at the starting line, blazing a trail neither he nor his 10-year-old lead dog, Calico, has ever taken before.