The snow at Barkerville was filled with paw prints after teams of dog sleds in the mail run arrived at the historic site with 1,500 letter destined for 19 different countries.
Mushers were sworn in as honorary letter carriers by Canada Post's mail run liaison, Kerry Wootten on Friday (Feb. 7) at Troll Ski Resort before setting out on their journey.
Wootten has been part of the mail run for around a decade, she remembered not knowing about it when she first started at Canada Post in Quesnel and being ecstatic watching the dog sled teams arrive to be sworn in.
"The whole sledding community, I've gotten to know them all and they're like family. I love them and I love being here and being part of this," Wootten told The Observer at Troll after the mushers were sworn in. She said there are special envelopes and special mail boxes for the mail run each year that Canada Post counts, organizes an bags before handing them out to the mushers. "They carry it from Quesnel to Barkerville and then they hand it back to me and I take it and put it in the regular mail stream."
Wootten said some of the most popular countries outside of Canada for letters to go to are the U.K. and Germany. She added that all of the 1,500 special envelopes printed were sold.
As the dogs waited for the run to begin, they howled and barked and whined but once they got running, they were silent. Some once again got anxious to run once arriving in Barkerville while others enjoyed rolling around in the snow.
