Your unforgettable day on the mountain begins at the park and ride off I-70 in Wolcott, where a dozen guests bedecked in snowpants, anoraks, and Sorels—instead of plastic boots-—pile into a van that corkscrews for 10 minutes up Bellyache Road to a trailhead above Red Sky Ranch. There, you are greeted by a sonic symphony of barks and howls at decibel levels rivaling a jet idling on the tarmac at EGE because the dogs—60 Alaskan Siberian huskies harnessed to a half-dozen sleds—could hear the van coming more than a mile away and they are wild to fulfill their genetic drive to pull. Guests divvy two to a sled and settle under wool blankets behind the dogs and in front of mushers who stand on the back of the sled. “Hike! Hike! Hike!” yells each musher. Sled after sled, together the dogs lean into their harnesses and begin to run.

That’s when the magic happens. Because all is silent as the sleds glide over snow along a trail that cuts through aspen groves on a thousand-acre swath of private ranchland that’s as lonely and beautiful as the Alaskan tundra. If it is a powder day, the sensation is like floating down the Back Bowls on Vail Mountain. If it is later in the season and the trail has been packed out, the scrape of the runners on the sleds sound like carving corduroy on Beaver Creek’s Gold Dust—only instead of yeehaws! of skiers, mushers yell Gee! and Haw!, commanding their teams to veer left or right. It goes like this for a half hour over nearly 3 miles, all the way out to Kodak Loop, a panoramic overlook with views of Castle Peak to the west and Game Creek Bowl to the east. Here, dogs and humans take a break.

The mushers serve their guests hot chocolate from thermoses with hunks of homemade pumpkin bread, just like Wally and Denise Glass started doing in the winter of 1989, when they founded Mountain Musher to bring a bit of the wild Yukon to the Vail Valley. Only now, the bread (same recipe) is baked by Denise’s daughter, Sarah, who took over the family business with husband Cameron Bevard in 2024. The temperature dictates how long the Kodak moment lasts, and then it’s back to the trailhead. 

On the hourlong uphill run, the guests get to drive, with mushers running alongside, covering 2.7 miles in what seems like an instant. For Sarah Bevard, from Christmas week through the end of ski season, this is how almost every winter day has unfolded for as long as she can recall. “I’ve wanted to take this over since I was 5,” she says. “This is always what I wanted to do with my life.”