'Carried by dogsled': Beargrease musher offers special delivery of holiday letters

Few people enjoyed a better 2016-17 than Blair Braverman.

She stormed the New York City publishing world and gained status as a feminist iconoclast with her book, "Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube."

She elevated the sport of dogsledding with her warm and insightful social media posts.

She pressed her voice further into the male-dominated world of outdoor adventure writing by becoming a staple contributor to Outside magazine.

And now as Braverman trains for her first full John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon, she wants to carry your holiday letters. For free - well, the price of postage.

"Beargrease is one of many races that runs on old mail delivery routes," said the 29-year-old Braverman. "It's really common in dogsledding - one of the ways it was used and developed was as a system of delivering mail to isolated northern communities."

Braverman lives and trains five hours from Duluth - in Mountain, Wis., northwest of Green Bay - where she shares the BraverMountain Mushing compound with her husband, Quince Mountain, and 21 exuberant Alaskan huskies.

This holiday season, Braverman - who completed the 2016 Beargrease mid-distance race - will take holiday letters with her on her daily marathon training runs with the dogs before dropping the letters off at the local post office 2 miles from home. So far, she's carried more than 200 letters.

Users are asked to send their stamped cards in a package or box. Before she mails them, Braverman stamps the individual letters with a silhouette image of her dog Refried, one of a group of dogs the couple named after beans. Recipients are greeted with an envelope which reads, "This letter was carried by dogsled."

"I'd liken this to asking your neighbor to drop off your cards, or a business that hires a courier to drop off the mail," said United States Postal Service spokesman Peter Nowacki. "That Blair is doing this in preparation for the Beargrease race - commemorating a legendary mail run - is pretty cool."

For Braverman, the idea came in two parts: 1) she already had the traditional stamp, which she inks then pounds onto cards she sends to financial boosters and well-wishers of the kennel, and 2) she wanted to guide dogsledding back toward a more favorable light following a season of controversy.

In October, she wrote a story for Outside examining the 2017 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and the hullabaloo that arose months after the race about a dog-doping mystery. It was the most widespread exposure the sport received in years.

"For so many people - outsiders - it was the first story about dogsledding they'd read in ages," she said. "But we're like, 'Wow, dogsledding is always going on.' The world champion right now is a great-grandmother (Alaskan Roxy Wright), but nobody was hearing about it in that context. They were hearing about it in the context of news. I was thinking with the letters, 'What's a thing people can just like dogsledding as an everyday thing?' So they're invested in it and care about it without some issue they're supposed to have an opinion about."

Challenging audiences is something Braverman did with her 2016 book, "Welcome to the Goddamn Icecube" - a work that now seems as if it were a vanguard of the times in which we find ourselves. Before the recent flood of sexual harassment and assault allegations stole headlines and felled moguls, and before the country was swept by a #metoo movement on Twitter which saw women revealing their most tortured experiences with men, Braverman wrote her book.

She wrote two books, actually - one a paean to coming of age as an female outdoor adventurer and another, more revealing and honest version of the book that wove its narrative through her own experiences with sexual assault and harassment on the Alaskan tundra.

"I wrote two versions of the book - one this story I wished I'd had, but that was false, and the story I had to admit to myself," she said. "I had two complete manuscripts and I ended up clicking send on the day the manuscript was due on the 'wrong' one. Deep down I knew I was going to do it. No way was I sending in the one I didn't feel mattered. My perfectionism is stronger than my shame."

The book, now in paperback, moved some of the country's most important literary critics to acknowledge Braverman as a powerful new voice, and the book continues to spread its influence on the strength of positive word-of-mouth attention. She spoke at an event in Minneapolis earlier this month, expecting a modest crowd. She arrived to a packed auditorium.

"There were all these people and they had worn-out copies of the book," she said, "and they knew who (her dog) Flame was."

Carried by dogsled

To have your holiday cards and letters carried by Braverman and her team of dogs, send them stamped and in a separate package to:

Blair Braverman

℅ BraverMountain Mushing

P.O. Box 26

Mountain, WI 54149