Drifts of snow more than waist high lay along the side of Rimini Road as Dave Armstrong's "Cream Team" sled dogs raced along during one of their training runs at Camp Rimini during World War II.
The rare film footage was among the highlights of Armstrong's presentation at the Montana Historical Society, Saturday, about historic Camp Rimini.
But his stories and his sled dogs also grabbed the interest of the crowd of 60 attending the event.
Armstrong, who's been called the "guru of sledding" in Montana, is a lean and wiry 86-year-old.
He had just turned 22 when he landed in Camp Rimini in 1943.
It was there that the military trained 850 sled dogs and 150 pack dogs from 1942 to 1944.
The military planned to use them as part of an invasion into Norway, which was later called off.
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Dogs had already been a major part of Armstrong's life by then.
As a teenager he'd worked at Chinook Kennels in Wonalancet, N.H., caring for and training the sled dogs Admiral Byrd would take on his expedition in the Antarctic.
It was an adventure he longed to go on, but was turned down because he was too young.
At the Chinook Kennels, Armstrong worked with Siberian huskies, Siberian/Malamutes and half-wolf Siberians.
"Those were the types of dogs I fell in love with," he said.
Cutting through snow
His Cream Team were a joy to watch on film as they cut through the snow.
Armstrong directed them, he said, with a call of "gee" to turn right and "haw" to turn left, as Armstrong would flick a 25-foot whip to either side of the sled.
It was, in fact, the Cream Team and Armstrong, that artist Shorty Shope captured in an illustration that graced the stationary of historic Camp Rimini.
Instead of being shipped to Norway for an invasion, the trained dog teams at Camp Rimini were dispersed to several different military bases.
Armstrong and a fellow musher and their dog teams were assigned to Harmon Field in Stephenville, Newfoundland.
They did some search and rescue, but primarily recovered bodies and cargo from planes that had crashed.
Table Mountain run
Armstrong's hardest assignment, he said, was part of an effort to haul 12, 1,500-pound boxes to the top of Table Mountain. He never knew what was in the boxes, but suspected it was communications equipment.
He and the other mushers' teams, a total of 16 dogs, were harnessed together to pull the load.
They did three, six-mile round trips each day.
The last half-mile of the run to the top of Table Mountain was up a 41 percent grade.
"We couldn't let the dogs stop," he said.
If they did, the weight of the cargo would have slid back down the mountain.
Drifts near the peak were 50 feet deep, he said. But by later in winter drifts would reach 100 feet in depth.
Once they reached the top, there was a brutal, howling wind that could blow a person over.
After the war, Armstrong continued to train sled dogs. Although he never competed in an Iditarod, he did run in the Race to the Sky and some of its precursors.
One of these, the 500-mile Governor's Cup, crossed the Continental Divide at least six times, which is a much more demanding course than the Iditarod, he said.
Although spry and athletic, he decided in 2002 it was time to stop racing. But it's obvious his passion for sled dogs and sledding still runs strong.
