Jeff Smith

Hello, I’m Jeffrey Smith, originally from Fairfield county Connecticut, land of long commutes and longer traffic.  Now I live, and what some people call work, in the Eastern Sierra.  The best move of my life, and it all started from a phone call from an old friend.  My fellow Musher Chad gave me a call and asked if I would be interested in coming to Mammoth Lakes to mush dogs.  I laughed, come on, who gets a phone call to go three thousand miles away to mush dogs, its not like I’ve ever done anything like that before.  Two weeks later I returned the call with a list questions like, ‘If I quit my current job, will the new job be there?  If I get rid of my apartment, will the job be there?  And most importantly, if I tell Laurel, my girlfriend of nine years that I’m moving to California, WILL THE JOB BE THERE?  Chad in turn laughed at me and reassured me the job would be there, but remember he said, “The dogs do the hiring, so it’s really up to them.”  So at the beginning of October I packed up Laurel’s Volkswagen Vanagon and drove west.  Now I live at a kennel full of wonderful coworkers, a few good mushers, and my office is on the back of a sled with twelve dogs and the great outdoors.  And so far the dogs seem to like me, and I couldn’t be happier about all my new supervisors.