Mushing without snow

FAIRVIEW PARK — While some young people relish sleeping in on Saturdays and Sundays, Zach Stewart, 9, and Dylan Manning, 11, can’t wait to wake up early some weekends.

Just about every Saturday, Zach and Dylan travel from Temecula and Westminster, respectively, with their moms to Fairview Park in Costa Mesa with their Siberian huskies for a taste of a sport that might seem strange in Costa Mesa.

The two boys, their moms and more than 15 other husky owners gathered Saturday morning at the park to be pulled behind their huskies, something normally reserved for snow covered trails.

But the Urban Mushers don’t need snow to have fun. They call it scootering, and each dog owner harnesses his or her dogs to a special scooter — a cross between a mountain bike and a heavy duty scooter — and then they take off down the trails, dogs running and owners calling out commands.

Zach and Dylan like going fast and, despite taking a few falls here and there, are not fazed by the trail ahead because they have confidence in their dogs.

“With all the energy all the dogs have inside them, they can run for like six miles,” Zach said before they hit the trail.

Sheryl O’Rourke started scootering with her huskies in the fall. The Costa Mesa resident had previously gone sledding with the dogs, but she said that after just a few months of the extra training, the dogs performed better on the snow during a recent trip to her home in the Eastern Sierras.

“At first I thought, ‘Well, that doesn’t look stable,’ but then I tried it, and it was great,” O’Rourke said as she waited with her stepson Liam Maxwell, 12, for the group to get ready. “So I got a scooter, and it’s been great…. It’s a fun thing to do. It’s fun for everybody.”

Huskies have tremendous amounts of energy, especially as puppies, and many of the urban mushers said that the dogs get excited when they realize they’re going to the park.

“As soon as we pull in and they see the other dogs, they just start howling,” Rancho Santa Margarita resident Joan Tommarello said. “They just love being in a pack.”

And it must be true. Even novice dogs that don’t know any commands seem to do OK their first time, simply following their newfound friends along the path.

Costa Mesa resident Charles Hill brought his 1-year-old husky Mya to the park Saturday with his daughter Vivienne Hill, 11. He watched the dog and Vivienne scooter along the trail and chuckled when his dog was momentarily distracted by another passing dog. But he was delighted at how quickly she caught on.

“They have so much energy. They need to get it out…. After she [Mya] does it a few times, I think they’ll get the hang of it,” Charles Hill said.

Rancy Reyes of Costa Mesa started the group, using a Yahoo Group in 2005 to see if anyone else would be interested in scootering with him and his dogs.

“I was the only person doing it here that I knew of in Orange County…. Working breeds such as huskies, they really have a lot of energy, and you need to work with them or they can get destructive or not be fulfilled in their lives,” Reyes said.

Reyes advertised on craigslist.org and had his Yahoo group, which resulted in anywhere from six to 20 people gathering on Saturdays and Sundays to find out more or to join in the run.

But it isn’t all fun and games.

“They all have a great time running after one another tied to the scooters. And they know commands — there’s discipline involved too,” Reyes said. “They don’t just run mindlessly.”

The group also tries to plan trips to the snow, and during the summer months when it’s too hot to run the dogs, sometimes they’ll go to the dog beach or plan other activities, Tommarello said.

“If the temperatures get to 70, we don’t run the dogs,” Reyes said.

The group meets almost every Saturday and Sunday around 8 a.m. For more information, go to Reyes’ website, www.urbanmushing.com.