Jacques and Jewel in Nome

Hello this is Jacques, Magali's husband.
I was also born and raised in France near Paris where I graduated from medical school in 1980.
This is about when I started mushing after I brought back my first dog, a Siberian Husky named Rhino from the Yukon Territory.
After spending one winter in Alaska in 1981, I raced limited class in Europe for 3 years before I went back to Alaska to run my first Iditarod in 1985.
I enjoyed spending that winter with Joe Redington Sr known as the "Father of the Iditarod".
Joe thought me a lot about long distance racing and he also gave me a lot of advice when I took a team to the summit of Denali (Mount Mac Kinley for non Alaskans). You can see my race records here.


As the passion for sled dogs took over our live,  Magali and I have been residing in the Fairbanks area (Interior Alaska) since 1993.

Location of Noatak Kennels

The Fairbanks area in one of the best places in the world to run sled dogs, it can be quite cold at times, but there is usually good snow all winter and it hardly ever rains so that the snow does not get icy.
Since the beginning, Jacques built a strong partnership with the dog food company Royal Canin that has been supporting his kennel for almost 20 years.
 
We adopted the American citizenship in 2002 and have no plans to move out of Alaska at the moment.
The last four summers, I have been working on glaciers in Skagway and Juneau for Alaska Icefield Expeditions, allowing thousands of people to discover sled dog sport. Pictures can be found here.

Jacques and Mitzy

My other passion is programing computers. I took basic computer science classes in Alaska and have been mostly self taught after that.
I started programing in Object Pascal and Delphi that I used to write Kennel Management, Nutrition and Training applications, as well as some general purpose components.
Lately, I have been mostly working with C# and the .NET framework, building several data driven web applications.
Some of them are: coldspotfeeds.com, katahdinms.com, antipodesled.com,
I have my own web server in LA that I can administer from a remote place in Alaska, this is where this Blog is hosted.
So far, I have been only programing for the Windows platform, but I am starting to learn Python and programing for Linux.
I am interested in cryptography as you may have noticed by the name of some of my dogs like Rijndael , Shamir, ElGamal, Enigma...