Harnessing the world.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: Town of two Rivers in Alaska

Two Rivers, home of dog musher Rick Swenson, is called the Dog Mushing Capital of Alaska. Located northeast of Fairbanks, this town of roughly 3,000 people also houses an international business.

Building a better mouse trap is the standard axiom for business success. Karin Franzen of Two Rivers added a very Alaskan twist to the saying; She built a better sled dog harness.

"I like to try to do things that make sense," says Franzen, owner of Taiga Mushing Supplies. "A lot of the thing with inventing is that you're using the stuff yourself so you can pinpoint what does and doesn't work."

Franzen, 40, and her husband, Glen Kravitz, used to spend weeks in the Alaska wilderness every spring with their sled dog teams. She sewed their mushing clothes and the dogs' harnesses, and eventually started a small business out of her living room making harnesses.

"For a lot of years it wasn't more than a cottage industry, a supplemental income," Franzen says. A civil engineer with a full-time job, Franzen didn't have much time to devote to Taiga. Then came the Alaska economic crash of the 1980s, which resulted in Franzen being laid off in 1987. Instead of sending out resumes, Franzen turned her attention to improving her dog harnesses.

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a 1,049-mile race from Anchorage to Nome, was becoming more competitive every year, and mushers were looking for ways to save time on the trail. Traditional dog harnesses constantly got wet and mushers had to unharness their dogs, dry the harnesses, and hitch the dogs back up at every checkpoint. It was a tiring, time-consuming chore. Franzen started to work on the problem.

Working with top mushers Joe Runyan and Susan Butcher, Franzen designed a waterproof padding system and lightweight dog harness. Mushers could harness the dogs at the start of the race and leave them on all the way to Nome if they wanted.

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