<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps it would be closer to the point if I entitled this FTV \u2018Historical Snowmobiling Adventures\u2019 as I haven\u2019t ridden one since our kids were in elementary school.\u00a0 Grandpa Ed (my dad) always kept a Ski-doo Elan at camp he called \u2018the kid\u2019s machine\u2019 so they could take a spin when we stopped by.\u00a0 Whether it was on the old logging roads behind the camp or on the iced over end of Huron Bay, the kids enjoyed it, but we never got around to buying one of our own.\u00a0 I appreciate the local snowmobiling groups who toil to keep the miles and miles of trails in tip-top shape, but my experiences go back far enough that I have never been on a groomed trail.\u00a0 In fact, I think my experiences with motorized sledding could actually qualify as an episode of the old radio and TV show <\/span>You Are There <\/span><\/i>(produced by CBS from 1953 to 1957).\u00a0 My brother Ron is a dedicated \u2018sled-head\u2019 so at least part of our family is still in the game.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Okay, perhaps I exaggerate the \u2018historical\u2019 part a little.\u00a0 I was born in 1953 and Joseph-Armand Bombardier founded the L\u2019Auto-Neige Bombardier Limitee (Bombardier Snowmobile Limited) in 1942 at Valcourt, Quebec.\u00a0 He had actually begun playing around with the idea when he assembled the first snowmobile in 1935 (there were some earlier models, but they were pushed by a propeller rather like an airplane on snow).\u00a0 Bombardier\u2019s first vehicle employed a sprocket wheel and track drive system and was steered by skis.\u00a0 The company manufacturing Ski-doos these days was spun off from the parent company in 2003 and now goes by the handle BRP (Bombardier Recreational Products), still headquartered in Valcourt.\u00a0 BRP currently operates manufacturing facilities in five countries:\u00a0 Canada, the United States (with plants in Wisconsin, Illinois, North Carolina, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Michigan), Mexico, Finland, and Austria.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Leroy Simonar, owner of Simonar Sports in Luxemburg, WI, claims they are the \u2018oldest and largest Ski-doo dealer\u2019 in the country.\u00a0 Their business was actually founded as a blacksmith shop in 1928 by Leroy\u2019s father, John.\u00a0 The business was taken over by his three sons when the senior Simonar passed away in 1955.\u00a0 I do not have any statistics to challenge the \u2018largest\u2019 dealership claim, but I do have questions about Leroy\u2019s comment about being the first dealer.\u00a0 Leroy says, \u201cWe sold our first snowmobile in 1965.\u201d\u00a0 By 1965, our family was already on our second or third Ski-doo.\u00a0 We had been riding a sled for at least three years by then.\u00a0 All three of our machines were purchased from \u2018Col.\u2019 Bud Wessen who was selling them out of his garage in our Marquette neighborhood.\u00a0 His garage\/shop was only three blocks up the Norway Avenue hill from our house (and two houses to the west on Kaye Street).\u00a0 I remember going up there with my dad on occasion to see what was new.\u00a0 We will discuss more about Bud\u2019s business in a bit.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When WLUC-TV 6 reports from one of the many antique snowmobile gatherings organized around the Upper Peninsula, I always enjoy picking out the models I remember from back in the day.\u00a0 Our first Ski-doo was a rather boxey affair so the shape is pretty easy to spot.\u00a0 There weren\u2019t that many companies back then so the same can be said for spotting the first models of Arctic Cat, Rupp, Yamaha, and Polaris machines one would see in the old days.\u00a0 When the boxey Ski-doo models gave way to sleeker and more powerful machines, we upgraded several times but never ventured to buy a different brand of machine.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We were fortunate to live across the street from a rolling farm field bordered by streets on the west (Norway and Lincoln) and by Wright Street to the north.\u00a0 The eastern edge butted up against a residential area and what was then the western border of Northern Michigan University.\u00a0 Hedgecock Fieldhouse was visible from our house and there was a small creek occupying the valley between Hedgecock and us.\u00a0 NMU would eventually expand to the west (beyond Lincoln when they began building married housing units and the new presidential residence), but in our earliest snomo days, we had nothing but wide open spaces even though we were well within the city limits.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I asked my brother what he remembered about us getting into snowmobiling.\u00a0 Dad was still in the Michigan State Police in the early 1960s and the Marquette post mechanic (Dave Mileski, son of my former first grade teacher and father of one of my classmates) worked with Bud Wesson.\u00a0 Mileski had a camp north of Marquette at Saukshead Lake.\u00a0 He and Bud invited the troopers and other post workers to a cookout – snowmobile demonstration one nice winter day.\u00a0 He had outlined a large oval track on the ice and gave everyone the chance to try and get the fastest time for one lap.\u00a0 Ron figures he was about the lightest rider so he claimed the title.\u00a0 When he retold this tale, I immediately remembered two things about that day.\u00a0 I did not take part in the timed racing part, but I did take a spin straight across the lake and back, thus marking my first time on a sled.\u00a0 The second thing I remember was the menu:\u00a0 it was the first time I ever ate rabbit stew.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As a marketing plan, it worked out pretty well as the guys from the post were now hooked.\u00a0 A few years later, my dad began organizing a weekend snowmobile trek from Halfway (the little berg between Marquette and Big Bay) across the Yellowdog Plains (south of the Huron Mountains) to our camp at the head of Huron Bay.\u00a0 There were no groomed trails to take this sled caravan from point A to point B, just a series of unplowed paths and logging roads.\u00a0 It took a considerable amount of map work to plan the route plus some seat of the pants intuition about which way to go when they encountered multiple forks in the road.\u00a0 After the first few trips, it took much less backtracking to get back on the right trail.\u00a0 I know my mother would fret about this yearly rodeo until dad was back home on Sunday night, but they managed to survive several of these cross country treks into the 1970s.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Our earliest machines were rated by the horsepower of the engine.\u00a0 I am not sure how powerful\u00a0 our first machine was, but I will guess it was in the 10 HP range.\u00a0 By the time we picked up Ski-doo number three, it had an unbelievable 18 HP engine, much larger by far than our first two machines.\u00a0 We maxed out with the last Ski-doo I drove regularly which came in at 24 HP.\u00a0 About this time, the rage became comparing the number of cubic centimeters (or CCs) the engine had.\u00a0 Not being overly mechanical, I found myself sticking with the old \u2018HP\u2019 system which I was accustomed to.\u00a0 The one thing I noted was the insane need to go faster and faster as the machines employed bigger engines.\u00a0 I always kind of liked the speed range where you could fall off the sled at full throttle and get up laughing.\u00a0 Once the sleds got a little too fast for the \u2018fall off and live\u2019 metric, I began wearing a helmet on a regular basis.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One of the cross country trips took place when I was in my late teens and dad asked me to come along.\u00a0 Truth be told, he said, \u201cI want you to run the 12 horse machine to camp for me so I can pull the sled with the extra gas with the 24 horse.\u201d\u00a0 The smaller machine had been picked up so dad and Ron could toss it on and off the truck when they wanted to go ice fishing.\u00a0 With everyone else on the trip riding the new, more powerful machines (some up into the 36 HP range), I had the smallest, slowest sled in the bunch.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a matter of getting lost as the dozen or so sleds ahead of me left an unmissable trail to follow.\u00a0 When we hit the trail, I started in the middle of the pack and was soon passed by everyone following behind.\u00a0 My entire day consisted of watching them zoom ahead in a cloud of snow while I ran full throttle trying to catch up.\u00a0 Every time they took a break to discuss which way to go, I would arrive just in time to see them jump on their machines and roar off again.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We followed what is known as the Northwest Trail which skirts the southern boundary of the Huron Mountain Club.\u00a0 We built a bonfire and boiled a batch of bratwurst where the trail crosses Cedar Creek just outside the HMC boundary.\u00a0 I was never quite sure exactly where we were then, but a couple of years later I figured it out.\u00a0 When I worked at the club, I occasionally delivered camping supplies to the Mountain Lake boathouse.\u00a0 It was down the lakeshore not too far from where Cedar Creek enters the south end of the lake and therefore, only a few miles from where we built our bonfire.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With lunch done, everyone hopped on their machines and zoomed off again.\u00a0 I put my throttle thumb down to the handlebar and continued trailing the pack.\u00a0 Once we got to the hills just east of Huron Bay, I felt a little more comfortable because we had been hunting and sledding this area for many years.\u00a0 I did not want to disappear and have them come back to look for me, but there were several different routes I could have taken to camp once we got that far.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One of the guys on this trip was a true motorhead – tinkerer who decided his Arctic Cat just wasn\u2019t fast enough.\u00a0 He had upgraded it with a small airplane engine and if he had added wings, it just may have been fast enough to lift off.\u00a0 Offered a chance to try out the super Arctic Cat on the ice on the bay, I decided against it after watching the first volunteer.\u00a0 He made the mistake of putting the throttle down all the way.\u00a0 The steel cleats on the track dug into the ice and the machine took off like a scared cat.\u00a0 It soon stopped, however, as the rapid acceleration caught the driver by surprise and he did a full backwards somersault off the seat.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The return trip was much less exciting.\u00a0 One of the other machines broke down so my 12 HP ice fishing mobile was loaned to the sledless driver.\u00a0 When they departed Sunday morning, I stayed at camp wondering how late I would get home and how tired I would be in school Monday morning.\u00a0 It was early March so it wasn\u2019t even starting to get dark when it dawned on me that I should make some dinner because I wasn\u2019t going to get home that night.\u00a0 Mom and dad showed up about 9 p.m. and after a full day of riding and then a two hour trip back to camp, the plan was to spend the night and bring the broken sled home with us.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The one trip I made during the cross country caravan years happened my sophomore or junior year in college. We didn\u2019t have a phone at the camp yet, so I was surprised when dad called from the Huron Bay Tavern (aka:\u00a0 Billy the Finn\u2019s).\u00a0 They had another breakdown so I was tasked with picking up one of the guy\u2019s snowmobile trailer in Marquette.\u00a0 The plan was for me to drive out to camp on Saturday, pick up the machine and then deliver it back to the house where I picked up the trailer.\u00a0 Just as we got to Three Lakes (not far past Michigamme), the trailer blew a tire and we had no spare.\u00a0 My buddy Wayne was along for the ride, so we parked the trailer at the little store that used to operate in Three Lakes and left it for the owner to pick up after the trip.\u00a0 We loaded the broken sled in the truck and got that back to Marquette just fine, never wondering why we had to bring a trailer with us to begin with.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Even when we had a shell covering the box of the pickup, we had no trouble hauling two machines.\u00a0 When Mitch and I would go out of town to ride, we would run my machine into the box from a snowbank and then lift his machine in backwards so they would both fit side by side.\u00a0 Mitch said he got his first machine before he could drive so he also bought a trailer.\u00a0 He lived in the residential area in east Marquette (riding the streets was frowned upon), so his mother would take him out of town, drop him off to ride, and then come back later to pick him up.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mitch and I did our fair share of riding and there are two trips that stick out in my mind.\u00a0 Mitch\u2019s sister lived just south of Marquette in Harvey.\u00a0 We started at her house on Cherry Creek Road and snowmobiled to the area known as The Crossroads (halfway between Marquette and KI Sawyer Air Force Base).\u00a0 Again, this was well before trail grooming became the norm and I remember this trip because all the snomo traffic on this route had really roughed things up.\u00a0 If one can imagine riding a snowmobile over waves, then one can imagine how sore we were after the constant up and down jostling we took getting there and back. \u00a0 We had a pop and a burger at the Crossroads Bar.\u00a0 Before we headed back, we had a discussion along the lines of, \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be great if they could smooth out the trail every once in a while?\u201d\u00a0 Little did we foresee what was to come.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The second epic trip actually involved KI Sawyer AFB.\u00a0 We parked at a gas station in Sands and went cross country on some of the old roads that crisscross the flat sandy plains in this area.<\/span><\/p>\n At one point, we encountered the perimeter fence at the south end of KI Sawyer\u2019s 9,072 foot (or 1.7 mile if you prefer) long runway.\u00a0 The wind at the top of the Sands Plains can be pretty wicked and we found a spot where the snow had drifted over the top of the cyclone fence.\u00a0 We debated whether we should ride up and over the fence until we noticed the huge arcs of snow being tossed to the side by the gigantic snowblowers clearing the runway.\u00a0 It was a bright and sunny day so Mitch said, \u201cIf we can see them, then they can see us and if we enter the perimeter, they will send someone to find us.\u00a0 Let\u2019s go around.\u201d\u00a0 Having once found myself staring down the barrel of an airman\u2019s rifle when I was helping my dad clear the fence right-away on the other side of the airbase, I wasn\u2019t eager to repeat the scene.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Snowmobiling closer to home, we had easy access to the Dead River Basin.\u00a0 The old dam at Tourist Park just north of Wright Street created a lake we could follow upstream until we got to the area known as Forestville.\u00a0 One had to be careful to not get too close to the Forestville or Dead River dams as fluctuations in the water level would sometimes leave areas of unstable ice or even open water.\u00a0 We stuck to the shoreline areas and the old logging roads being ever mindful that we were pretty far from home if we ran out of gas.\u00a0 One of the routes we took to the Dead River passed by an old sawdust pile formerly used to store blocks of ice back in the day.\u00a0 The deep pit between mounds of sawdust was never filled when home refrigeration killed the market for blocked ice.\u00a0 We used this area the same way skateboarders use an empty swimming pool or skateboard park.\u00a0 How we managed to go up, around, and down these embankments without rolling a sled still makes me marvel at the lengths we would go to have fun in the snow.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There are more historic snowmobiling tales to tell, but as I often say, they will have to be saved for another day.\u00a0 In the meantime, thank you to all of the people who keep the trails groomed and the tourists who use them.\u00a0 Just remember:\u00a0 we would rather have you stimulate the local economy in every way possible, except the parts that involve search and rescue or hospital services.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Ringo rides a double track Ski-doo!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps it would be closer to the point if I entitled this FTV \u2018Historical Snowmobiling Adventures\u2019 as I haven\u2019t ridden one since our kids were in elementary school.\u00a0 Grandpa Ed (my dad) always kept a Ski-doo Elan at camp he called \u2018the kid\u2019s machine\u2019 so they could take a spin when we stopped by.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,12,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-humor","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2428"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2432,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428\/revisions\/2432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}