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4-2-08 Greetings and welcome!
It looks like it is time to wrap things up here for the season before I wander off and forget to do it. I am going to add this to my second last report so that all three can stay on the page for a while.
Here is a picture of the last snowmobilers that we hung out with before the trails closed. Thanks for the pool lessons guys!
Snowmobiling is pretty much all of the way over here in Silver Cliff now that the trails have all closed. There are a lot of places that you could still ride, but there are a lot of bare muddy places too. Riding now is a last chance affair in a stretch of sheltered woods that still holds snow, or maybe an open field. The days of being able to ride almost statewide on a 25,000 mile network of continuous snowmobile trails is over for a few months.
There is actually a lot of base and snow left out there. From my travels around the area, there is still plenty of evidence of the snow and miracle base that we had this year, and it is the sunny spots, roads, and lack of top snow that keeps it from being desirable to ride today.
The sun is the major issue. I made the comment earlier in the week that if it did snow 3" overnight, it would be gone and dry by noon on a sunny day and gone by sunset on a cloudy day. And so it was. It was a cloudy day, and by 5pm, the only indication that it snowed was a few white patches in shaded spots. The sun is the real deal killer, by the end of March it gets hot enough to eat 3-6" snow on a cloudy day. Only occasionally will the snow keep up. This late in March you pretty much have to ride it the same day that it snowed.
Instead of mourning it's passing, I thing that we should pause for a moment and revel in what was one of the best seasons I have seen in my years. At the peak of the season you could ride anywhere in the state. For a while a guy probably could have ridden from central Illinois up to Copper Harbor without running out of snow. I would bet that if it weren't for the urban areas on the south end, you probably could have circumnavigated Lake Michigan by sled, all on decent trails.
Up here we had a quiet winter considering the absolutely spectacular trails. The conditions, lower traffic counts and an exceptional job by grooming crews brought us trails that were often termed to be the best in 10 years, or the best ever.. I know that the trails that I rode were beyond spectacular.
Lower numbers of riders was not a good thing for people in the snowmobiling tourism industry, but it was for riders. Apparently a lot of people in the UP got used to the level of snowmobiling tourism that happened when they were the only area with snow. They were howling loudly this year for sure when a lot less people ventured north. Locally here it could have been a lot busier year too, and considering the conditions, it was a disappointing year for businesses that count on riders.
On the other side of it, a lot of our central state and downstate friends got to ride trails closer to home. That is a cool thing in that they get to ride more, and more economically. I know how it goes to go through the work of setting up a trail system and not seeing it used for a lack of snow. It was great to see people get to use those trails again, and to be able to ride nightly after work or on weekends. The fact that it all coincided with an asinine 80% rise in gas prices in one year was a bonus for riders and a first class bummer for northern tourism destinations.
For a rider around here it was pretty much paradise. There were deserted or uncrowded trails that were perfectly flat thanks to the hard work of the clubs. I had rides that I could count the whooptie stretches on one hand, and they totaled less than a mile out of 50. Until March, road trails had a good layer of ice and snow built up, and even those were spectacular. A sign of just how nice it was.. I was on Hwy 32 on the last weekend, and the sunny stretch between Lakewood and Townsend on the railroad grade by the bridge over Mccaslin Brook still had a good ice base on it. Most of you know the spot, it is always one of the first to go between the sun and traffic levels. It has been an amazing year.
Looking ahead, it is now time to think about summer storage. My first order of business is adding some Stabil to the gas and running it into the carb and fuel system. The new gas is as bad as it is expensive, and a failure to treat it WILL cause problems next fall. That is absolute.
Next up is fogging the motor. The crank and bearings are high carbon steel, and that rusts in about 20 seconds when exposed to moisture. Considering that those bearings spin 100-150 times a second and could leave you in the woods on a cold night, and cost a grand or more to fix, take the time to fog them.
Fogging an engine is easy. Take out your air intake filters, start up the sled on a stand, and spray fogging oil into the carbs/injector bodies a little at a time. It will choke down the motor, so take it a little at a time and give it some throttle. Once there is a lot in there, I start with an increasing amount of fogging oil and increasing throttle until I load enough oil into the motor to choke it out at wide open.
I am of the mind that I like to put oil down the cylinders and ports to the point that the crank bearings are partially bathed in oil, and occasionally when I walk by I will pull it over and give the bearings a bath. That is fine, but you need to still fog it, or the piston wrist pin bearings will be left high and dry. You also want to keep up on pulling it over, snowmobile oil is fairly thin (especially at summer temps) and will run off of the parts at some point. Fogging oil is thicker and stickier, and probably a better solution if you are convinced that it is reaching all of the parts. The 92-97 XLT 600 motor comes to mind with the second clutch side bearing that is always dry, and always blowing up.
Corrosion resistance comes next. Pipes like to rust and aluminum engine parts like to oxidize and get ugly when stored in moist places. My answer to this was taking a mixture of oil and a little kerosene and spraying it through an old paint gun. I would hit the engine, the pipes, the skis, the rails on the suspension, and anything else that corrodes.
Mice are a constant problem. They get in the exhaust and air box, and you really don't want them chewing on wires. I put steel wool in the exhaust pipe, and cover air box entry points with something hard that will keep them out of there. As far as keeping them out of the belly pan, some say to use mothballs, some say no. I say go a step farther and use a little D-con poison pack too. It is cheap insurance.
You will want to wax your hood, and maybe use a protectant on the seat. The seat protectant is a mixed proposition, it protects, but it also makes the seat slippery next year. Some of you have related stories of unexpected dismounts as a result of some Armour-All on the seat. The slippery surface + inertia path apparently has lead to some surprises. Use some discretion there.
A cover that breathes a little is a good thing. In an outside storage environment it will keep the sun from rotting the paint and the seat, but still release moisture. It will also help to keep the paper wasps out of your hood. One thing that you don't want is a cover like a blue tarp that holds in moisture. The moisture from the daily warming and cooling that makes dew, also makes dew under that tarp, which traps it, and it will rot anything under it.
The next item is to get the track and skis off of the ground. I put the skis up on pieces of wood, and do the same thing with the track. Ideally the back would be suspended and the track off of the ground, and the suspension extended at rest. That is great, but don't forget to put a smudge of grease on your shock shafts. You don't want those rusting.
Beyond all of that, don't overlook regular maintenance. If you broke something over the winter, get that sled to the dealer. The problems are fresh in your mind, and the dealer is absolutely starving for work right now. It is better than waiting until December, when you don't remember all of the stuff that went wrong, there are literally 60 sleds ahead of you at the service door, and you will miss a trip to the UP waiting to get stuff fixed or for parts on order.
I want to take a minute and thank the people who's names are in the page sponsor's box. Those people were kind and generous enough to send their hard earned money in to help support what I do here. Each and every one is greatly appreciated, and I can't thank you enough. When the dust settles, I make about 38 cents an hour before expenses when you figure in the ads and donations. There are a lot of days when it is the coolest job in the world. There are a lot of days that it is not much fun to be me. There are a lot of days that I look at making 30-50x the money by going back to being a weekend warrior with an eye on my $800 car and 15 year old sleds. As I mentioned previously the people are the real gasoline that make the site run, and your donations are the oil that makes it possible. Thank you to all of you that have sent in your hard earned money.
At the moment my attention is focused on the coming whitewater rafting season. The first rafting trip of the year is in 3 days, on April 5th. That assumes that the river will cooperate. If it is ready, we will be out there taking pictures and making videos of the people paddling the rapids. It should be a good spring for water if it rains even a little. There is a decent snow pack and it will take a while to all melt off. Like I say play in the snow one more time by rafting in it on the Peshtigo in April.
I am being reminded that the ATV trails close when the snowmobile trails do. The snowmobile trails closed 3-31. The ATV trails close for about 6 weeks while the ground is soft in the spring. Once the frost is out of the ground they reopen the trails. Most recent years it has been the first weekend in May, but my guess is that it will be late this year thanks to the immense ice base that we had. That has to go away before the ground thaws, and it is not melting much with out 33 and 40 degree days.
You guys to have a fun, safe and healthy summer and thank you for a great winter!
RJB
Thursday 3-20-08 Greetings and welcome! I got a good look around yesterday at a lot of trails. I think that it is now time to stick a fork in it and call it done. There are a lot of trails out there with good base still, but the bad spots are getting pretty bad. If you want to ride it still can be done in a lot of areas, but roads are raw and the frost is coming out of the bare spots. Open fields bring some riding opportunity, there is still shin to knee deep snow in most of those. As of today Iron Snowshoe closed the trails south of Hwy C for the season. Both yesterday and today brought warm sunny days. The temp sensor in the weather station went down a few days ago (Probably a battery) so I am not sure how warm, but I'd guess at 45-50 yesterday and close to it again today. It could be that the sun makes it feel warmer than it is, but there is some pretty good melting going on too. While I am thinking of it, my thanks goes out to Jeff for letting me know that yesterday's report was one big link to Cramer's Jug.com. Apparently I missed an argument when I was coding the link yesterday. A simple </a> fixed it right up. I didn't notice it because it did not do that in Firefox, only in Internet Explorer. Since I use mostly Firefox, it did not show up when I checked it. I guess that is one way to get you to look at the new web site, but it wasn't intentional. Thanks again Jeff. I do very much appreciate all and any bug reports. I think that I am done riding for the year personally. The trailer is behind a 3' snowbank that has frozen and thawed so many times that it is a block of ice, and the tongue is an integral part of it. I think that both sleds are now officially broken, so it is time for me to call it too. The last time out on the XLT the vibration got worse, and the engine started racing like it was running lean. My guess is a crank bearing is bad enough that the oil seal can't seal. Since I parked it before it blew up, it is a pretty easy fix. The RXL runs great, but it has a lot of track/tunnel noise suggesting that a cross shaft bearing went away. Again, it is not that bad of a fix since I caught it early. The blue room is also out of operation for a while. The melting of the big snow pack has flooded it. When I was out there the other day it was about 2" deep. I moved the big heater, and the extension cord pulled out and started falling toward the puddle that I was standing in. I caught it with a shovel in time, but it was scary. I have the power out there on a 50amp breaker for my welder, and had the extension cord found the puddle, I probably would have had a bad day. Other than that, it was a pretty good year mechanically. We had no on trail breakdowns, the sleds ran good for us, and I only buried the RXL really deep once. I know that you guys like my crash & burn stories, but there just wasn't much of that this year. The big disaster this year was the page crash on Jan 21. Apparently the server host had not been doing backups of the database, and 3 months of page development vaporized. I got it back up after a couple of all nighters followed by about a week of work, but it never was the same, and continues to be missing some features. They were supposed to be doing nightly backups. I am considering abandoning the database driven CMS Joomla program that I used to run the site this year. It has cool features, but it has plenty of bugs too. If I just haven't decided, but I am leaning toward going back to a standard HTML page. It is much easier to manage and back up, and generally less problematic. That comes with some hesitation because I really like the resizable text and page size and photo gallery features of Joomla. It was a record year for visitor hits. I have not done a final tally on server logs yet, but my rough number is that you guy hit the page about 300,000 times since November. That is up significantly, and again I thank you guys for your support. This winter brought the best conditions that I have ever seen up here. The ice base kept us on the trail, and the snow kept coming. There was plenty of snow statewide, so we never saw really big crowds on the weekends. The clubs did a great job of grooming, and I heard a lot of comments about the trails being the best ever, or the best in 10+ years. It is true. January and February were fantastic. Once couple that I spoke with at Chute Pond took a week off and went riding, and they said that they had over 1,200 miles for the week. Nice! I talked to dozens of people that had 150 miles by noon Saturday, and more than double that for the weekend. There were indeed some kind conditions. I might be wrong on this, but I recall only missing one weekend since Christmas. That is a welcome change from last year's 9 day, one weekend season. I want to thank our page sponsors profusely for their generous donations. Your hard earned dollars are most appreciated. It was great this year having a few bucks set aside just for riding the sleds. Most of the names on that list are hard working middle class people, and your donations mean a lot to me. Thank you very much! Likewise, I would like to thank our page sponsors that bought ads. Our advertisers were pleased to see results, and I want to again thank you guys for your support in that direction. The real gasoline that drives the site is the people. I have a slideshow of faces going on in my head of all of the people that I had a great time with this winter. Hundreds and hundreds of you said hello, bought me a beer, slipped me a donation, or hung out and had fun with me. Thank you very much to the people that took time out of their fun time and stopped to say hello. While this seems like it should be lucrative, it is not. It is very much the opposite. Sometimes I get depressed about it, and right about then a bunch of you guys will pop up and cheer me up. Trust me when I say that the people that visit are the real power behind this site. Thank you. Likewise I also want to thank the people that contributed to the message board. Many of you had over 100 posts on the new board, and I know that a lot of people appreciate your contributions. Something cool this year was the introduction of video on the web. I finally found a hosting co that was reasonably priced for a streaming media server. I have had video production equipment for several years, but it would have cost 10-40 cents a viewing for each clip to host on the web. Multiply that by the many thousands of times that they were seen, and it was prohibitively expensive. The new company and the ability to do video at a reasonable price is very nice. We ended up having video clips from the Chute Pond drag races and from the Lakewood snowcross races. There are a lot more coming next year. I am considering using it for conditions reports and might have to do a test run on that next fall. I never did get the helmet cam running, but I still have visions of that too. The whole video on the net thing is new to me but I will get the finer points of it down by fall. This is not my final report of the season here, but it is one of them. I am sure that there will be stuff to update. In the meantime I am getting ready to start updating the scindex page over at Silvercliff.com. I do that page with a lot of what I do here, weather, events, and stuff like that, plus rafting info and pictures and the occasional fishing adventure. The difference is that I do that page a few times a week, not daily. I am planning an opening report over there, and then I am going to take a few days off. There was discussion of heading back to town for a few days. My diet will be abandoned as I gorge myself on gyros and Chinese food, and tip a few with old friends. I will have to miss a few days of the muddy driveway and quiet times at the local trail stops, and will appreciate living here a lot more when I return. I am already getting antsy for the thaw to start. If I can't ride my snowmobile it might as well be 70 and green. With the muddy ground and bad ice on the lakes, there isn't much to do. If it weren't for the whitewater rafting starting on April 5th, it would be prime time for cabin fever. The tremendous ice base remains intact in a lot of places. Likewise there is still snow in a lot of the fields. The sunny spots and raw roads are pretty bad, and the trails south of C closed today on Iron Snowshoe. There are places to ride, but you will want to pick them wisely. The 16 day outlook shows more snow chances, but we will have to see how that works out with the sun. I will be taking a few days off, but will be back if anything important happens. One last thought, Bo changed the dates of the Rustic shutdown. They are now closed from 3-31 until April 9th for spring cleaning and vacation. That is it for me today. Thank you all very much, and have a good spring! RJB |
