Greetings and welcome!
Wow what an intense weekend! Thank you to everyone that made it a great one!
My bet is that the Sunday/Monday storm will be a positive thing for the trails, but there will probably be a little short term pain along with it. As of midnight I have an inch or two of very sloppy snow down in the yard on top of what is in the picture. When you step on it your tracks are wet on the bottom. I have a hunch that it will all translate into an icy base once it starts freezing up.
Right now that is what I see looking outside. Looking at Athelstane Weather’s web cam it looks like they got more snow that I see here. That isn’t surprising. There were a lot of switches back and forth between rain and big snow flakes, so there is probably a little local variation in snowfall totals.
There were times when I thought that is switched over to snow and we were about to get some decent accumulation, then it would let up. There were also a couple of times that I could hear the rain on the roof when a brief downpour came. We are expecting another inch or two of snow before it is over.
I will get a better look around in the morning. Unless conditions are nasty I am planning my usual Monday Lakewood/Townsend/Carter run for groceries and supplies. At that point I will get a better look at how the trails fared from the weekend and from the storm.
My Monday afternoon ride is also going to be subject to conditions. If the trails are soft and slushy I will suspend it as a courtesy to the hundreds or thousands of riders behind me. I don’t want to be the guy that left 100 miles of ruts in the ice trail base. Most likely I will be pulling the rope, but that is up to conditions. Hopefully it will go below freezing tonight and firm things up. Right now the TV says Crivitz is 38 and Athelstane Weather has 33.
I feel very blessed right now. I met literally hundreds of snowmobilers over the weekend, both new friends and old. Most of the time it was pretty reasonably paced so I got to spend a little time with some of the groups. Thank you to everyone that made it so much fun at Rapids Saturday, and my apologies to the groups that I missed.
It was clearly the busiest weekend of this Winter. There were a lot of big events and nice trails, and it was great to see so many riders out. Rider reports had the trails in good to very good condition, though there were some signs of traffic with all of the riders.
It occurred to me Saturday morning that it was the second Saturday In Feb, and that I had missed the High Falls Radar Run, Winterfest, and Fish-O-Rama on the event calendar. My apologies, I thought that it was next weekend. I feel pretty bad about missing that.
My first visitor to the Rapids Resort when I got there Saturday afternoon was Jeff Schwaller, President of the NEW Low Buck Vintage Riders. He was riding a really spectacular 79 SRX 440 L/C.
He is on a mission to do 500 miles in 5 days on 5 different vintage Yamaha snowmobiles. He is running different Marinette County trails daily and backtracking as little as possible.
Jeff has a nice stable of vintage Yamaha snowmobiles and is out to enjoy some of his hard work restoring them and the investment getting them registered for the trail.
Saturday he rode the SRX 440 around the Iron Snowshoe Trails. Sunday he rode an 81 250 Enticer near Pound Coleman, And White Potato Lake.
It sounds like a very cool adventure, and you can follow along. He is blogging about his rides in the forum on the New Low Buck Vintage Riders web site.
I am planning on riding with The NEW Low Buck Vintage Riders Saturday the 23rd on their Racer and Lana Rae’s to Pines Pinch. Racer’s is about 16 miles west of Crivitz on W, and the Pines is on Crooked Lake. It isn’t a long ride, but they go there and back on the antique snowmobiles and make a day of it. One of their rides passed through Rustic years back and they are a fun group. I am definitely looking forward to it.
If all goes well I will be riding the RXL. It isn’t an antique per se but it is a classic. Not only is it 21 years old, it was the first mass produced fuel injected snowmobile.
I am going to try to track down a clutch spring today and hopefully take it for a ride. The primary clutch spring in it is old and tired. It engages at too low of an RPM causing a low end bog. It is asking the engine to start pulling before it is running fast enough to be in its power band. It is a fairly common problem on old and high mileage sleds.
Let’s do some people pictures! Thank you to all of the riders that visited the Rapids. If I don’t ask you to do a picture, ask me. I am always happy to do it. It is great meeting everyone. Thank you very much!
When I stuck my head out of the door at 2am it was still raining lightly. There is still an inch or two of new snow, but it is well saturated. Once it freezes in it will make a heck of a base. That is good, March is only two weekends away, and we will be happy about that ice base once the sun starts getting a little more destructive. It doesn’t look good for tomorrow afternoon’s ride, but long term I think it will be a big boost for the trails.
Thank you again to all of the people that made it an amazing weekend! Have a good Monday and thank you for visiting!
RJB