High Country Snowmobile Club meeting and Events

Hello High Country Snowmobilers,

We will be having our February club meeting tomorrow night at 6 at the Bakers Brewery in Silverthorne.

One of the items we will be talking about will be the proposed fee increase at the Vail Pass Winter Recreation area. Details can be found here:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/whiteriver/recreation/?cid=fseprd605103

Two of our club members are on the Vail Pass Task Force board of directors, we will have our member Brian Binge and Sam Massman the new Mountain Sports Administrator at the Dillon Ranger District in attendance to talk about the fee proposal.

Events:

Thanks for everyone that attended last month’s Flattops club ride and the CSA convention this past weekend. We had about 9 club members attend the convention and rides. The Snotrackers snowmobile club out of Gunnison did a fantastic job hosting the convention including dragging a huge sled behind their cat to cook a BBQ lunch at Lake Irwin on Saturday.

We rode from Marshall Pass up to Sargent’s Mesa on Friday and rode the Kebler Pass area on Saturday. The snow up at Kebler pass was fantastic, I highly recommend adding Crested Butte to your list of riding areas to hit later this winter.

While I attended the CSA quarterly meeting Sunday morning, some of the riders went to Arrowhead to ride while others rode other areas on the way home. A good time was had by all who attended the event.

The February club ride will be on the 17th. We will figure out the ride location at tomorrow’s meeting.

Our social coordinator, Dave Garrett is still researching options for an overnight weekend ride in the beginning of March. Last I heard, Dave was trying to get us into Vega Lodge outside of the Grand Mesa for one night and then riding into Electric Mountain Lodge for a night there.

We will send out destination and lodging options as soon as we firm them up.

Grooming Update:

We completed the sale of our old cat and closed out our purchase of the new cat with Mountain States Snowcats. Jared, Jeff and Larry have been out grooming in new 2011 Prinoth Bison X for the past few weeks!

So far, the new cat is working great and the guys are getting used to the additional power and the new electronic controls. There has been a bit of a learning curve adjusting to the controls on the new cat and figuring out the handling differences from our old cat. I rode the trails a little over a week ago and thought the grooming was great, but Jared has assured us the trails will only get better from here.

History Lesson of the day:

For a little background information, in 1974, the Colorado snowmobile community voluntarily established the snowmobile registration program, in order to establish and maintain a network of winter trails. Generally speaking, the fees collected by Colorado State Parks, go into two separate funds. One to fund capital purchases of grooming equipment, and one to reimburse local clubs for fuel and maintenance costs for the grooming of over 3,400 miles of winter trails. Almost all of those miles of trail are groomed by volunteer club members, like Jared, Larry and Jeff.

Your snowmobile registration fees and club memberships helped fund our new snowcat and also help cover our costs to groom the trails at Spring Creek every year. Thank you for registering your machines and thanks again being a club member!

Thanks to the State Trails committee accepting our capital grant application last summer, we were able to pay for half the cost of our new cat, ($32,000), from the State’s registration money! The remaining money ($30,000) came from the sale of our BR275 and funds the club has saved from memberships and fundraising events over the past several years.

If you think about the history of the motorized registration program in Colorado, the motorized community has been very proactive funding trail maintenance and the equipment to take care of its trails. It is a concept the non-motorized community has yet to embrace.

Club Meetings:

As a reminder for the new folks, our club meetings are held the second Tuesday of each month, 6 pm. at Bakers Brewery in Silverthorne.

Hope to see you tomorrow at 6pm. Bring some extra cash because I am sure Kayleigh will have some girl scout cookies to sell!

Thanks, Rich Holcroft,
President, High Country Snowmobile Club