Skiers Beware: Snowmobile Racing Is Taking Over the Mountains

By early April, there was so much snow in Alpine, WYO., that it was hard to find Dan Adams's snowmobiling school, the Next Level Riding Clinics. I was looking for a big black trailer on a small side road in a boom-and-bust town on the edge of the Tetons, the 12,000-foot mountain range that sits on the state's border with Idaho. Forty minutes away, in the town of Jackson, you can find tofu burritos, a world-famous ski resort, Dick Cheney, and Sandra Bullock, plus tons of backcountry skiers who hike up untamed ridges on Teton Pass, then lay steep tracks back to their Subarus. Here, in Alpine, you see black trailers half-buried in the drifts, convenience stores, and snowmobiles.

The correct trailer was parked next to an '07 Dodge Ram Diesel with a custom black-and-white vinyl wrap, near a cinder-block garage that used to house the Alpine fire department. Adams was inside, wearing latex gloves and topping off the oil on nine Polaris 800 Pro-RMK snow machines lined up with military precision. He was maybe 5 foot 8, and about the same dimension through the chest, with a James Cagney jaw you could use for breaking bricks. The walls were plastered with logos from his sponsors, dominated by a huge crimson banner that read POLARIS: CONQUER THE TERRAIN.

Adams grew up in Jackson, where he led the mountain version of an all-American boyhood: riding a snow machine to the bus stop and growing into a pro snowboarder. Today, sledding wannabes come to him because he's starred in nearly a dozen extreme-snowmobiling movies (he helped invent the genre), because he's only the ninth guy ever to do a backflip on a snowmobile ("once was enough"), and because he's an all-around badass who regularly launches off monster cliffs and rips huge rooster tails in bottomless powder.

That kind of riding only became possible starting in the mid-1990s when sleds such as the Ski-Doo Summit appeared, designed to access steep terrain and deep snow. Adams's current snowmobiles are 431-pound featherweights on treads sized long?155 inches?for flotation, with 800-cc two-stroke engines.

Such adrenaline machines have muscled their way into the mountain scene throughout the American Rockies and up into British Columbia. It hasn't been a smooth transition?some backcountry skiers who once had the peaks to themselves have reacted with outrage. I can relate. Like many other skiers, hikers, and climbers who grew up in the age of sweat, I'm suspicious of anything that makes the mountains too accessible?if you can drive there, it's not wilderness, right?

Not all skiers resent the rise of the machines. A subculture of snow junkies has begun using snowmobiles to ferry each other uphill in a DIY version of helicopter skiing. In fact, I planned to get me some later in the week. I might feel guilty about it, but it comes down to core values?ultimately, I decided, there's nothing more important than powder skiing. I just needed to work on my sledding skills first.

Class started with something like a smoky doughnut on a Jet Ski. We were a dozen trail miles from Adams's shop, deep in Bridger-Teton National Forest. Wade Gaughran and his son and nephew, who were finishing up a multiday clinic with Adams, were thriving, but I had already racked up a grim record: one collision with a tree (Adams had dug me out stonily), the makings of a purplish scar on my right shin, and two-thirds of a competent powder turn. "This is a boot camp on snow and I work your tail off," Adams had said. He was taking it easy on me, but my forearms were fried, and an ache was growing between my shoulder blades.

Mountain snowmobiling looks hard, and actually, it is. To turn in deep snow and to ride across hills you need to get the machine tipped up on edge, which takes timing and commitment. Adams told us to countersteer, turning the skis to the right briefly to weight the left side of the machine, then hop onto the left side of the sled, right foot on the running board, left leg way out in the snow, and pull the machine over on edge while we gave it a brrump brrump brrump GRWAAA of throttle. Basically, you plant your foot and the sled pivots around it.

The clutch engages at approximately 4000 rpm, and the idea is to feather the throttle to keep the engine spinning slightly above that rate. "Go as slow as possible, but just fast enough," Adams said. Unfortunately, I wasted my youth by totally ignoring dirt bikes and go-karts, and as a result I have the engine instincts of a boiled ham.

But Wade! Wade Gaughran has raced everything from Formula Fords to the 200-mph Saleen S7R supercar, and he scored a second-in-class at the 24 Hours of Daytona?he's a man who knows how to work an engine. I watched him porpoise turns through deep snow and traverse hills that would have sent me tumbling. Then he totally blew my mind by pounding straight up the slope, popping the skis into the air at the crest, and muscling the machine around to ride out of it. It was unreal. "I might stop car racing," Gaughran emailed me later. "Snowmobiling has grabbed me like nothing else I have ever done."

Mountain Sleds

Snowmobiles meant to operate in deep snow and to climb steep terrain appeared in the 1990s, and have advanced rapidly. They now account for perhaps 20 percent of the approximately 90,000 snow machines sold in North America each winter. Mountain sleds, like the Polaris 800 Pro-RMK shown here, have long tracks for flotation, narrow builds for side-to-side agility, and a high power-to-weight ratio?a typical machine is about 450 pounds and is driven by a 150-hp engine. Riders can boost power with aftermarket turbochargers.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/sports/technology/skiers-beware-snowmobile-racing-is-taking-over-the-mountains?src=rss

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