Friday, February 13, 2009

Trailbreaker's fun

Here is my first post - some photos from trail-breaking. The basic of this activity is scooter driving on the track (if there is any). If there is no track, look forward, if there is some stump or unfrozen water ahead.

First ride of the season is usually quite unpleasant thing to do. Trying to remember where the tracks were last year, crossing creeks with little fear that the ice isn't strong enough (sometimes really isn't, than it gets quite nasty I must say, especially in very low temperatures:), getting stuck every few meters in soft snow without any harder part under (except ground full of big stones, etc).

If you drive offtrack with one ski, scooter could start flipping to the side, rapidly slowing down and than stopping for good.
It's really wonderful to dig out our 320kg (cca 705pounds) snowmobile from the wet snow, which is something like strong and heavy glue, filling whole area inside the belt and freezing in less than hour to one piece of ice. It sticks to the shovel every time you use it, so it's almost impossible to throw anything away.

Opposite thing is digging scooter out from 1.7meter of fresh powder snow - scooter just digs deeper and deeper. The only thing which always saves me is my old snow-shovel, which I always carry in the back of the machine. Well... almost always. I didn't have it with me only once and I've walked home for three hours... This year, I got hit by that shovel into my face, while pushing scooter from deep snow with full throttle... very smart if me. When the scooter got grip and shot forward, I've turned back and got it. I was trying to hide blue eye when I got home, but unsuccesfully :) But I must say that it was more pleasant than last year's bath at -13C...

That's all for this time, I am sure that I will post more pictures some other day.




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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This look like great fun! Maybe you have to have program in Huskyfarm that norwegians that are not allowed to snowmobile can coem and try it at your place:) Or maybe you have to catch a moosebaby, tame it, ride it with snowshoes on in winter! PS remember to kill a couple of them cornertrees in summer, you must mark them now:) Rikke

Katerina said...

I´d just ad a comment to the pictures: "Just another day in trailbreaker´s life" :)

Jachym said...

I guess after one ride like this, any Norwegian would be thankful for not being allowed to ride snowmobile at home:)