North America's earliest explorers left a legacy of trails and paths that others could travel safely and enjoyably. That's a legacy that today's snowmobiler can understand.
Across North America's snow country, snowmobilers have banded together in clubs that go beyond just sledding together for fun. They fund, create and maintain an intricate network of trails, providing the highest level of riding enjoyment to snowmobilers.
About 80 percent of North America's three million snowmobilers ride on marked and groomed trails, of which there are about 230,000 miles.
The U.S. Midwest and East boast many "integrated" or connected trails. A Trans Canada Snowmobile Trail is 80 percent complete, so a snowmobiler can drive from Nova Scotia to Manitoba. In the U.S. West, it's more likely that distinct trails lead to play areas. But elsewhere, it's trail-to-trail-to-trail, across the winter landscape.
North America's snowmobile trail system is actually a network. Within each snow-country state or province, and within regions in each of them, trails are usually conceived, organized, built, maintained and groomed by groups of local volunteers. These local and regional trails are linked to others allowing a snowmobiler to ride infinitely.
Each state or province has its own system and its own way of funding it. But in each, the snowmobiler pays his or her own way down the trail.
Generally, in the United States, a snowmobiler pays for state snowmobile registrations, trail permits and gas taxes. That money is then funneled back to snowmobile clubs, economic development agencies and other trail builders and groomers.
In Canadian provinces, this process has been privatized. Snowmobilers buy permits, but the money is collected by the provincial snowmobile association, then allocated to the local trail groups. As trails are developed and riders sample them, the percentage of snowmobiles sporting permits rises.
In either nation, organized snowmobilers see a need for a trail, plan its creation, and through fees paid by snowmobilers, make it a reality. Soon, one club's trail is connected to others'; before long, they form a web connecting towns and businesses.
Businesses want to be on the snowmobile map, all right. Snowmobiles are more than just fun in snow country, and trails don't just lead through the woods and over the snow. They link businesses, resorts, cities, restaurants and gas stations, parking lots and parks. Indeed, in winter, many gas station and restaurant parking lots contain more snowmobiles than cars. Snowmobile trails are arteries pumping new life into the snow country.
Jennifer Willard of the Iron Range Trail tourism group in northern Minnesota said her region was once kept alive by summer tourists who flocked to area lakes to boat, fish and swim. Last year, she said winter had caught up with, and surpassed summer in tourism activity-and that winter tourism had come riding a snowmobile!
In snowmobile country, trail maps are as easy to find as highway maps. They show not only trails, shelters, rest areas, hospitals, towns and other landmarks, but they also list the groups that created and now maintain the trails. Contacts are listed for more information on the club or the trail.
Many maps also contain safety tips: be especially courteous where the trail crosses private lands, avoid snowmobiling on a lake, stay off ski trails and research local snowmobiling rules. Above all, remember the universal rules for crossing a road: come to a complete stop, make absolutely sure no traffic is approaching from any direction and then cross at a right angle to traffic.
Another advantage of a trail map? You can file a "snow plan," a description of your machine and your planned route to which friends and relatives can refer if you don't return on time. (Let those people know you're back or have arrived at your destination, of course, to avoid needless searches.)
Snowmobilers understand and appreciate the trails they help support. They study groomers with as much enthusiasm as they do the latest sleds.
It wasn't always this way. At the peak of the late 1960s and early 1970s snowmobile boom, the machines went just about everywhere-where they belonged, and where they didn't.
Allen Hetteen, one of three original Polaris founders, was also instrumental in creating the International Snowmobile Industry Association and became its first president. In the 1970s, he urged that the group work toward safe snowmobiling and toward the creation of a North American network of snowmobile trails crossing public and private lands.
Now, trails pay dividends in ways you might not have thought of. Don Lumley, past president of the Canadian Council of Snowmobile Associations, says that where there are no trails, 90 percent of snowmobile riders are male. On groomed trails with improved facilities, women make up a full 40 percent of riders, many of them in family groups.
It's on groomed trails, in fact, that the entire revitalized world of snowmobiling travels.
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