R.I.P. DVD

The last time Mountain Sledder published a snowmobile film review was in Issue 13, Winter 2018. There’s been a small handful of sled films issued on DVD since, but the vast majority of productions have either moved to streaming services or simply disappeared altogether.

The largest online catalog of sledding carnage undoubtedly belongs to Thunderstruck, which has published its own subscription service called Thunderstruck TV.

Other prominent sled series, like Boondockers, are now primarily available on either Amazon Prime Video or iTunes.

509 Films has gone a different direction—rather than producing a feature length film each winter, they regularly release episodic content for free on YouTube throughout the season.

Other production series such as Slednecks, 2 Stroke Cold Smoke and Braaap have apparently stopped making content altogether. It’s a tough go these days.

Though not totally related to the shift in the way that sled films are delivered, we did also cover 2014’s Winter Project by Hybrid Color Films, which was the first (and only that we’re aware of) snowmobile film to be fully crowdfunded.

We were never remotely qualified to critique sled films anyway, but it was a fun way to kick back towards the end of summer and enjoy some great sledding footage from the season past.

Alpha One And Other New Technology

One could argue that more impactful technological developments have occurred in the last ten years, but Arctic Cat’s singlebeam rear suspension ALPHA ONE stands out for ostensibly altering the definition of a snowmobile in a way that we haven’t seen since the departure of the trailing arm in the early 2000s.

Other noteworthy advancements on mountain sleds in the last ten years include:

• Ski-Doo SHOT Starter

• Polaris 7S Display vehicle-to-vehicle rider tracking

• Arctic Cat ATAC on-the-fly suspension adjustment

Everyone Flips

In the footsteps of Jim Rippey pioneering backcountry backflips and Daniel Bodin landing a double, it seems that many riders in the past couple of years (including regular guys you’ve never even heard of) have landed a backcountry flip of some sort.

What was once a rare, deliberately calculated attempt that was professionally documented for posterity, has evolved into simply a benchmark of courage and ability that unfortunately might barely slow the scroll of an overstimulated social media user.

So, while flips remain just as difficult and committing as ever, they are no longer solely the pantheon of our snowmobiling heroes. There exists now a small army of riders who have successfully attempted their first backcountry flip—a disproportionate number who have found the courage to do so in the presence of two riders: Andreas Bergmark and Brett Turcotte. It’s no coincidence that both of these progressive and influential riders are featured in this very issue, passing their knowledge on to others.

10 Years

A lot has changed in the ten years Mountain Sledder has been in publication. Yet we’re still pretty much doing the same old thing—heading into the mountains in search of a good times adventure.

The what we do hasn’t changed so much as the how we do it.

We’re safer now than we were a decade ago. We’re comfortably going farther than ever before. And our understanding of what snowmobiling can be is evolving, even as we continue to affirm the basic, fundamental truth that Snowmobiling Is Fun.