A PRIMER ON THE NORTHERN ESSENTIAL – SNOWMOBILES

In close to 30 years of snowmobiling, I’ve never ridden on a groomed track. Snowmobiles up north are essential to experiencing the land. I’ve ridden at crazy speeds over a frozen James Bay – carefully in narrow paths on the way to a bush camp or to a beaver lodge or out of the village at night to get away from the street lamps – admiring the aurora borealis or just the millions of stars that are only visible away from population centres and their atmospheric and light pollution.

Some of the best times I’ve had involved a bunch of us heading out to a camp on one of the rivers to go

PERSONAL PASSIONS: SNOWMOBILES

A primer on one of Canada’s beloved contributions to winter living

By Alain Lajoie

Alain Lajoie was a teacher in Northern Quebec for 28 years and an owner of five death tobaggans during that time.

ice fishing or going out with our Cree culture teacher to film him emptying a fishing net set under the ice or setting up traps at a beaver lodge.

In the north during spring time, you see trains of snowmobiles and sleds heading out over the ice as the camp’s families get ready for the spring Goose Break. They ride out and fly back by chartered helicopter at the end of the hunt. Once the ice breaks up, they travel by boat to retrieve their snowmobiles.

When I started snowmobiling, it wasn’t rare to finish a weekend ride towing a broken-down snowmobile;

that never happened in my last decade on a snow machine, as reliability improved with technology. On the other side, there wasn’t much that couldn’t be fixed with a rock on earlier snowmobiles, but, like modern cars, modern snowmobile engines require specialized diagnostic tools to repair.

The original snowmobiles were cross-country machines. The trail networks that are found throughout northern North America didn’t exist.

WHERE IT ALL STARTED

Bombardier produced the first modern snowmobile in 1959, the two-passenger Ski-Doo (Ski Dog + printing mistake). The motor was in front of the passengers, who rode on the tunnel that the track occupied – it was steered by skis. This is still the template that modern snowmobiles use.

The original Ski-Doo was widely copied. In the mid-sixties, dozens, if not hundreds, of companies building snowmobiles came and went – of those, five main brands survive today: Bombardier Recreational Products’(BRP) Ski-Doo, Lynx (Finland), Polaris Industries, Yamaha and Arctic Cat. The original snowmobiles were cross-country machines. The trail networks that are found throughout northern North America didn’t exist. The first machines had to be able to break their own trails. Before long, snowmobilers started racing each other from point to point; the manufacturers noticed and started creating models to race.

MORE THAN JUST A SKI-DOO

This led to the cross-country machines of today, light single-rider snowmobiles with high-performance motors, shortish tracks with suspensions built to absorb the biggest jumps in the lightest form possible. They are often ridden standing up and your knees double as additional suspension travel; fun for youth, not so much for older knees.

As snowmobiling boomed in the ‘60s, snowmobiling clubs sprang up. They organized special events, had clubhouses where one could warm up and they started grooming trails, going from one clubhouse to another and opening the access to wooded areas and local sights. With the expansions of the trail networks, it was now possible to travel long distances on comfortable, groomed trails.

TOURING SNOWMOBILES

The twitchiness of cross-country snowmobiles was superseded by the comfort of touring snowmobiles, generally built to take a couple on trails as smoothly as possible. Tracks are longer to accommodate two-up seating, the seats are more richly padded and sometimes heated, the windshield is larger to keep the riders warm, the suspension is more softly sprung, side bags and a trunk are available to pack the needs of a tour.

Touring snowmobiles have also contributed to the (partial) greening of the species. One of the favourite touring areas in the United States is Yellowstone National Park. In 2001, up to 65,000 snowmobilists visited the park, and this led to many complaints about the noise and pollution emitted by all these