Our journey to Halfway started with a rather innocuous e-mail. We often get letters and e-mails about riding in various places around the West, but this e-mail wasn't anything like that.
Panhandle Snowmobile Club president Whitey Bloom sent us an e-mail telling us about how his snowmobile club redid its trail map. The redo was because SnoWest Magazine readers were somewhat less than complimentary about the local snowmobile trail map in our annual Top 15 Trails in the West survey and the Panhandle Snowmobile Club wanted to change that. So the club redesigned its trail map.
That piqued our interest. Halfway, tucked away in the northeast corner of Oregon, has always kind of been on our radar as one place we'd like to snowmobile but we just never made it happen.
Boy were we missing out. A bit off the beaten path-definitely a bonus-Halfway is a great place to snowmobile.
Our first day of riding the Halfway area, named the Pine District (after the Pine Ranger District of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest) on the trail map-was a mix of groomed and ungroomed trails, wide open meadows and hillsides, some hillclimbing, tree riding and ridge running.