What a wacky winter—at least as far as the snowfall goes. The snow started early, almost completely turned off in January and then the skies opened in February and we had some awesome rides in February and March.
One of those awesome rides came in mid-February in the Salt River Range south and east of Afton, WY. Our friends, Lonnie and Mickey Sutton, had been after us to go riding with them for a couple of years now and it finally happened. It didn’t take long into the ride for us to ask, “Why did it take us so long to do this?” It was a great ride. With this entry is a short video showing some of the terrain and the conditions that day.
The snow was deep and in great shape. The terrain was challenging and the drainages were, well, draining. We played in a lot of them and spent our energy and our fuel. We really hated to see that day of riding end but the E on our gas tank loomed larger and larger as the day wore on.
Then, last week, we caught up with another friend, Brett Jensen, who showed us around his backyard near Preston in a great spring ride. Andy Checketts, who was also along on the ride, let us ride his 800 RMK with Northstar’s Ultimate Outdoors (www.northstarsuo.com) performance mod that adds a very nice bump in horsepower on the Polaris. We were wishing for some deep powder to really see how the mod worked but had to settle for the spring conditions. Checketts owns Northstar’s.
We went through Copenhagen Basin, up to the top of Midnight Mountain, off the backside and found some soft powder in the trees of a north facing slope near the warming hut. The sun was out and there was a few inches of new snow, making for a great spring ride.
We’re not done riding yet. A quick check of the snotel sites in our area show plenty of snow on the ground with more coming later this week.