AmSnow.com is now SnoWest.com
It’s Labor Day and I’m under a bank drive-up awning in Crookston, Minn. struggling into a rain suit. All I wanted to do was finish watching the baseball game and ride the 55 miles home from my lake place. When the game started, it was partly cloudy and pleasant. When the closer blew the last fastball by the final batter it was starting to get a little gray. Everything would have been fine. I suited up, took off and was making decent time when all of a sudden I passed a Dairy Queen and felt a strange magnetic pull on my motorcycle. Something science has yet to explain. And once I was forced by the alien powers to finish my Brownie Batter Blizzard it was threatening rain.
Anyone who has read my columns probably knows that I love snowmobiles and motorcycles and I do a lot of comparisons between my different riding experiences. Obviously, both have benefits and non-benefits over the other, but if there is one instance where the motorcycle suddenly pales to the snowmobile it’s when the topic of rain comes up.
This spring I bought my dream bike, a barely used BMW R1200RT sport tourer from a dealer down in Nashville. I had been looking around for one for awhile and had no luck finding exactly what I was searching for close by. An airline was running a $149 one-way ticket special, so I pulled the trigger and decided to make a 1200 mile trip out of it down to the Music City. I figured I’d ride along the Mississippi home through great towns like St. Louis. Instead, I waded through three days of non-stop, religious rainfall, the beginnings of all the terrible flooding down south.
It occurred to me then, as it did while, taking shelter at that closed bank trying to wrestle a pair of sticky rain pants over my size 14 boots, that other than bitter cold and the occasional blizzard, planning what to wear on a snowmobile is a whole lot easier than a motorcycle. The other thing that occured to me is that some manager is going to bust a gut watching me get into a rain suit on the bank surveillance tape in the morning.
See, rain is something you have to go out of your way to plan for. Most modern snowmobile gear is so good you don’t need to plan for anything other than being really comfortable. They make (somewhat) rainproof riding suits for motorcyclists but they cost about $600 and make you look like a member of a hazmat removal crew. The alternatives come down to a cheap plastic rain suit or spending a hundred bucks on a real “motorcycle” rain suit that pulls over your riding gear. Either way, you’re going to look stupid, be all sweaty, and probably throw your back out trying to get the damn thing on.
Then, you have to ride in it. Depending on how hard it’s raining you can’t really look around much. This is not only due to the concentration required, but also because every time you turn your head, the rain runs off the helmet, down your collar, and right down your spinal cord. And if your rain suit leaks a little, as 94.8% of them do, the rain that does get through invariably ends up somewhere down around your crotch, so that when the sun comes out and you peel your rain suit off, it looks like you peed your pants.
Snowmobilers should rejoice! Snow is relatively dry, at least outdoors at freezing or below. It doesn’t cut like little daggers through all types of space-age fabrics. Snowmobilers can layer themselves and perform a sort of twisted burlesque show on the side of the trail when it all becomes too much, as opposed to a contorted battle between wet and rubberized fabrics that have no business being next to each other. Believe me; it’s easier to lose clothes than it is to add them, at least in the case of a rain-drenched motorcyclist. The other great thing about snowmobile clothing is that the most functional stuff is also the best looking, which is less than I can say for some of the top-notch motorcycle gear out there.
I guess the difference just comes down to the fact that by the time the snowmobiler in me comes out, the crap that I curse on the back of a motorcycle is now frozen and white and looks really good with snowmobile tracks over it. Besides, in the winter all the Dairy Queens that make me late are closed and there aren’t many bank drive-ups along the trail!