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The tough get goin’
It started on the local drag racetrack, where Dad packed me around in his arms, a 4-year-old sporting bright yellow ear plugs. By the time I was 6, I was sitting behind Dad on long weeknight trail rides to dinner at an isolated mountain restaurant 26 miles northwest of town.
The memories of those early years are soft and fluffy: dunking under the bath-hot water of Granite Hot Springs every time my hair froze in the winter cold, sitting on a snow bank in a fat snowsuit roasting a marshmallow over a campfire, sledding down a slope on a space blanket Dad dug out of a first-aid kit. Rarely was there a difficult moment for me; somehow, Mom and Dad were always there to cushion me against any risk the mountains posed.
But I got restless as I grew older. In the safety of Dad’s shadow on rides into the Wyoming Range I watched burly guys swing sleds in easy ribbons, high-marking peaks and pulling their sleds through the powder like sharks through glassy water. These guys earned their names on landmarks: Lankford’s Hill after Dad’s best friend, who rolled his 1986 Trail Indy, snapping a good-sized Quaker tree and ripping off a ski, shock and trailing arm; and Tony’s Cornice after a local highway patrolman who flipped a handstand over his 800 Storm after jumping off a cornice.
I wanted a landmark, too.
But I was intimidated by the mountain slopes and often physically too small to handle the machine I was on, whether it be a 488, a 500 or a 600. Once, I had teetered on the lip of a steep slope called the Powder Bowl, too afraid to nudge my machine forward. Dad sat behind me and coached me to the bottom.
The man behind the RMK
To me, Dad was an expert. But to Dad, snowmobiling was just part of the raw hands-on lifestyle in which he was raised. He grew up in Pinedale trapping and hunting on snowmobiles.
He responded to Search and Rescue calls, assembling teams of skilled riders to cut through the foreboding mountains in pitch-black night to find riders who had gone missing. Always, save for once when a teammate fell into a creek, his team returned home with the lost party.
Dad had fallen into the snowmobile business naturally, buying Bucky’s from his parents, Bucky and Lucy Neely, in the early 1980s. They had opened Bucky’s in 1961 as a small engine repair shop, selling hides and furs on the side. They launched Polaris and Ski-Doo dealerships in 1975.
When Dad bought the business from them, he focused on building a brand as a mountain snowmobile dealer. Bucky’s will celebrate 50 years in business this year.
With a near-lifelong knowledge of engines and experience in the mountains, Dad understood the power that mountain riding demanded. The bias in me says he understood it better than anyone else, but his invention of a custom-built chassis for mountain sleds speaks for itself. It was with that chassis that Polaris’ Rocky Mountain King was born in 1996.
The chassis rested on four components: moving the cooling system higher, out from under the running board, to create less drag; replacing the stock track with a longer one; moving the drive shaft back and down to alter the track’s shape, helping the machine plane out easier; and installing big plastic paddles on the track to allow for better acceleration.
The RMK was the top mountain sled in 1997, and the Rocky Mountains, which had accounted for just 2% of the national sled market, suddenly grew to about 25%.
Dad’s role in the RMK development, along with his longevity in the business and contributions he has made to the Polaris Dealer Council and snowmobile testing, earned him the fourth slot in the Polaris Hall of Fame in 2006. He accepted the award in Orlando, Fla., days after my wedding, which, of course, took place in Wyoming’s mountains.
The tough get tougher
But let’s back up. Even as Dad pecked away at that mountain chassis late into the Wyoming nights, his desire to see his only daughter succeed on a sled never left.
My trip down the Powder Bowl had sparked a renewed courage in me, which Dad saw as an opportunity to test my riding skills further.
“It wasn’t to make you a great rider,” he told me recently. “It was to develop your skills so you could go deeper with me into the mountains.
“There were so many places I wanted to show you,” he said, “but the further back into the mountains you get, the more skill you have to have.”
The winter after my scare on the Powder Bowl, I flipped a 488 Trail Snow King Special as we descended into the head of a creek drainage, far back in the Wyoming Range. Dad remembers I emerged laughing. I remember I emerged crying. Whichever, I had earned my name on a landmark. We called it Kate’s Knob.
Race fan The climax of my “tough girl” experience saw me back where my days around sleds had started: the racetrack. But instead of hanging out in Dad’s arms, I sat behind the handlebars of a well tuned 600 RMK, revving the rpm, waiting in fierce anticipation of the light turning green.
It was a leap of courage for me; I only did it to satisfy Dad. The thought of screaming down a groomed track neck-and-neck with another hot sled awakened nausea in me powerful enough to weaken my knees.
“Try it just once,” Dad begged me. I was a high school freshman. “If you don’t like it, you never have to do it again.”
I did it once, for him. When I felt the power – on the snow, on the grass, on the ice – I was hooked.
Seems I have a sense of adventure after all. Have I completely overcome my fear of mountain steeps? No. But, Dad says, “You never do entirely. Not even the pros do.”
Did I win every race? No. In fact, I recall one race in which my holeshot was so fierce it bucked me off the machine. There I lay in the middle of the track, in front of a crowd of people, unscathed, but too mortified to get up. Only when Dad showed up was I able to move, safe under his wings.
The softer memories are still there. But so, too, is a bigger belief in myself as a tough girl, a mountain girl who is no longer afraid to get out and ride.