Trail conditions for Thursday, March 11, 2010

The warm weather has finally done us in. Trails are officially closed for this season. I can't blame them - most trails are more bare ground than ice or snow. Plowed roads are almost completely bare. The forecast is calling for temps in the 40's and 50's for the next week. It is done:  A sad day for us snowmobilers.

We hope you enjoyed reading our reports this past season and found them to be helpful & accurate. We put on about 5,400 combined miles with majority of them ridden on local trails. The winter started out with some decent snowfalls in December. Unfortunately, it was mostly dry, fluffy snow so we didn't have a good base. We didn't get much snow in January, February or the beginning of March. There was a minor thaw the last weekend in January but we had some rain and a little heavy wet snow which ended up giving us a decent ice base that held up the rest of the season.

We would like to thank all the groomer drivers for their efforts this past season. They are the ones to thank for the smooth trails you find.

This was an interesting winter for trail conditions. We had a wide variety of conditions (from good to fair) most of the season. It never seemed like we got all the trails into the good category but could always find good ones. A better base early on and more maintenance snow would've really helped. Hopefully next season we'll get the big snows instead of southern parts of the country that don't want any.

We like to comment on how we felt the different clubs did this past season with their trails. Some might not like what we have to say but riding almost everyday gives one a good impression of how things were. Also factoring in are reports we received from our guests on what they rode on. We both feel that there wasn't one club that stood out above the rest but will say that the top ones we found were Sayner, Eagle River, and Sugar Camp. Arbor Vitae/Woodruff were also up there but we didn't ride theirs as much as these other 3 clubs so aren't as sure of their consistency. We both felt that St. Germain was good but didn't do as good of job as the ones listed before. Their trails tended to have more bumps and also seemed to have more snirt than others clubs. Next we'd say Conover - sometimes they were great but other times they were getting rough. Finally there was Boulder Junction and Lake Tomahawk. Neither one seemed to be consistent with their grooming and we couldn't rely on their trails being smooth. While we did hit some other clubs it was only a time or two and don't feel like that is enough to comment on.

Hopefully next season will bring us plenty of snow and great riding all season long.

Till the snow starts falling...

Tom & Sally