What are your views on snowmobiles?

Question

Please say if you have ever been on one and what part of the country you live in (not the state). Why or why not you like them. I live in the way north, 35 (not a kid) and work in the snowmobile industry. Please be truthful.

Answer 1

We live in the high mountain desert are of Idaho, right in the heartland of potato country (and about 75 miles from Yellowstone National Park).

I'm a stay home farmwife, who raises meat goats.

My husband works on the commercial wind turbines.

We own two snowmobiles.   Snomobiles are a fact of life in this area.  Winters here can be so very brutal, snomobiles can be the ONLY way (besides snowcats) to trasport yourself.

When it snows here, they very often (on the road in front of our farm) have to use the largest of bulldozers, and road graders to move the snow.  Even the giant snowplows will not budge the snow.  Even with the giant and extremely powerful machines, they sometimes get them stuck, and are unable to move them.  

So anyone that lives out this far MUST be self sufficient.  You must have food storage, water, a way to heat, and a way to shovel snow off your roof, so your house doesn't collapse.  You also (if you are wise) need a snowmobile, or a snowcat.  If there is a medical emergency, it might be the only way to trasport someone to where an ambulance can meet them.

After we get big blizzards up here, people will be out on the snowmobiles, checking on each and every neighbor.  Then a line of snowmobiles (for saftey) will buzz into town.  They will come back with medicine, milk, diapers, pet food, or whatever a neighbor was caught short on.

We live at 4700+ feet elivation.  My husband works at a much higher elivation.  The wind turbines are all along mountain ridges.  The base of the highest wind turbine is at over 7000 feet elivation.  The ONLY way my husband and the other empoyees are able to work on the wind turbines during the winter is with the snow cat, and the snowmobile.  For about 9 months of the year, it is the ONLY way to reach the wind turbines.

When you drive the paved road up to the building at my husbands work site, it is like driving through a tunnel.  The snowplows have had to blow so high, it's over 25 feet high in spots.  The road ends up being bairly one lane wide.

It's so dangerous to go up there, the men meet up at lower elivation, and drive in, and leave work in a convoy, in case someone gets stuck.

I've been here (on the lower elivation farm) when the wind chill has gone down to negative 68 degrees (F)!  

Snowmobiles and snow cats save peoples lives.

Idiots who go out and chase elk, moose, deer, or any other wildlife on snowmobiles should be shot on site.  People should be required to be responsible owners and operators of snowmobiles, just as they are of cars.

~Garnet

Permaculture homesteading/farming over 20 years

Answer 2

Oh! Snowmobiles are horrible!!

They redistribute the innocent snow!

And they make noise!

Have you no heart??

Actually, I live in East Tennessee and we've outlawed snow here, so we have no need for such vehicles. I've never actually seen one in person but they look like they'd be really fun to drive!

Answer 3

Great times had on those things.  I've gone up to my friend's cabin in the upper midwest for a few years.  Gets the heart racing when you're flying at 60mph down a wooded trail.