A Big Conundrum

Wow, I thought as I puttered along on my 1980’s model snowmachine. How does anyone like this? 

Snowmobiling is really loud, cold, and hurts my back. Thank god I’m not a snowmobiler. Yes, I was thinking this while sitting on a snowmobile. I was accessing backcountry skiing, and I was on a snowmobile that was worth less than my left ski boot, but I was snowmobiling nonetheless.

We were exploring the Routt National Forest from Clark Colorado,  trying to find the best skinning to vertical ratio for a snowmobile shuttle. We snowmobiled here and there, skinned to ridges, scoped out the terrain and skied untracked run after run, but it wasn’t ‘it’. At the end of the day, we saw it, a beautiful tree run that looked like it went for miles. We scoped it out for later, noted where it was on the topo map and returned to the cabin to shoot some skeet as the sun went down.

Skiing, route finding and skeet shooting in the same day? I guess I can be a contentious sledneck in order to do all that.