A couple years ago my good friend Tony bought a couple sleds as he thought this seemed to be a lot of fun for him and his family. Now he had never been snowmobiling but he purchased two big machines right off the git go. On our first outing I told him to stay on the packed trail and don’t get off in the timber where the powder snow was about five feet deep. I was in the lead and things were going fine until he figured he would test the water sort of speak cuz the dealer told him this big sled would go anywhere. He decided to ease off the trail into the deep powder to try it. First thing when you go into deep powder you have to pour the coals to it just to stay afloat. Well he eased into it and immediately got stuck. It wouldn’t have been too bad if he had not then decided to put the gas to it to get out and all he did was dig the track all the way down to the dirt. So there was this fancy six hundred pound new yellow sled with it’s back end dug to the dirt and it’s skiis pointing toward the heavens. When you bury a big snowmobile in five feet of powder snow I guarantee it’s not fun anymore. It took some time packing the snow down in front of the sled and tugging and pulling until we finally got it out.
After that we were having a good time riding the wind swept packed snow in this high meadow. I stopped to look back to see if Tony and his friend were still behind me and there was his friend but no Tony. This is big country where we were and the drifting snow would cover tracks in no time. We circled back trying to find his track to no avail. After searching for some time we thought maybe he decided to head back down the trail and we went down. When we got to the bottom there was no Tony, so I headed back up to look for him. About half way up I met him screaming down the trail and his first comment was “why did you guys leave me”. He figured he would take the defensive so I wouldn’t beat him severely with a pine branch. What he did was vere off the trail again to take this little detour to an area that looked good to him. He was doing ok until he fell into what we call a tree well. He managed to work himself out of it but as he admittted later, it scared the hell out of him. There he was all alone with the sled tipped on it’s side on top of him and down in this hole with little idea of where he was at.
To this day whenever he tells the story to anybody else he tries to bs and say those guys left me. Tony reads this blog religiously and so now my good friend the whole world knows the truth.