West Yellowstone success

West Yellowstone went great for my wife and I. She got her first experience on a snowmobile and a positive one at that. Well for the most part anyway. We did about 25 miles before her rental "gave" out on her. A bolt came out of the lower right side a-arm and caused some trouble steering.

But before that we did some trails, bumps, and played in some small patches of fresh snow, which she enjoyed the most. So that's a positive. Next time we'll get her out in some deeper stuff and see how she enjoys carving and climbing some hills with deep snow on them. So far I'm very impressed and excited about her future riding with me and our other riders.

Here's a quick picture she got of me playing around. She's pretty handy with a camera.

Snowmobile Game

So you may or may not know, but I'm a software engineer in my day job. I can make computer software, web sites, and web applications with the best of them. However, this wasn't my dream. My dream was the create video games. I went directly to school for this. I have a best friend who works for a AAA video game company. Yet here I am, in Billings, Montana not doing what I love.

So I've decided I'm going to attempt to prototype a snowmobiling game. There have been a few games out there, I mostly have them all. Sled Storm, Ski-Doo Racing, a few titles I own on PC that are forgetable. They were fun and decent, but really didn't define snowmobiling at all. You could pull out the sleds and put in ATVs or Motorcycles and the game wouldn't change at all.

I am going to try to change that. I plan on paying for some freelance art to get started. (Get me a good looking snowmobile to use) I want to get all aspects of sledding. The mountain riding, so that include weight transfer, carving, jumping, climbing, not getting stuck, etc..

Its quite the chore but I wanna do what I can to make a fun game out of this.

I'll keep the updates going on this blog for now. We'll see where it goes in the future.

Future Ride Report

Well my wife and I are all set on a trip the West Yellowstone on Feb. 22-23. This will be my first attempt at bringing her into the darkside. I'll be bringing down my Nytro of course, and we've arranged to rent her a FX Phazer MTX, which I've ridden breifly during the Yamaha Demos last year.

It should be a great time and hopefully my wife will see what the fuss has been about! I haven't ridden in West Yellowstone in probably 2-3 years, what a shame. I hear they've been having awesome snow there this year. So I'm excited and we'll take lots of pictures because I need to capture this moment with my wife.

Previous Trip Report

Ok, so I've been on 5 trips sledding this year, halfway to my goal of double digits! Me and the gang headed out to our "secret" southern Big Timber location again this past weekend. Its not really secret, but the snow can be quite good and its not large enough to have a lot of people sledding in.

Few observations this trip. The Maverick track keeps showing its suckiness more and more. I had a hard time climbing some crusty layered, though deep poweder underneath snow that normally I should be able to. Even the Rev 600 in the group didn't have this problem. I was able to finally get the climb in, but I had to take a slight run at it, a few more sled lengths than the other guys. I probably could make it stock, once the clutching is dialed in, but the track is really the biggest issue. Challenger will be going in this summer.

I made a few suspension adjustments before this trip and failed to see any improvements. First I sucked the limitor strap top its 3 holes tigher than I recieved the sled, which was in the first loosest hole. This seemed to have no baring on climbing, but may once I get a different track.

I also tighted up the front spring pre-load on the shocks a bit, probably 75% tight that the stock shocks let me adust. Still again, didn't really notice much. Sled might have been a little worse on trails with this, not sure if it was the adjustments or the trails themselves.

BTW Stay tuned as I'm writing 3 posts today!

Disappointment

Well this is going to be just a short update. Saturday was to be a great day. Fun snowmobiling, great weather, cameras ready for both video and stills.

I should have known better.

Bret and I ventured out way to Red Lodge, MT with the intention of going up Beartooth pass like I've done twice this year already. Well we didn't make it to the top, close, but not close enough.

Snow drifts covered many sections of the road and we crossed many of them, some dangerous, but not enough to stop us, until we got to the big one. It was huge, probably 15 feet tall and covered the entire road, from rock face to guardrail, not that you could see that guardrail.

It was either roll off the the right into the rocks and hurt yourself and your machine, or roll off to left and over the guardrail and down to your death off a huge cliff.

Needless to say, we turned around. So much disappointment. We will never come here again unless Red Lodge or Carbon county decide to maintain the pass at least to the rest area that almost reaches the top. It hurt to waste such a beautiful day...