Saturday, April 19 was the club’s first run for 2008. This is my third year with the club but the first time I’ve ever been on the very first ride of the year. It’s been one thing or another but for the most part I’m not a mud-seeker, and consequently I haven’t been that keen on going out for the year’s early spring run.
Anyway, this time it was going to be down the railway trail, so I thought I should be able to do that without getting knee deep in mind. So on Friday I got my brand-new Can-Am 650 prepared, my trailer lights checked, draw bar adjusted to the right height of the Jeep, and tried to get a good night’s sleep knowing the next day would be, for a (slightly) older guy like me at least, probably very full.
And indeed it was. We started off at our predetermined time of 10 a.m. from the Glenn Tay weigh station parking lot. Well we had gone hardly 5 km on a relatively dry trail when all of a sudden a hundred meters of packed snow – packed from snowmobiles running all winter of course. Well as I said I am fairly new to ATVing and I’ve never done snow, so this was great. I love to drive cars in ice and snow especially the rear-wheel-drive ones. I love to do endless slide-outs and reverse steering corrections…..so that’s what I really wanted to do, but never having done such things on an ATV before, I decided to wait and try it on the way home after a little more experience. Darn!
Needless to say my patience was tried more than once as about 20% of the trail was snowpacked, so my anticipation grew all day.
Speaking of the day it was absolutely gorgeous. The morning warmed up and the guys kept taking more clothes off, and there was even a suggestion that the ladies not stop at all when they got started. That was ignored. Darn!
Speaking of ladies, we had the pleasure of two of them, which for a starting group of 11 ATV’s wasn’t too bad.
We all enjoyed every meter of the ride, and
took the opportunity to socialize at every rest. The ride was led by Terry, and he called
short munch-and-rests just about on the hour every hour. This was appreciated by all. The nicest stop was probably at
Onwards after Sharbot to
Kaladar, where the fuelling stop was executed and some of us replenished (and
unloaded) other fluids as well. Because of the slowness of the trail, and the
congenial socializing at every stop, it had been decided not to push on to the
original destination of
I would like to say that the ride back was also extremely pleasurable and without incident. However, only the first part of that sentence is entirely true. You see I had promised to experiment a little more aggressively in the snow on the way back, and of course I keep my promises. This slip-sliding around resulted in my falling off the hardpack at one point, and ending up hung up in the deeper soft stuff. Four-wheel-drive or no, I was stuck. So a few brave men and a woman dismounted in order to give me a hand. Unfortunately, while John and company were coming to help get me unstuck, Lorie, gave me a miss-hand: she took my picture - stuck as I was in the deeper snow! So you see I had to tell the truth. Darn!
Well at least the rest of the ride was without incident, and we arrived back at the parking lot at about quarter to six, right on time, 170 wonderful kilometres later.
Amid the handshakes and adieus, we all agreed to try to meet again for the next absolutely awesome ATVing day.
Bike types by my
recollection were as follows:
Can
Am: 2
Arctic
Cat: 2
Yamaha:
2
Polaris:
3
Anthony Tsoukanas