Good news, the little storm that we were supposed to get dumped a good 5-6″ of workable snow onto the majority of our system. We were able to get about 80% of the trails leveled out before it hit, and will start packing things in more today. Overall the trails are in really good condition. Don’t fear running anywhere on our system.

Mackinac Island treeline is up and being used. Proceed with CAUTION.

Waterhole on RR Grade up by Trout Lake is FIXED. Signs will remain for now.

Red Creek Road, on teh Cedarvill connector (trail #47) is being totally closed, with no re-route this week from 7am to 11am. It should be open after Friday.

Groomer update: #5 is down with engine problems. Lowboy is picking up tomorrow, and will will in all likelihood loose it for 2 weeks for repair, assuming parts are available. They don’t know for sure what happened, but the cylinders are at 75% compression, and one is down to 15%, and we are loosing oil. The groomer drivers are doing a very good job at handling our system with only one machine, however there will be times when outer trails like the Cedarville and Rexton connectors will have to go ungroomed for 3-4 days. Please be understanding and thumbs up a groomer when you see them – as it probably has been running for 18+ hours!

Forecast for the coming days hints at some more snow, between 2-4′, and a really nice weekend for a ride. We are heading into the heart of the season, time to lay down some miles!!

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Good and Bad. Trails held up OK though the weekend. Rain on Friday didn’t really hurt things much, softened the top 4′ of so, and then is freezing back down. Trails did get away from us just a little over the weekend with a scheduling conflict, and now the bad news: Looks like we may have lost a motor in #5 Brevort groomer. Only 3500 hours, and regular maintenance, there is no reason that I can think of for this to happen, but we have oil where it isn’t supposed to be. We have a mechanic coming to Monday morning for diagnosis. Depending on the results, we will either have it back up and running on Thursday, or if not, it will be later next week. This means the groomer drivers are going to have to work really hard at coordinating and double-shifting the tractor to get things covered. We are going to cover the entire 101 miles of trail with just 1 machine, so at time the outer trails will have to be neglected, but we will concentrate on getting the core of the system done as much as possible. We will certainly have the whole system fixed back up for next weekend, during which it will be required to miss some runs. To do our system with 1 tractor it has to run almost 20 hours straight, so coordinating more then one day like that it tough.
I will post up the good/bad news as soon as I head more.

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