SUNDAY 1/17 Update: Another 3 inches last night pushes the storm total to 10 inches at the ilsnow storm center. We “lost” a few inches of accumulation due to melting/compaction Saturday afternoon – but otherwise, this storm did everything we hoped it would do. Finally, some REAL mid-week riding will be had for me. 
January 15th Report:
Obviously, the complexion of the upcoming weekend will depend highly on whether we get the goods on Saturday’s snow event.
But I’ll give you the baseline on conditions we have at the moment, Friday afternoon.
We’ve been looking at the same six-inch snow cover, give-or-take, for the past couple of weeks – so trail conditions haven’t changed much as we have nearly the bare minimum for any snowmobile riding around here. The best places to ride, given the marginal riding conditions have been Moose River Plains and Perkins Clearing. Town trails and other narrow woods trails are very rough with the lack of snow to sufficiently bury the rocks.
We’ve recently scored a few seasonably cold nights with temperatures near zero degrees to add ice on the lakes. Indeed, people have started to ride most of the lakes around here.
I can’t tell you whether that ice is “safe” but I can certainly tell you the ice is nowhere as thick as it should be in mid-January.
Riding on frozen lakes is ALWAYS at your own risk – even more so this winter.
Bottom line
If you’re into riding ANYTHING at all, the easy call is to come up and ride whatever we have this weekend. If you’re waiting for perfect or even “decent” the call is probably to get up here because one-third of the snowmobiling season has already passed without much to show for it. And I’m nearly 100% sure this weekend will have the best snow conditions that we’ve seen so far this snowmobiling season.
Whether groomers come out to work their magic over the weekend will depend on the amount of snow we do get and the decision of each club and municipality. Keep in mind that a significant amount of new snow would get churned into bumps very quickly with holiday weekend traffic. But, we could be setting up for acceptable mid-week riding conditions once the groomers stamp out the weekend carnage and assimilate the fresh snow into the trail base.
I wish we could have gotten the snow dump this week so we’d know what we’ve got. But we don’t get to chose the weather – otherwise, there’s no way we’d wait this long for a decent snow. 😉
I’ll be sure to update on Saturday with a snowfall report – hopefully GOOD!
One more thing…
I have brought the ilsnow bulletin board back to life. The old version is dead for good, so you’ll need to sign up for a new account if you want to post. Here it is: https://www.ilsnow.com/forums/
For the ilsnow nation,
Darrin
This report is brought to you by Progressive Motorsports, celebrating their 28th year. They live, eat and breathe snowmobiling. Stop in today and see for yourself! Be sure to tell Karen that Darrin @ ilsnow.com sent ya.
