Father & Son Day
I didn’t make it to Salisbury last week. But this time I would make it and took Darrin Jr with me.
We dropped off in Speculator this morning and picked up a rental to go along for the ride. I’m always curious about different sleds, so I chose this Yamaha missile from Village Motorsports and had some fun:
Then off we went! Business Access Trail was freshly groomed and mint. Lake Pleasant and Sacandaga Lake were great crossing. LP1/Page Street trail was choppy and snirty through the woods. Fish Mountain/Oxbow trail was also choppy and snirty in the woods past the cemetery, but totally passable.
Oxbow Lake was smooth as silk. C8/Spy Lake Trail was freshly groomed and mind blowing terrific! I’ve never had a better ride on that trail.
C8A/Powley Road was freshly groomed powder heaven, an awesome ride from top to bottom:
Past Powley Road, C8A was lumpy, but the new snow softened the blows a bit down into Stratford. C4A down to Dugway Road was recently groomed and a nice ride into Herkimer County
C4A/Salisbury was a freshly groomed and nice ride down to the Clubhouse. The roadside banks were plentiful and groomed well.
We stopped for lunch at the Salisbury Clubhouse. I did pretty well with ordering the NY Strip Steak. 🙂
After lunch, we continued C4A to loop over to Barto Hill and then connected with C8A and headed over to Dolgeville. Most of that was excellent as the trails were freshly groomed though the open fields. Nothing wrong with this:
Snow cover got thinner as we got further south of Salisbury but still very passable. For kicks I pressed on C8A to see how far south of Dolgeville we could get before running out of snow. Turns out I got about a mile or two down before the trail became more pebbles than snow. So, we turned back C8A and hit S45B thence C8C back to Salisbury Clubhouse with the snow getting deeper and deeper again.
After refueling at the Salisbury Clubhouse, we headed back up to Speculator via Powley Road. More or less, the conditions were similar but with some additional traffic wear from the day.
We got back to Sacandaga Lake just after 4PM and decided run Fawn Lake/Big Brook trails to hit Perkins Clearing. That was an excellent decision as Fawn Lake and Big Brook were in reasonably good shape. Carpenter Hill Road and LP9/Nichol Vly trail were simply mind blowing! I was astonished that only 2 or 3 other sleds had made tracks on that all day. We were pushing though 8-10 inches of powder most of the way through there…and it was starting to snow hard late in the day.
Then we spun down Perkins Clearing Road to the south end, then hit C4/Melody Lodge (freshly groomed today) and LP3/Oak Mountain back down Speculator Village to wrap up the ride and return the rental.
What an incredible time! Ultra-quality time with my son, perfect weather and 138 miles in low mid-week traffic. Days like this remind me of how much I truly have to be grateful for. I just spent one of the best days of my life with this awesome kid!
Bottom line
I’ve ridden more miles in the past 3 days than I did the entire last winter. I gotta let that sink in a bit.
You might have Friday to hit the trails before the zoo comes into town for New York State Free Snowmobiling Weekend.
I’ll fade into the woodwork for the weekend…and maybe sit on the couch. 😉
For the ilsnow nation,
Darrin
This report is brought to you by Adirondacks Speculator Region Chamber of Commerce. Speculator has long been one of my favorite places to ride! There are lots of options, whether you want to ride around Speculator for the day, or launch a 250 mile mega-miler. Speculator is loaded with businesses eager to cater to snowmobilers. Look them up at the Speculator Chamber and grab a copy of their snowmobile trail map. Be sure to tell them that Darrin @ ilsnow.com sent you.
