Despite over a foot of fresh I couldn't ride today because my wife is working all day. I tried to get any one of my buddies to come with me and ride the Vmax (and I would pay everything but their sled fuel) but apparently my crew is a bunch of deadbeat loser flunkies who can't even afford 8 gallons of premium. Oh yeah and they have families and it's Christmas. Whatever. So I've been sitting around all day getting more and more depressed about not riding. Yeah I could have gone myself...pretty unsafe riding for my taste, those mountains are no joke, but I'm thinking that was a bad decision now. Supposedly more snow later this week...that's not much comfort right now, it might as well be never. I've been thinking up crazy ideas like how could I mount a sled on top of my Civic...that's how sick I am here.

So, here are some of last week's pics and stills from video. I quit doing youtube because the picture quality is just horrible. If I wanted my videos to look like that I would just throw up on the lens before shooting. But the stills from video at least give you some action and you can actually, you know, see something.

[attachment=41373:2007_12_...001_copy.jpg][attachment=41374:2007_12_...001_copy.jpg][attachment=41375:2007_12_...001_copy.jpg][attachment=41377:2007_12_...001_copy.jpg][attachment=41378:2007_12_...001_copy.jpg]

Those were the action shots, here are the stills

Not many pics, it was so cold the batteries were not holding up.

great pictures , its depressing here in norway. 2nd day of christmas,3plus and rain !!! all our snow is gone. :bash:

great pictures , its depressing here in norway. 2nd day of christmas,3plus and rain !!! all our snow is gone. :bash:[/b]

Ouch. We have had two big rainstorms but we had so much snow too that it only hurt but didn't kill our mountain snow base. It's cold and snowing now so hopefully that keeps up.

Awesome pics man... you live in the right area! As for me :bash:
Peace Dave

Nice pics Beaxch.

Thanks for sharing.
Too bad about the lack of riding partners at the moment but you did the right thing about waiting to ride. Gotta respect Mother Nature and her mountains. That way you'll have many more days to ride. And that's what it's really about, right?

Jeff

You are so right. It was not even two years ago that I rolled off the side of Last Chance Mountain Road and had the Vmax parked on my chest with an avalanche on top of me, and if I was riding alone I would be dead right now. So yeah, I pretty much don't do it. There are just so many things that can go wrong, even going out with only two people is a little sketchy if you think about it. My wife could not drag me out if I were hurt bad. And we are riding in cougar territory. I was nose to nose with a cougar summer before last, I was in my car thankfully, on one of the very same roads that we snowmobile on. He was just sitting in the road, and even though my civic was extremely loud because the muffler was knocked off, he didn't even care. The road was not wide enough for me to turn around or pass him and he just sat there as I pulled up. Finally he got up and slowly walked off to the side of the road and down the hillside. I thought I was in freakin Africa the thing was so big. Not like a tiger or anything but much bigger than what I thought I would ever see in person. What happens if we run into that guy while on snowmobiles? I'm not sure but I don't want to be alone if it happens. We carry machetes now, but things could get ugly with a big enough kitty that is enraged for some reason. You never know with wildlife. And yeah, we have already seen cat tracks this season, but they were small enough that I think they were bobcat. Still not a nice reminder. I followed the cat tracks on the road for miles as I broke trail and I kept fearing that right around the next corner we would find the kitty and he'd be bigger than I thought. We went back and took a different fork of the road and just a mile in there were cat tracks down there too. The snow was less than 20 hours old, so yeah, I just don't like to ride alone.

Next time you need a riding partner just give me a call, I can be there in around 25 hours :thumbsup: . Got lots of time off work and no powder anywhere in site. :confused:

WOW!! Most people can't even imagine meeting anything beyond a rogue squirrel. LOL

I had a cougar or mountain lion as they're also known leap out in front of my truck in New Mexico back when I drove for a living. I will never forget the visual of that scene in my mind. It leaped off a rock that was off to the left of the road and landed onto the middle of the road and then onto the right side of the road in it's second leap. This was about 100 feet in front of me. It then casually ran across the desert. Not slowly, but certainly not in a hurry or as if it felt threatened by 80 feet of truck coming towards it. Fortunately, I was only going about 40 MPH as the road was a twisty 1 1/2 lanes wide with many little hills and valleys. I too was amazed by their size.
I just watched a video clip on cougars and they mentioned that they attain a body size of 7 1/2 feet long (that doesn't include their tails) and can leap 20 to 30 feet in a single bound. Definitely not something you want hungry and chasing you. Or worse, if you're riding an Arctic Cat, and burning oil that smells like a female cat in heat.

Scroll down here to cougar.

http://www.hww.ca/media.asp?mcid=1

There's a 30 second video clip and also a second link to an interesting fact sheet on them.

Jeff

lol I didn't want to hear this! We see a lot of bunny tracks, and I assume that's what the kitties are eating. We have seen many deer tracks during spring riding. One we saw was really really big but I don't know if we have elk or if it was just a huge deer. My uncle has been a hardcore hiker in this area for 30 years or more and he said he has seen at least 20 bears but never a cat. Bears!? It's not that these animals want to mess with us, I know they don't and they probably run like hell 99.9% of the time they hear us coming. But they are wild and you never know if they have a baby stashed in the bushes you just passed or maybe they just feel cornered on a narrow trail. That's my concern.