THUNDER BAY — The Thunder Bay Adventure Trails Snowmobile Club is hoping for a little help from the cold breath of Mother Nature.
A mild November has led to a lack of freezing on creeks and swamps in the District of Thunder Bay and while one would think the recent snow would assist efforts to bring the trails off to a good start, that’s not always the case.
“(Getting snow early) is (good) and it isn’t,” said Adrian Tessier, groomer co-ordinator for the Thunder Bay Adventure Trails Snowmobile Club.
“We really need the lakes and the swamps and the creeks frozen before we start getting our groomers out. The snow slows down the frost going in the ground. There’s virtually nothing for frost in the swamps and that’s our big issue.”
This week, Tessier has been working on the equipment at the club’s shop to put the groomers in shape to hit the trails and plans on doing an inspection on Friday of the washed out Matawin River Bridge — about 80 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay — looking for a different route until the bridge is fixed.
“We try to get out before the snow comes and the snow caught us by surprise this year,” said Tessier, who will be entering his 12th year grooming for the club. “We get out on our quads and do hand brushing and we have a mechanical brusher that we tow behind the quads. If it’s real bad like a few years ago when we had the ice storm go through, we had to rent a couple of excavators with brush heads on them to clear tons of trail with big trees that were down that were too heavy to handle by hand.
“Up until that last storm we had (recently), we haven’t been out, but we’re probably going to go out on Friday. We have to reroute one trail because a bridge on the Matawin River got washed out. . . . We have to put up about a 500-metre trail down the Matawin River. Our Friday project is to go out there and try to brush a trail from our existing trail to the river and see if we can get around that bridge. Hopefully, (the Ministry of Natural Resources) will do something next year with that bridge because we don’t really want a trail on the Matawin River.”
While trail permit numbers have been down since the club’s heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they would have as many as 3,500 trail permits sold, the COVID-19 pandemic actually gave the organization a boost in numbers.
“When (the COVID-19 pandemic) came, our (trail permit) numbers jumped like crazy,” said Tessier. “People weren’t travelling anywhere, they were staying at home. They were looking for things to do. They were buying up snowmobiles and they were buying permits, so our numbers virtually doubled and stayed that way for the last, so far, three years.
“You’ve got a helmet on and you’re all tied in and you’re a long ways from the next person — you’re snowmobiling 50 feet apart. You can’t get much more COVID protected than that.”
The club has sold approximately 225 trail permits to date and prior to the pandemic, were in the neighbourhood of 1,500 to 1,600 sold trail permits in the district.
Thunder Bay has access to around 400 kilometres of trails around the city with the district boasting almost 2,600 km of trails in the vastness of Northwestern Ontario.
Once the freezing sets in, Tessier said they could use some of the white stuff Mother Nature spews during a typical winter in the region.
“We need about anywhere between, depending on where we are and what particular trail, 12 and 18 inches of snow before we even get out with the groomers for a first try,” said Tessier, who said the first week of January is a good rule of thumb to start grooming the trails.
“We need enough snow because we go out with these packers (behind the grooming machines) and we pack the snow down to build a base. If you have 18 inches of snow, you pack it down to about six inches.
“If there’s any logs or stumps or rocks, we need to try to get most of those covered up as best we can before we actually open the trail. Otherwise, it’s just dangerous and plus we end up breaking our machines when we’re on the rocks all the time.”
The deadline for discounted trail permits has passed, although regular trail permits can be bought for $280 and classic permits (snowmobiles aged 1999 and older) can be purchased for $190 at tbattrails.com.
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