Apparently we are having an ideal winter for the joyriding crowd: ample snow for snowmobiles, but not too much in most places for the ATVs, the quads of summer.
That, coupled with mostly moderate cold, has both species out and about in such abundance that my inbox is awash with farmer-rancher-landowner complaints of blatant trespass, cutting of fences and other vandalism.
On a fine après Boxing Day, I headed for the part of the West Country I know best to see what I could discover, maybe get some pictures. The first thing I noticed was a near total absence of rigs and trailers laden snowmobiles heading west. In summer, it seems every rig on the highway is hauling papa bear, mama bear and baby bear ATVs westward for a family weekend of scarring public land, including scouring the beds and shores of trout streams.
My count was several trucks with a single quad ATV each in the back, but only two snowmobiles all day, on a trailer, already out there and heading further west. But what was immediately striking, and remained so all day, was that the ditches of every numbered, paved highway — and I travelled on at least 10 different ones — were scribed with the swooping, curving tracks of heavy snowmobile traffic.
There was much less evidence of snowmobile travel in the ditches of gravelled side roads through mostly private land, but wherever there was a fence cut, or down, snowmobiles had turned onto what I know to be private land. Perhaps they had permission, but cynics would say they didn’t and some landowners say snowmobilers routinely cut or take down fences whenever they impede their travel plans.
Strangely, in the ditches on one of the scenic, hilly gravel roads I most cherish, with public land on both sides, not one snowmobile had traveled in the six weeks since we got most of our snow.
The most egregious trespass I observed was professionals on quads gaining access to survey a well site on public land from what they say is a road allowance, but which anyone with two thumbs to sight with, can see is entirely on private land, the old corduroy road from a sawmill on Prairie Creek into Rocky Mountain House.
The beds of our rivers and streams are public land in Alberta. Presumably that includes the ice in winter, and certainly virtually every stream I crossed had snowmobile tracks etched onto the ice. The problem is that boulder gardens, thin ice and derelict trees can impede snowmobile navigation.
Too many stymied river and creek operators simply cut or take down a fence and proceed to trespass and joyride on adjoining private land. This is the form of trespass and vandalism about which I hear the most outraged complaints, often from ranchers and landowners who have fences cut in many places that they have laboriously built to keep their cattle out of watercourses.
Not long ago I heard of amazing new technology to measure avalanche hazard (which should be out of sight in a month or two) and I immediately thought it will make no difference as long as we have snowmobilers who think they can go anywhere they want, whenever they want.
When it comes to the less hazardous high of trespassing, that includes a majority of snowmobilers, despite what industry spokesmen keep trying to insist is a small minority.
Interestingly, the landowners I talk to insist it is the neighbours, many from increasingly numerous rural subdivisions, and not bad boys from the big cities, who trespass and roar all over private land whenever they want. Certainly that seems to have been the situation in one of the cases I looked into on my recent sojourn out west.
What might help, some landowners tell me, would be to make it mandatory for sled and operator to display a clearly-legible registration number front and rear, and making the registrant liable for trespass and other infractions.
In the spring of 1969, less than three years after I started these columns, back when snowmobiles were little more than motorized stone boats, I wrote an emotional column on the then common practice of killing coyotes by running them down and over, over and over.
The column, which won probably my first national writing award, and was reprinted more times and places than I can remember, noted that the operators who were engaging in what they regarded as varmint “hunting” could not understand the public outrage. The column ended with my admission that even if I didn’t know coyotes as well as some claim to, at least I knew my fellow man, then with my words: “I, too, just do not understand.”
Mercifully, that barbaric form of outdoors recreation has apparently ended; at least I haven’t heard of a similar incident for many years. But I must confess when it comes to joyriding ATVs and snowmobiles wherever and whenever you please, I still just do not understand.
Bob Scammell is an awarding winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer.