.

 

 

One evening late this fall I was sitting with some fellow hunters in the main room of an especially fine hunting camp. The large wood stove, consisting of two 55-gallon drums, on placed above the other, was throwing out a wonderful hot white warmth. The stove was burning ash, which is plentiful on this property, having been cut, split, piled and allowed to dry for two years. Above the stove one of the members had placed a hand-lettered sign that read:

Beech and Maple, if dry and old
Keep away the winter cold
But ash wood wet and ash wood dry
a king shall warm his slippers by.
-Anon

We had just finished a wonderful dinner prepared by bear slayer and master chef Andy DeVirgeles and, as you might expect, outrageous stories of the day’s hunt were flying across the room. At some point during this ritual of swapping tall tales, which is such a traditional part of the hunting camp experience, the discourse turned to snowmobiling.

One of the out-of-town guests in camp that weekend asked if anyone knew the names Sabin or St. Onge.He went on to explain that he had raced sleds in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and that at that time those individuals were known to be among the best racers in the National Racing circuit.

The conversation made me realize that snowmobiling was at its absolute peak in this community during the 1970s when Vern Sabin and the father-son team Herve and Oscar St. Onge were burning up the track as consistent winners and respected competitors.
For reasons which are better left to a sociologist or some other analyst to explore, the popularity of snowmobiling in later years flattened out. In the early 1990s it was almost lonely on the trails, even the most ardent snowmobiler of earlier years no longer owned a sled or if they did, it sat unused in storage.

That situation has now again changed and there is presently an explosive resurgence and not only locally but on a national level it has become one of the fastest-growing winter activities. To even the most casual observer, the snowmobiling story, especially if you live in snow country, has to be fascinating.

I’ll agree that snowmobiles are something that you either love or hate (sometimes simultaneously). Whatever your feelings as we stand on the brink of the millennium, this machine deserves at least a nod from historians as they evaluate this century’s pantheon of human achievements. Now, I’m not suggesting (if you are at least 40 years old) that having been witness to this evolution, from a clumsy box-like affair with cleated wooden tracks to today’s sleek chartreuse machines such as exhibited at Eric’s new shop, is as momentous as the birth and development of let’s say the airplane, nor has it altered our lives in the pervasive way in which technology has transformed the world in the past forty years. The point is we weren’t at Kitty Hawk when Orville and Wilber bumped down that pasture trying to get airborne, nor were we living at Silicon Valley.

So who built the first snowmobile? Actually, no one knows despite many people who claim to be the first inventor. No doubt like the Adirondack guide boat, it was the brain-child of many people, each one experimenting with various methods to develop a contrivance that would enable them to travel (in this case) over snow, until a final form evolved.

Many of the early machines were actually an automobile equipped for over-the-snow capability. The Ford Motor Co. built a kind of snowmobile that Admiral Byrd used on his polar expedition in 1928. Ford later decided it had no other commercial value and discontinued production!

In the late 1920s a man named Carl Eliason patented a motor toboggan that had ski-like front runners and a rear-drive track. An improved version of the “motor toboggan” is the first two-man snow machine that I personally remember appearing in this village. It was owned by Cy Malbouf, who at the time was the proprietor of the Evergreen Hotel (now Wheel Inn).

The winter sports club at the time (1955?) hired Cy to bring the ponderous tow rope to the top of Sugar Loaf (new ski slope). When the snows came before the newly ordered tow rope arrived, it took him four days, creating a path 20 feet at a time, which is an indication how primitive those first machines were.

The army developed a troop-carrying treaded vehicle during (1943) World War II called the “Weasel.” Leon Lafave of this village, whose military assignment included training sled dogs to be used in winter warfare, once told me in the post-war years, when I would visit with him in his restaurant (now CJ’s) that his experience with them while Montana at Fort Harrison (1st Special Service Force. Kiska Operation Italian Campaign) was limited but that his dog teams would mush right by them as they would become mired in the deep high-elevation snows.

Perhaps not the first, but certainly recognition should go to Joseph Armand Bombardier, who developed the snowmobile into the first saleable product. Bombardier had founded a small company in the late 1930s and had built large troop-carrying snow vehicles (like the Weasel) for the Canadian government. Then in 1959-1960 two things happened to cause a major breakthrough in developing a small two-person machine.

First was the development of a light-weight engine. The second and prime motivation for Armand was when one of his sons died of appendicitis because the roads of rural Quebec where he lived were blocked by waist-high snow and inaccessible to medical help. Immediately Armand and his son Germain sought a way to adapt cleated tractor tires used on large vehicles to small machines. Germain developed and patented an all-rubber track with interior steel rods for lateral strength and the machine nicknamed the “Ski-Doo” was born. In 1962 Elliot W. Hutchins of Malone became the Northeast distributor and sold thousands of the bright yellow machines, which were priced at around $700.

The industry then mushroomed with dozens upon dozens of manufacturers attempting to get in the action (1965-1975).

Many of these companies were short-lived and in the shakeout that followed a company called Polaris emerged as the U.S. leader (Bombardier was Canadian).

Copyright William C. Frenette Collection