Change of Location- January Overnight Ride and Upcoming Events

Hello High Country Snowmobilers,

Happy Holidays!

January Overnight Ride:

I was just notified that the site of our January overnight ride, Electric Mountain Lodge has been sold to a Church group and will not be operating as a snowmobile lodge this winter. They are calling people with reservations, apologizing and re-funding your deposits. I was looking forward to riding there, but don't worry, we will still ride.

After some scrambling and checking availability, we have picked Vega Lodge, on the north/east side of Grand Mesa to be the new site of our overnight ride. They have a full service restaurant, fuel onsite, plenty of trailer parking and all 6 of their winter cabins available. www.vegalodge.com.

Vega Lodge has agreed to hold all their cabins from the night of January 16th to the 18th for our group. If you are interested, please get in touch with them at (970) 487-3733 asap. They have 2 larger cabins that would work for bigger groups, so if you'd like to get some friends together, that is a great option.

It seems the entire state is in line to get a lot of snow from Sunday to Wednesday of next week, so conditions everywhere are looking up.

Spring Creek Grooming Update:

The groomer is fueled up and ready to go, unfortunately both the BLM and Forest Service have timber sales and extractions happening. The beginning of the trail system been plowed by logging companies. The BLM is logging off the first mile of trail to the USFS gate. The forest service contractor is logging from the intersection where the upper road first splits off the main road, to where our first connector trail heads from the lower road up to Elliot Ridge.

The good news is that our groomers have been told by the Forest Service contractors that they plan to wrap up and be out of Spring Creek by the first of the New Year. The upper road is not being plowed and is available for snowmobiling up to the ridge. With the main access road being plowed, we don't want to drive our cat to the upper road every time and beat it up just to do some early season packing/grooming. Hopefully both timber companies get scared off with this next storm cycle and wrap up for the year so we can start packing out and widening the trails.

The Forest Service has asked me to tell users to please not drive vehicles and trailers up the plowed road the upper road intersection. Apparently there have already been issues with trucks with trailers getting stuck trying to turn around and problems when logging trucks and equipment trying to pass snowmobile trailers on the narrow plowed road. Please use the regular winter trailhead and ride in from there.

Events:

We have a few events coming up including our big overnight rides.

• January club meeting is the 13th at Q4U in Frisco, new change this month is the meeting will be at 6:30 pm instead of 6pm.
• January's overnight ride will be at the Vega Lodge, riding on the Grand Mesa, (outside of Collbran) on January 16, 17 and 18, 2015. http://www.vegalodge.com/ 
• CSA convention and ride will be in Meeker, January 22-25. Information is available on CSA's web site at: http://www.snowmobilecolo.com/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=45117&module_id=149597
• February's meeting will be on the 10th at Q4U in Frisco at 6:30 pm.
• February's overnight trip will be to the Hahn's Peak lodge, (north of Steamboat) on February 20, 21 and 22nd 2015. www.hahnspeakroadhouse.com

This will be the final reminder for many of you that your club and CSA memberships will be expiring on December 31st. If you do not renew, you will not receive updates on club events and happenings. Memberships can be renewed online at www.snowmobilecolo.com or in person at any club meeting or event.

Thanks and have a happy and healthy Holiday Season!

Rich Holcroft

President

High Country Snowmobile Club