Snowmobile club maintains miles of trails

Washington County experienced its first snow of the year last weekend. Before long, snow will blanket the area. For some, snow is a nuisance that complicates travel but for others it is an integral part of their winter recreation. A popular form of winter recreation in the county is snowmobiling.

Several local families belong to a snowmobile club called the Eastern Iowa Sledheads. The sledheads began in 2000 and now have 80 family memberships according to their Web site. The sledheads maintain 200 miles of trails across five eastern Iowa counties: Washington, Muscatine, Louisa, Johnson and Cedar. There is a trail that enters Riverside from Lone Tree and then goes west through Kalona and Wellman then through Talleyrand, West Chester and Washington.

Mary Jane Stumpf of Riverside has been in the club since the beginning and is now its treasurer. She and her husband Terry bought their first snowmobiles back in 1974. Terry is a contractor, which means it is difficult for him to take a vacation during the warm months of the year. However, since he has more free time in the winter, snowmobiling seemed like the natural sport to invest in.

?We like snow and we like outdoor activities,? Mary Jane said. ?Sledding made for something fun to do during the winter months.?

She said snowmobiles have changed considerably since she and Terry bought their first ones in the ?70s.

?They are much more sophisticated now,? she said. ?They?re bigger machines and they go faster. They have shocks on them to give you a smoother ride and now there are hand warmers in the handlebars.?

The Stumpfs and their friends often take a week?s vacation in the winter to go sledding. They have done this in northern Iowa, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and South Dakota.

?Wisconsin has taken its railroad beds and made them into multipurpose trails,? Mary Jane said. ?In Wisconsin, there are miles and miles of trails like the Kewash trail here. They would be used by snowmobiles and cross country skiers in the winter. A lot of them are old logging trails. In some places, they don?t plow their scenic secondary roads because they become snowmobile trails.?

Snowmobile clubs and resorts in northern states use a device to groom their trails which can be pulled behind a snowmobile or a tractor and is supposed to flatten and compact the snow. The Eastern Iowa Sledheads do not have such a device to groom the trails in the county. Mary Jane said that ungroomed trails are bumpy and less comfortable to ride on. She said groomed trails allow the snowmobilers to go faster, up to 35 mph, whereas the snowmobilers may go only 25 mph on an ungroomed trail.

The snowmobile trails in Washington County are chiefly road ditches, although there are also trails in wooded areas on private property and trails on harder surfaces such as the Riverside Trail. The Riverside Trail is a multi-purpose trail finished this fall which can accommodate snowmobiles.

?When we?re in Wisconsin, we can drive 100 to 150 miles in a day,? Mary Jane said. ?The road ditches are rougher, so when we?re here we only drive 50 miles per day.?

Angie and Rusty Zook of Riverside are a couple other charter members of Eastern Iowa Sledheads. Angie said a club member mows a path in the ditches in the fall, which tells the snowmobilers where to go because the unmowed grass sticks up above the snow. The club also puts signage in the ditches indicating the location of culverts and other hazards. There are also stop signs where the ditch meets a road.

Angie said she likes to sled as often as possible, but the weather in Iowa has not allowed her to sled as much as she?d like during the past couple of years. Angie said that the snowmobilers would prefer several snowfalls spaced out over the winter rather than one big snowfall, such as the one last year that dumped 18 inches of snow on the area. She said that big drifts in the ditch are not much fun to drive through.

Mindy Scott of Lone Tree is the club?s president and said the group often goes on ?supper rides? to grab a sandwich in West Branch or another town. She said it?s always fun to get the group together, ?as long as the wind is not blowing hard.?

Scott said the best temperature to ride in is 20 degrees and that any temperature 30 degrees or lower is manageable.

?One year we backpacked to Canada and rode in minus 35 degree temperatures every day,? she said.

Ron and Theresa Sexton of Riverside are a couple of other longtime members of the club and have snowmobiled since 1978. Ron said there are about 20 people from Riverside in the club. He said that the club has been busy building bridges over the past couple of years. Not only did club members volunteer labor for the bridge on the Riverside Trail, the club also built four bridges in 2010. One of those, at West Liberty, was 70 feet long.

In addition to riding the marked trails in the county, Ron said that the English River to Kalona is another good place to go snowmobiling. He said the riverbed creates a natural path to travel on.

?The water is only a foot deep, and we know the river anyhow,? he said. ?The river has never been a problem for us.?

Ron said the best kind of snowmobiling riding is through wooded areas.

?Flat is boring,? he said. ?Winding through tall pines is the best. There are not a lot of those trails in Iowa. You?ve got to go north or way out west. If you go to the middle of Wisconsin you can find nice trails like that.?

Ron said that he once tried ?extreme snowmobiling? when he was vacationing in Dubois, Wyo. Extreme snowmobiling is going off a trail and usually in wooded or hilly terrain. Ron said he did not enjoy the experience.

?We would get stuck in the snow, go 20 feet and get stuck again,? he said. ?We were sure we would have to cut down a tree because we were going to spend all night in the woods.?

Luckily, Ron and his party made it back to civilization just before nightfall after spending nine hours in the forest.

Scott said she and her husband Bob have gone extreme snowmobiling before. She said they liked it but that it was tiring.

?You?re basically standing up and going from side to side the whole time,? she said. ?You?re going up the side of a mountain and your sled is always riding on an angle. We enjoy it, but I think trail-riding is the most fun. A good day on a trail can be up to 200 miles. A good day riding out west would be 20-30 miles because the riding is so much different.?

Snowmobiling is much more comfortable now than in the past. One innovation that has helped make the cold more bearable is the heated helmet. Ron has a helmet with coils running through it which keep the temperature 65 degrees around his head. Ron said he likes it because it prevents fog from obscuring his vision.

?It actually gets too warm in there so I have to open my helmet,? he said.

Scott said the Eastern Iowa Sledheads, along with the Iowa State Snowmobile Association, fundraise for Spina Bifida research. She said the club has also built a playground in Atalissa and an addition to a barn at the Muscatine County Fairgrounds.