At this time, january 14th, VAST recommend staying off the trails. Although there are some limited areas you can ride in the upper elevations there is a lot of ice being reported on hills and corners and overall conditions are poor to fair at best. Trails are rock hard with very little cooling capacity for the machines, …
VAST improvement for snowmobilers in Vermont
Dale Allen was at a Lamoille Union High School basketball game recently when he talked to someone who’d put in about 100 miles on his snowmobile this winter — a decent bit of mileage considering the season was only a couple of days old at the time.
“That’s really amazing before the first of the year,” said Allen, the Lamoille County trails coordinator for the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers (VAST).
Snowmobile season runs from Dec. 16 until April 15, but in recent years the early and late parts of the season have featured more green and brown on the ground than white. This year, though, the first big dumping of the year came just in time for opening day, and VAST’s club leaders have been out grooming some of the association’s 5,000 miles of trails. Not all trails have enough coverage to ride on yet, and an ice storm two weekends ago set them back a bit. But then again, most Vermont ski resorts don’t have all their trails open yet either.
Matt Cote, head of Morristown’s Lamoille County Snow Packers, offered the hopeful perspective all winter sports enthusiasts give at this time of the year.
The Lamoille Valley Rail Trail is fully groomed between Johnson and Wolcott, and Allen — who also heads up Hardwick’s Snowflake Ridge Runners — has groomed VAST trails around the Northeast Kingdom.
Wendell Mansfield, president of the Stowe Snowmobile Club, said he has groomed between his house near Mayo Farm Road and up into Mud City in Morrisville, through Sterling Valley. Mansfield said the snow in the valley is good, but the VAST trails that traverse cornfields, like alongside Stagecoach Road, were too thinly covered to groom.
Snowmobilers can technically head west out of Stowe, but their machines might take a beating this early. “River Road’s open if you want to ride it, but nobody wants to wear out their blades,” Mansfield said.
VAST, a nonprofit, private group, controls the network of trails, which are maintained and policed by roughly 130 clubs in all 14 Vermont counties. Much of the trail network traverses private land, and the organization requires every rider to purchase a trail pass, or TMA (trail maintenance agreement), from one of the local clubs. There are substantial fines levied against snowmobilers who get caught riding without a TMA.
