Driving Snow Mobiles in Yellow Stone Park
Actually driving the snow mobile was a whole new experience for me. I’ve driven a lot of different kinds of vehicles in my life and then practically every sport on the planet - definitely every sport that involves the board.
I didn’t know what happens when you turn a snow mobile. Does it slide out in the back like a jet ski does, or does it track like a motorcycle does on the street? It turned out that they have an incredible amount of traction, but for an item that is being driven on the loose snow and ice, it turns out that it has two blades on the front that looked like skis, which are probably the most slippery part of the whole thing, and then at the back of the tractor, like you’d see on a caterpillar tractor truck, it has an incredible amount of gripping. If you turn it really sharp, you can get the front to slide a little bit, but you have to turn really hard to get them to slide at all. I did do that quite a few times until the guide told me that the rangers will write me a ticket if I kept doing it.
To make the snow mobile go is really simple. You turn the key to get the snow mobile to start, which started very easily, and then, you have a single thumb control, which made the snow mobile go fast or slower. The advantage of this is that if the snow mobile took off and you flew back off the handlebars, you would no longer be pushing on the thumb, and it would turn off. This is different from the old motorcycle ones where you pushed your hand backwards to make it go, because then sometimes when you took off at speed, it would accelerates, and you’d just go faster and faster.
The nice surprise for both of us is that there were seat warmers, hand warmers and even thumb warmers on the snow mobile. And as we turned and cranked them up at the highest setting, I, amazingly, felt my hands and thumb getting too hot after awhile.
The only thing I didn’t like about them, even though they were brand new Yamaha snow mobiles, was the fact that it took a lot of pressure to push on the thumb control to accelerate the snow mobile. We were out and about for about 6-8 hours and by the time we were an hour into it, my thumb was already getting exhausted and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to push the thing the whole trip. If we had done the “big loop”, which I’d like to do next time and is about a 120 miles, I honestly don’t know how long my thumb would be able to last. It was kind of strange that the hardest thing to do when driving a snow mobile was actually the pushing with your thumb.
We also found it incredibly fun to ride standing up. You get a whole new perspective of the world, and I’m sure it’s much more dangerous that way. But, especially on the way back, I found myself riding the snow mobile standing up with my feet on the two platforms on either side of the seat with the face mask up, and the freezing wind blowing in my face.
The snow mobile also has a nice built-in basket in the back so bring a couple of bungee cords along so you can throw your extra jackets, food and any other things you want to take with you in the back and bungee cord them down. My items stayed in place really well with 2-3 bungee cords that I had with it. The guide also had a big wilderness style backpack that you use to go mountaineering. His was bungee corded in and it stayed in place the whole time.
It would’ve been very comfortable to have 2 people on the snow mobile also, but when you consider the fact that you spent so many thousands of dollars just to get to Yellow Stone, I predict that anyone who’s old enough to ride one will enjoy riding their own snow mobile, and even a 60-70 year old adult would have no trouble riding the snow mobile, provided they went slow enough that they maintain control of the snow mobile.
The only thing that was difficult on them was that there were ruts on the road. There had been many different vehicles, including snow mobiles and these funny snow coaches (which were cars and trucks with these tractor-wheels on them as well as these skis in the front), and all these vehicles would build ruts on the road so when you’re riding your snow mobile, your skis on the front of the snow mobile would give (???) and you would actually, for the most part, lose your ability to steer. Most of the time, the snow mobiles just follow these ruts. If you put a little pressure on, you could hop out of one rut into the next. But most of the time, you’re simply following the path that have been worn in by many people before you.
My wife complained many times because she followed me the majority of the time, and our guide had taught us a series of hand signals that I wasn’t able to memorize. During the time he was teaching us the hand signals, I was becoming oriented to how the whole thing was set up and how it worked, so I pretty much missed the hand signals. A couple of times when I would see an end, I’d come to a quick stop and throw a hand signal back, but I guess I threw the wrong one and she almost ran into me twice because she didn’t realize I was stopping. I still think she just may not have known how to operate the break properly, but she claims that I’m absolutely wrong on this. I’d teach you what the hand signals are, but honestly to this day, I still can’t remember what they were and I never actually learned them in the first place.
