Hello All! Hope you had a great Christmas and New Years.

First, a northern Minnesota trail update.  What can we say. For the most part the trails are great. However, the heavy traffic, especially Christmas week, took a toll on some of the more heavily traveled trails. Most of this is due to the fact that everyone that has been dying to have good snow for the last two years was out on the trails over the past two weeks. This was a great sign to the rebounding health of the sport in Minnesota, but the trails suffered a bit from all of the use. Hopefully the fantastic grooming efforts of the local snowmobile clubs will continue to keep up. Believe it or not some trails could benefit from a little more snow to help fill in some bare spots. Now that the Vikings season has put us out of our misery we can focus our entire weekends on riding!

January and February are also the time that we see the many charity rides that take place around the state. A charity ride is a great way to spend time on your sled and help others in the process. Every year Minnesota snowmobilers raise over one million dollars for wide variety of charities including those that support cancer research, MS, ALS, Special Olympics and a variety of others. One of the charity rides that the staff of snowmobiletrail.com is heavily involved with is the annual Yeti Tour which benefits the March of Dimes. Like most charity rides, the Yeti Tour was created by a group of snowmobilers who wanted to make a difference. It was the brainchild of Nate and Kelly Alvar, who became involved with the March of Dimes after being faced with personal heartbreak, losing their first child, Isaiah to severe birth defects. Tragically, their second son, Mason, was three born months premature and passed away after complications from emergency surgery just one week after being born. Today Nate and Kelly have two healthy boys, Jonas (5) and Elias (1), and they credit organizations like the March of Dimes for making advancements that helped give Jonas and Eli a healthy start in life. “I come from a snowmobiling family,” said Nate, “I have a couple of close friends that I always ride with and one day Kelly said ‘You guys should do something that involves snowmobiling and the March of Dimes’ and things just grew from there.” The Yeti Tour is a one day 140 mile ride that originates and ends at the Sunset Bar and Grill in Duluth, Minnesota. The event takes place on Saturday, January 25th and there are still openings available for riders. “This is a fun, rider friendly event,” said Alvar. Now in its fourth year the Yeti Tour has raised over $50,000 for the March of Dimes. Unfortunately the ride portion of the Yeti Tour has been cancelled the last two years due to lack of snow, but with this years early December storm the ride will go on as scheduled. If you would like to take part in the Yeti Tour they are always looking for riders and donations. You can visit their website at www.yetitour.com for information on how to register or donate.