Snowmobile and Rider Miss Corner and Falls off a Bridge!
What's becoming a theme for this blog in our (now series) of posts about 'missed corners...
The Port Tack Racks R&D crew were riding up to Brohm Ridge on Sunday in a group of four. The snow level isn't all that far down so the ride up is a mix of ungroomed whoopies and rocks. About half way up, one of our friends (no need to name names) wasn't on the ball and didn't take the corner all that well. See the pic below.
Notice the gap in the snow on the side of the bridge!
He tried to jump off the sled when he knew there was no saving the beast from going wayward. Unfortunately, he had his foot in the peg and rides with a little buckle on his boot down there. The buckle caught and he went over the edge with his sled.
The pictures don't really do it justice, it was a 6-8 foot drop to a creek bed. To be honest, it really couldn't have gone better than it did. We were up the trail a little bit, some other riders alerted us to the accident when they passed us by so we headed back. Our one friend who saw it was already helping him up. The three of us pulled our buddy up to the road as his ankle was hurting pretty badly. Then we got the sled turned around and 2 other passerby's help us pull/drive the machine out of the creek bed. Thanks very much to those fine gentlemen, wish I caught their names.
And the verdict... too tough to go to the hospital when he got home, a bag of frozen peas and cold one later our buddy thinks it's going to be OK. The Arctic Cat M8 doesn't even seem to have a scratch, and started up right away when we used it to drive it out of the bank. Now that's a sturdy test of durability.
We'll see if the ankle needs any work later but things could have been much worse. The creek bed was only partly frozen, and at least 1.5 feet deep at the spots we could see. The machine also could have landed on him. We think the snow that came down with them both helped break the fall.
Moral of the story, even on the trail, look out and don't be in so much of a rush to keep it in the straight and narrow.
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