Above photo: from the archives, Ridge Rider’s Sled Drags on March 11, 2023.
After months of almost no snow, the Tumbler Ridge Ridge Riders has cancelled the annual snow drags.
“We’ve had the date picked out since fall,” says president Steve Larrivee. “And it wasn’t looking like we were going to have a drag race. At our meeting at the beginning of February we basically made a decision that if we didn’t have enough snow at our next meeting on March 7, we were going to cancel. And March 7 came and, yeah…”
Despite some late season snow, Larrivee said the races were unlikely to happen, even without things starting to melt. “We need probably close to three feet, four feet and we don’t have nearly that. I mean we also need a base, which we don’t have either. So we made the decision to cancel the drag races because we don’t have the snow for it.”
This is not the first event that has been cancelled, or at least changed, by the low snow. Earlier in the year, the annual Steve Young memorial ride was converted into a get together out at Moose Lake, where only three people showed up.
The annual poker ride did happen earlier in the year. Conditions then, says Larrivee, were borderline, but it was enough. “It would have been nice to have a lot more, obviously. But it wasn’t too bad.”
He says there’s a foot and a half of fresh snow out in the mountains, but it’s sitting on top of a layer of ice. “Sledders have to be careful going out in the backcountry because all over BC, avalanche conditions are high, but here it’s extra extreme because we had all that snow earlier in the year, but then it got super warm so everything melted. When it got cold again, it froze and turned into ice. And now we get a foot to two feet of fresh snow on top of that? It’s a ticking time bomb waiting to go. You trigger that and all that new snow is just going to slide.”
But every year is different, and the club is already planning for next year, hoping for better conditions. “I don’t see us getting a whole lot of snow this spring. I mean, people are still going sledding. They have got to be really careful because of the avalanche conditions, but they’re still riding.”
To view the 2023 Sled Drag photos see our previous article: https://tumblerridgelines.com/2023/03/18/ridge-riders-sled-drag/
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.