Quick story;
We're riding down in Preston above Bret's ranch, like January 08. The snow is dry, no base. Willows, junipers, serviceberries, sagebrush... just clawing through everything. Guys are digging down to dirt, leaving brown trails up the hillsides. Bret's taking us through the thickest, ugliest spots, sidehilling over logs and rocks. The group's getting smaller and smaller as we go. Just Bret and anyone dumb enough to try to keep following, which by now includes just one of the 'dumb enough.'
We're on 2009 Arctic Cat M8 prototypes, forgot to mention that. The ones with the white bumpers. They're now brown. Windshield piping is dangling off, A-arms are covered in bark residue. The Arctic engineers are sitting back at Bret's shop.
So Bret keeps finding thicker and thicker crap to go through. We're cutting a steep sidehill through bush like the big mule deer like. There's a huge fallen tree to the left of us, and Bret cuts it hard uphill around the end of the tree through a 2-foot gap in the brush and sticks it about 15 feet up, kind of pointing up and back a little the opposite direction. Following in his track, I make the hard left around the tree and look up ahead.
There's the tunnel of Bret's sled, dug down in his trench, brand new with the cool LED tail light Cat went to on the '09s, sitting right in the only possible line. And Bret's waving his arms in a 'pick-up-the-pace' circle, yelling
"Keep going! GO! GO! GO!" as loud as he can.
Of course I stopped. He shook his head. I laughed. Because he would have ripped right over the back of that sled without a second though.
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Professor Rasmussen, on a typical Tuesday afternoon. His technique is flawless (Follow the sequence)
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5. Note the ski position.
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