I recently got back from a trip up to northern Michigan and on the way we drove through a few small towns built on the shores of lakes. It drifted me back across the frozen landscapes of my childhood, staring out at tiny little houses dotting a barren white expanse, hard water as they call it. In South Dakota and Minnesota, where I grew up, this time of year ushered in a whole new season of sports, not of the exciting alpine variety but more of the head shaking, why the hell would anyone do that variety. There was snowmobiling, which is fun and makes sense if your not drunk and its light out, guidelines when not followed result all too often in decapitation by barb wire fence. I’m not kidding, nearly happened to two kids in my high school but luckily they both lived to tell the story of the rakish scars across their neck.

Here’s a pretty rad video of a guy carving like crazy on a snowmobile:

There were other stranger sports like trapping, which could be quite frightening.

The traps are generally set in places that are hard to both see and reach and are often occupied by understandably upset woodland creatures. If their not, than your not a good trapper. The all to common result is that you end up lying on your belly in three feet of snow, reaching under a fallen tree on a frozen creek and running into a pissed off and dying skunk. Believe me it’s a bad scene and hard to understand what makes it worth it.

There was also ice racing. Something I never did but a lot of the burnouts who used to beat me up in high school swore by it.

Basically it’s just racing with real long spikes on your tires. I think it comes in all sorts of classes, motorcycle, ATV, snowmobile etc. I suppose it’s fun but it strikes me as absolutely nuts to be racing at top speeds on ice with what essentially amounts to little spears on your wheels.

Really the only sport I ever got into much was ice fishing, more on tht later.