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Eighty inches. That’s the amount of snow we had gotten in Whitefish, Montana by the end of January that year. We would nearly quadruple that before the flakes would start melting in the Flathead Valley sometime in May. It would take until July before the ski mountain started to thaw. To a snowboarder, this might sound like heaven. But to a motorcyclist from Southern California? I was going to need some help.
It was a big adjustment trying to move from a place of eternal summer to a place of eternal winter. Setting aside the negative temperatures and the lack of sunlight, which the human body does an impressive job of adapting to in time, the biggest obstacle to surmount was living among a culture that didn’t seem to care much about motorcycles. When the snow took the valley for half of every year, bikes were put away in favor of snowmobiles and skis.
But I have bad knees and snowmobiles are scary, so I set out to try to bring a little bit of my favorite thing to the great white north. $1,200 bought me an old Kawasaki KLX125. $20 more bought me some Kold Kutter ice screws. Eight hours of meticulously placing, adjusting, and gluing the screws into each knob of the tires built me the perfect miniature ice bike.
And fortunately, with temperatures that never made it above freezing, there was no shortage of ice to ride it on.
Our first test run of the little KLX was atop a ski mountain. The tires cut into the ice-covered parking lot like fine race rubber grips asphalt, and I was giggling even more than the gawking children and baffled skiers. Past the ski lodge and around the shop, my knobs dug into the corduroy and propelled me forward.
Well, up until I plowed into a deep pile of fluff. But some rocking and digging got me through.
Our second test followed a compacted frozen fire road to an equally frozen lake that was covered in a foot-and-a-half blanket of powder.
The piled flakes were nearly as tall as the bike, and the tiny tires fought to compress the powder enough to keep moving. Like the world’s littlest snow plow, all eight horsepower of that Kawasaki and all two horsepower of my legs were necessary to get back out of the frozen dust. I trudged through the snow like it was a swamp, pushing wheels now caked with ice. I wanted so badly to ride on a lake, but my ambitions seemed to be outweighing my talents.
Getting on the ice with a little help from your friends
The third test called for a bit more method to the madness. On Lake Mary Ronan, just outside of Lakeside, Montana, there’s a place called Camp Tuffit. The same family has owned this little camp for over 100 years, and my partner just so happened to work with them up at the local ski mountain. Every year, they would get together for a bonfire. And every year they would tow each other around on their skis using snowmobiles.
But this year, we had a different idea.
The owners of the camp, a young couple named Sam and Becca, just so happened to have a pair of Honda CRF150Rs sitting in their storage shed, and I just so happened to have a couple more bags of ice screws. The campfire warmed the gummed up carburetors while we fired up the hand drill. In the meantime, Sam hopped on an ATV with a large plow on the front and drove onto the lake. He pushed through over a foot of snow, revealing the 18-inch ice layer below. He continued to the middle of the lake, then he started making some turns.
One pass, then two, then three, and we had a race track.
One kick, then two, then eight, and my cold little bike fired to life. As a gust of wind dusted us all in a sudden flurry, we took to the turns.
You might be surprised the kind of grip you have on ice with tires full of sheet metal screws. The sharp heads cut into the turns as if I was on rails, then the bike was able to accelerate hard down every straight (well, as hard as a KLX125 can accelerate, anyways), without even the slightest wheel spin. Sam and Becca joined in on their 150s, and before we knew it, we had a race. Lap after lap, ice stung my cheeks and my goggles started to fog. The negative-17-degree temperatures and the snow blowing in my face seemed increasingly inconsequential. I was having too much fun to be cold.
We passed the bikes around to the skiers and snowboarders, giving everyone a chance to experience this little piece of heaven in the frozen tundra. Smiles covered every face in the camp. They were hooked. And I was hooked.
A few weeks later, two more people brought their bikes out of winter retirement to join us. A year later, a local business owner who had been spectating our races decided to start the first annual Lake Mary Ronan Flat Track Motorcycle Ice Races on that very lake, drawing a surprising crowd.
I no longer live in Montana. That much snow and cold just isn’t for me. (Plus, there aren’t enough race tracks.) But if we managed to bring a little bit of bike culture to the otherwise quiet little ski area while we were there, then it was worth every bit of frostbite.
