The South East SnoRiders are excitedly using their new Piston Bully that they got a few weeks ago. 

Mitch Gobeil from the South East SnoRiders says there’s been a need for a new snow groomer for quite some time now. 

Until now, they were operating with just one machine. 

The lone groomer was running from Sunday afternoon until Thursday afternoon each week non-stop, meaning operators needed to work all throughout the night. 

“With grooming 950 kilometers of trail weekly once all of our trails are open, it's a bit of a challenge.” 

Another downside to having only one machine, was if they ran into major mechanical problems. 

Last year they had some issues with the groomer, but fortunately, they were only down for about a day and a half. 

Gobeil says if the groomer is down, trails don’t get groomed, and that’s a problem. 

“It has an impact on what I view as our clientele, the snowmobilers, because all of a sudden they're not getting groomed trails, so they're not happy. And all of our funding comes based on the number of kilometers of trails that we groom.” 

With two groomers, they expect to groom the trails during the daylight hours and still stay away from weekends. 

“And if we should have a major mechanical breakdown on one of the groomers, we're confident that we could do the whole system with the one groomer if we had to again.” 

The volunteer operators have said that the lighting on the new groomer is very good, and the blade is quite flexible. 

The new groomer did come with a bit of a learning curve though. 

“The biggest challenge for most of us, because most of our operators are retired people, is learning all the electronic technology,” he says. “It's not much different than a new car or a new truck: there are lots of new buttons to learn that the old one didn't have.” 

The South East SnoRiders club decided to shop for a new groomer last year. 

"Not much different than shopping for a vehicle. You look at what's out there, you look at prices, availability, that type of thing, and we decided to buy a Piston Bully.” 

They ordered it in March and it arrived right on time mid-December. 

He says the snow came before the really cold weather this year, which is a big issue they are dealing with right now. 

The swamps, ponds, and rivers that they go across aren’t frozen yet, so they need snowmobilers to help pack down the snow. 

"We've been out there with some equipment and we've asked snowmobilers ‘if you have a chance to ride on some of the trails where we cross rivers, please do so to drive the frost down.’” 

He leaves snowmobilers with a message to be careful when out on the trails. 

"As always, watch out for deadfall or anything on the trail. Even if it's groomed, it doesn't mean that a tree didn't fall down after we went by,” he says. “And if you're out there packing trails, use more caution because we haven't been out there. There's a pretty good chance that there might be a deadfall right around that corner.” 

 

with files from Adi Loewen