While December 15th gets thrown around a lot, Wisconsin doesn’t actually have a set date for the earliest trails can open.
It’s dependent on several factors. One of the most important being safety conditions.
This means trails generally won’t open before the end of the 9-day gun deer season, there needs to be enough snow on the ground, and trails need to pass inspection.
“They need to brush away from the signs, make sure the signs are in the right spot, they're still visible and have eliminated any kind of safety concerns from the trail system,” said Todd Bierman, the Vilas County Parks and Recreation supervisor.
Typically, Vilas County will open all its trails all at once when they’re all in good enough condition to ride.
But recent winters have made the county re-think that opening.
Two winters ago, snowmobile trails never opened due to lack of snow.
They did open for a short period last winter, but Bierman says some sections could have had a longer season if they didn’t need to open all at once.
“It was kind of punishing the clubs in the northern tier of the county where they had the snow, and they're watching people drive by them with their trailers going into Michigan,” said Bierman. “Where they could just had snow here and people coming there to sled, coming there to spend their money on gasoline and groceries and food and things like that, where it's an economic thing.”
This year clubs with more snow on the trails will be allowed to open sooner, with an exception. Their trails have to connect to trails that are already open either within the county or to a neighboring county, which could include ones in the U.P.
“Say they want it open or everything's good to go right open, but the clubs around them aren't open, so we're not going to allow them to open up because there's no place for them to go except on their own trails,” said Bierman.
Once trails have passed inspections, clubs can call the county when they’re ready to open, and Vilas County will put out PSAs as different trails open.
“We're going to give this a try this year, and I don't think there'll be an issue with it,” said Bierman. “If it wasn't for the storm damage, I think Vilas County would open as a whole at one time. It's kind of a disappointing that we did have the storm damage.”
Bierman said they did discuss moving to a zoned system, but they couldn’t come to an agreement on which trails would be included in each zone or how they would stop people from traversing different zones.
Counties like Lincoln and Langlade operate on a zoned system. Oneida County could also have a zoned opening this year.
Oneida County
In October the Oneida County Snowmobile Council adopted an updated opening policy.
The goal is still for the county to open as a whole, but just the northern or southern half of trails in the county could open depending on how clubs vote.
The two zones are separated by Corridor 12 which runs east to west across the whole county.
To open up all the trails in the county, 7 out of the 10 members of the council need to vote yes. If there are less than seven yes votes, the votes will be tallied by zones.
• The northern zone will only open if at least 5 of 8 votes are affirmative (Northern Trails Unlimited & Northwest Passage are excluded from the northern zone poll).
• The southern zone will only open if at least 6 of 9 votes are affirmative (Bo-Boen is excluded from the southern zone poll).
As of Tuesday, Iron County has some of its snowmobile trails open. Trails in Michigan opened Dec. 1.
