Snowmobile club officials ask riders to observe courtesies on trails

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

Dec. 5, 1999

By Devlyn Brooks

With snowmobiling being banned on more and more land each year, one area snowmobiling club official is asking that riders observe certain courtesies when on the trails.

Dick Lueben of Bemidji's North Country Snowmobiling Club said being most trails in the state's snowmobiling grant-and-aid system are on private land, riders need to obey the rules of the trail.

Jumping off a trail and cruising across someone's pasture land is just going to result in losing more land for trails, Lueben said.

Most Minnesota Department of Natural Resources approved trails usually cross land not owned by the DNR, Lueben said, which means it could be private land, company owned land or another government's land.

This means the public does not have the right to drive outside the 20-foot trail bed. Lueben said staying inside the trail's posted signs is a good rule of thumb.

"Just because somebody else has driven their snowmobile through a field, doesn't make it right," Lueben said. "(The North Country Snowmobiling Club) lost a nice mile stretch of trail because of that reason: People went speeding out through a person's alfalfa field."

Lueben said education is the key to keeping riders on the trails because ironically it isn't the riders from the Twin Cities or from out of state ruining the access to trails in this region.

He said, although it hasn't been scientifically surveyed, landowners have found most of the time it is a neighbor within three miles of their house who is jumping off the trail onto private property with a snowmobile.