Blizzard Club Members and Local Snowmobile Enthusiasts,
This message got a little long but please read!
We received word from Ron Bray (NSSR) that they are relocating our race slot to a venue up north. Their reasons primarily included unknown ice conditions and demand from their racers to relocate the race to a venue up north (Brainerd area). They were just not attracting the number of racers to Fairmont that they see at their other races. This was not a total surprise to us as it was fairly difficult to get them to respond to inquiries and set a race date for this past year. They felt they were obligated to hold the race in Fairmont last year since we had the sponsorship dollars raised from the prior year’s race that was cancelled due to poor ice conditions. Ron did say he could potentially help us out with a scaled down version.
I know a lot of the Club members already know that is takes a lot of time and effort to go out and raise the funds and resources to get NSSR to town. They get a fee of $5-6k, we pay or find sponsors for their hotel rooms which is another $2-3k, volunteers are need to raise sponsorship $, find volunteer EMT/Ambulance services, organize concessions, plow snow of the lake, pay for biffies, clean up any trash left behind, Volunteers are needed for set up, helping at starting line and tear down, locate a power broom to clean the starting line, volunteers needed to collect insurance waiver signatures, create and distribute race posters, and advertising on radio/newspaper/social. I am sure I am missing a couple more things and this does not even factor in the help needed to run the Icekahanna.
This was the first year that we ran both events on the same day at the same time, but I only heard from three people who said they wished they were on separate days primarily due to different set ups needed on their sleds. We just did not have the manpower this past year to spread out the load and help on race day. With the NSSR fun run side we did get about $1,500 of the registration fees back to offset some costs. The Icekahanna side have very low participation numbers again this year. I believe we only collected around $600 which did not even pay of the trophies. Our timing equipment is also very dated and we may or may not have enough working sensors to even try to pull off the speed run on our own like we did in prior years. So if we were to try to host races ourselves again it may mean an additional investment in timing equipment and maybe even an ice shaver.
Another issue we are facing is that the Insurance company gets a little excited about covering the Icekahanna. I had to do quite a bit of negotiating with their underwriter this last year to allow any kids under the age of 18 to participate in the event.
So due to the NSSR pulling the plug, lack of participation in the Icekahanna and lack of volunteers it was decided that we will not have the Speed Run or Icekahanna in 2019. We will take at least a year off and see if it encourages people to step up, join the club and help make this happen in the future. We are trying to get this out early to see if it will get anyone excited and motivated to make a race happen this coming winter.
The snowmobile trials and fun events like the Speed Run and Icekahanna don’t just happen on their own. We are going to needs more members and volunteers to keep the Club going and our 140 miles of trail
Please consider joining the Club or becoming a more active member. You don’t have to make every meeting or event, but if we get enough volunteers to commit a couple hours a year it would make a huge difference. Let’s make this fun. After all this should be all about comradery for a sport we all love.
If you have thoughts, ideas or concerns on this please let me know or feel free to come to the next Club meeting is on 6/4 at 7:30pm at the Holiday Inn (either in Sisseton or George room).
Thank you,
Isaac Wallace
Blizzard Snowmobile Club President
507-236-7190
isaac.wallace@yahoo.com
Club Website: http://myblizzardclub.com/