The main draw
Saskatoon offers something few big-city snowmobilers get to experience: a local staging area from which they can head out for a leisurely Sunday ride or a weeklong interconnected excursion.
Located in an old school in the North Corman Industrial Park area between Saskatoon and the town of Warman, the clubhouse, as it’s known, offers 1,400 square feet of space where the 400-plus sledders that come through each weekend can warm up and unload their sleds. With an adjacent parking lot that is large and easily accessed by large vehicles with room for trailers, it’s a great place to use as your base whether you’re heading out for the day or longer.
The Saskatoon Snowmobile Club offers safety courses throughout the season, and most weekends will also see one of the local dealerships at the clubhouse offering demo rides and information to any interested sledders.
When you go for a Sunday ride you can head out to one of the nearby towns, have a quick lunch at one of the places that cater to snowmobilers and return to your city home. Or head out for the weekend, stay at any of the towns you ride through, all of which have accommodation, turn around and complete your loop.
Sledders’ hangouts
Aside from the clubhouse itself, most sledders looking to meet up take advantage of the Saskatoon Snowmobile Club’s online forum to arrange meet-ups and group tours. It’s also where information about the trails can be found by those who have ridden them.
Extended stay
While the Saskatoon Snowmobile Club’s groomers ensure that access to the extensive trail network that runs through the communities of Warman, Hague, Rosthern and Duck Lake are safe and smooth, one of the more popular rides heads north into the Nisbet Provincial Forest, a block of provincially protected mixed-wood forest that sits between Duck Lake and MacDowall as well as encompassing an area north of Prince Albert. Here, riders can cross the South Saskatchewan River and continue on to Sherbrooke or Prince Albert. To do it as a round trip it’s an average of 200 to 300 kilometres in a day. Members of the Saskatoon Snowmobile Club caution that sledding in the dark is not encouraged in this area, due to the number of moose that traverse the forest.
Riders can also head directly east towards Humboldt, 60 kilometres away, where they can hit a series of groomed trail systems that travel farther east into Melfort, Tisdale and Hudson Bay and through some spectacular scenery on trails that are groomed, well signed and interconnected by some of the area’s many closely-knit clubs.
