Ken Levick, recently retired ex-club president of the Porcupine Trail Blasters, took some time to talk with us about his favourite places to ride in Greenwater, Saskatchewan.
“My best ride is probably from Greenwater going down around Round Lake,” said Levick. “That main one is Kelvington Trail, and it’s good for any age sledder. You get a little bit of bush riding and some hills in there, but it’s mainly a groomed trail.”
Levick, age 72, said that he prefers to go out on the groomed trails like the one heading to Round Lake so that he and his wife can ride together. As an avid member of the Porcupine Trail Blasters and later as the club president, he helped maintain such groomed trails for many years.
“I like trail riding, but I don’t mind going out in the snow, and my toboggan is one that you can get out in the deeper snow,” he said. “But my wife rides with me a lot and she doesn’t like the loose snow, so we stick to the trails mostly.”
The trail to Round Lake comes down from Greenwater and offers many different trails for riders to take, though just heading down to the lake is one of the most popular paths.
“It’s probably about a 20-mile ride, and then you can loop any bush trail you want down there,” Levick said. “You could make it a 100-mile ride or a 50-mile ride. There are lots of different trails, and they’re all marked, groomed trails.”
Enjoying retirement
Levick had a fantastic experience with the Porcupine Trail Blasters for nine years, but one thing he did not enjoy was the trail grooming.
“I mostly just look forward to snowmobiling in the new season,” he said. “One thing I never looked forward to was cleaning trails. I was one of the ones that did it when I was president of the club, but I retired this year and I retired from most of that stuff.”
We asked Levick what his favourite part of snowmobiling with the club was, and he said that it was really the community that made it such a fond experience.
“The camaraderie of the snowmobiling, and group snowmobiling,” he said. “Just the people I met and the friends you make.”
Local heroics
His backwoods adventures fortunately never left Levick himself with injuries, though just last season he and his wife ended up finding someone in desperate need of help.
“We were in a vehicle when we saw a young fella on the side of the road,” said Levick. “He’d tried to cross a drainage ditch but he must not have remembered that it was there, so he didn’t make it across and must have flown about 30 feet in the air. He broke his femur and we had to get an ambulance out there for him.”
According to Levick, the rider ended up healing very quickly and was not left with any long-lasting damage.
“He ended up being okay,” Levick said, “and he even played hockey before winter was out.”
