Normiska, snowmobile club work to resolve trail issue

A little bit of communication between the Sunset Country Snowmobile Club, town officials and Normiska Corp. is credited with avoiding a sizable snowmobile trail problem in the west end of Fort Frances.
Until yesterday, snowmobilers who had planned to use the trail on the west side of McIrvine Road, just north of the CN tracks here, wouldn’t have been able to do so.
Landscaping underway in the area by Normiska had made the trail virtually impassable, sparking concerns from snowmobilers including Rick Socholotuk, a director for the Sunset Country Snowmobile Club and the person responsible for supervising that particular trail.
But he got on the bandwagon to reach some sort of land use agreement with Normiska to get the trail back in business.
As a result, roughly 100 yards of new trail will be re-routed along the southern edge of Normiska’s property near the tracks, exiting out at the west end of it.
Members of the SCSC are slated to tackle the project Saturday.
“We all did our part and got [the agreement] moving,” said Socholotuk yesterday afternoon, noting the SCSC and Normiska would be signing an agreement that would allow snowmobilers temporary use of the trail for one year.
Socholotuk also credited Mayor Glenn Witherspoon and Geoff Gillon, the town’s economic advisor, with helping get the agreement inked.
The trail system in question has helped provide sledders with access to and from snowmobile routes west of Fort Frances, and doing without it wasn’t something Socholotuk was comfortable with.
“The whole idea of this trail was to get the snowmobilers out and away from town as quickly as possible without having to worry about road traffic,” he stressed last week.
“It’s a big safety concern to me,” he said, adding the trail handles 1,500-2,000 snowmobilers (about 600 of whom are SCSC members) each winter.
Without that particular stretch of trail, snowmobilers would have been faced with travelling along McIrvine Road to the Eighth Street area in order to gain access to the trail system.
That meant crossing in front of five or six driveways (including Normiska’s), which increased the potential for an accident.
“It would’ve meant running machines on the road . . . that’s not safe,” he stressed.