Snowmobiling!!

So last week I finally got my first experience snowmobiling during the snow surveys.  The State highway is closed about 20 miles from Fort Jones because they have not plowed it and for this survey we needed to get up to Scott Mountain which is about 10 miles after the closure.  So for about 10 miles I got to drive the snowmobil...now if you have never ridden one, let me tell you they are VERY tippy.  You see them and they look pretty stable but there are so many uneven surfaces on snow covered areas that it is really easy to tip over and get stuck.  On the way up I had one guy with me who was coaching me and he probably thought that I was one crazy lady.  I went fairly slow but on the way up we had two almost tips and one (gentle) fall from the snowmobil due to my inexperienced driving.  He said I just didn't have enough throttle when we went on side banks but to do that you need to have ALL of your weight tipped into the bank and that is really difficult coordination!  We also had some difficulty.  On the way up I lost one of my ski poles from the back so Josh took off by himself to go look for it in the snow.  On the way back he also dropped both of his poles!  Finally we got to the summit with all of our poles and Josh took over and our small entourage of two snowmobils traveled into trickier terrain.  On the way up the mountain we tried taking the FS road all the way up to the survey but there were too many outsloped roads.  We got stuck a few times and then decided to snowshoe up the rest of the way.  It was a beautiful sunny day with just a slight wind.  We got back to the snowmobil and I rode on the back teh rest of the way back to the truck.  That was also really fun because you can just look around at all the snow covered scenery above and below the road.  The other person we went with said he got up to about 50 miles per hour and we were not far behind.  I did not know how fast we were going at the time but I was thinking as I looked at the ground, "man,  we are going fast, if we hit a hard bump I am totally going ot fly off.  I wonder if it would hurt?"  Good thing we wear helmets!!