January 2020 Newsletter

Happy New Year to all our members and I hope everyone is praying for cold weather and snow.

Our meeting was called to order at 11:05am. The minutes from last month’s meeting were read and approved. Treasurer Gail supplied us with our current financial report.

Our big topic for this month was our trail report and maintenance on our groomers and Kawasaki Mule. Thankfully we have a strong group of members that help out in both of these areas. We strive to be the best and always encourage new members to contact us to volunteer. If you like turning wrenches contact Trail Coordinator Steve Cox or myself and you’ll be more than welcome at our groomer barn. Currently we’re working on the BR180 repairing some braking issues and investigating a heavier track system for our Kawa Mule. Everyone loves the Mule and it sure gets a workout.

The Pavilion trail has yet to be fully marked due to one of the farms desiring to do some manure drag lining and a corn field still up. When those situations change we can complete the marking. We have great landowners and we work with them to assure we have a safe trail ready to ride.

In this New Year we are starting to work with the interactive trail map brought to us by our own NYSSA. It is being refined and will obviously take some time to perfect. We are working to make it as real as possible and up to date. We want to be able to show current trail conditions along with whether we are open or closed. We trust that in the future more sledders will be actively using this NYSSA tool to determine the best places to ride. We know when the conditions are right that will be the OVSA system of trails. At present there will still be paper maps but the interactive should give us a better day to day update.

This year we’ll also be updating our trails by GPS. This is required of each club with a trail system every 3 years. We will use the same firm as last time and a motion was made to approve this.

Brian Bartron who is heading up our February Daily Drawing said we’ve had over 600 tickets turned in and he’s looking for more before the end of January. He said we only have 40 tickets not spoken for and we certainly thank all who’ve sold and purchased these tickets. This is a very important fundraiser for us and many thanks to Brian for all the work he’s done coordinating this.

Our Sergeant of Arms Jack Rase also has NYSSA $5 raffle tickets which will be drawn at our annual NYSSA meeting this April 24th-25th in Syracuse at the OnCenter. A great value for a lot of prizes so contact Jack Rase at 585-786-5051 for tickets.

Our next meeting will be held Sunday February 2nd 11am at the Silverlake Sportsmens Club. Join where YOU ride and THINK SNOW!!

Chance Vogt
President OVSA