The Machine's Arrival and the State's Organization of It

The snowmobile reached Indiana as a machine before it existed as a system; the system is the state's organization of it, and the Department of Natural Resources' program manual tells the organization whole. The Snowmobile Trails Program began in 1976 as a cooperative effort between snowmobilers and the Department of Natural Resources — riders supplying the labor and local knowledge, the state the framework and the money discipline. The money is the riders' own: the program is funded by registration fees. A snowmobile's registration costs $30 for three years under IC 9-18.1-14-4, the fee deposited to the Off-Road Vehicle and Snowmobile Fund under IC 14-16-1-30; the operating law is IC 14-16-1 whole; and the registration's administration moved from the Department to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles on 1 January 2014. The trails themselves run largely on private land, and the manual prices the arrangement that makes a trail exist at all: the state pays clubs $65 per mile for trail construction and maintenance, trail land is leased at $75 per quarter-mile or $2 per acre, and preconstruction work may be invoiced to $1,500 — the leased-farmland mechanism in the state's own figures, a winter easement bought by the quarter-mile across the county's fields. The clubs are the system's hands: volunteer organizations that sign the leases, brush and sign the course, and groom it. The cooperative estate, as the Department's release of 1 December 2015 states it, is four trails: Buffalo Run, 68 miles in western St. Joseph County; the Miami Trail, 61 miles in Elkhart County; the Heritage Trail, 34 miles in southeastern Allen County; and the Salamonie Trail, 40 miles in Wabash and Huntington counties — with a fifth, the Potawatomi Trail, carried by the association and its clubs with no Department affiliation. The county's own club is the system's local form: established in 1983 as the South Bend Snowmobilers Club, renamed the Michiana Trail Riders Coalition in 2000, a 501(c)(3) seated on Rice Road west of South Bend, grooming Buffalo Run. The season the whole mechanism waits on is fixed: 1 December to the end of March, snow permitting — in a snowbelt county, the one trail system whose ground is weather.