Well, it wouldn't come as any surprise around here, that's for sure. Things haven't been as bad again as the time several years back -- not the hard winter of '95, I don't think, but sometime around then -- when the local ER had one snowmobile fatality per weekend for 7 straight weeks. It got so bad that the ER nurses pooled their money and had posters professionally printed up and put around town in the convenience store and the gas stations and by all the ATMs, asking people please not to drink and snowmobile because they didn't want to see them afterward.

The year after that, the Fish and Game people starting doing random breathalyzer checks out on the snowmobile trails, late at night, and we haven't had a year quite that bad since.