What Off-Season? It’s Snow Goer time here!

It’s official: We’re on deadline!

      While the rest of you are thinking about boats, bikes, quads or the latest in high-end lawn mowing equipment, Managing Editor Andy Swanson, Associate Editor Tom Kaiser and I are toiling away in the office, thinking about sleds.

      Hard as it may be to believe, the first big deadline for the premiere issue of Snow Goer Magazine is June 21 – Oh hell, that’s Monday! How are we going to get this all done? Looks like I’ll be toiling away in the office this weekend as well!

      Snow Goer is not a “normal” magazine, in terms of timing. With all other titles (including ATV Magazine, on which we all also work), a regular rotation of collecting stories is created over the course of the year. With Snow Goer, however, you have a relatively short window (that being winter!) to collect as much information as you possibly can, and then you actually get busy writing about the stuff, editing stories, going through your photos and everything else long after the riding and testing time is done. The seasonality of the sport really adds some challenges.

      For instance, in our premiere issue, we’ll have a major shootout of some top performance sleds. The shootout was conducted at the Rode Reports testing event in March, but we’re writing about it now. Similarly, we’ll have a tour story from a ride in the Black Hills in February, product test write-ups on six different products tried throughout last winter, a story on a tow vehicle tried last winter and much, much more.

      Other stories are kind of a combination platter. For instance, we’re going in-depth on four different technological innovations that were introduced as a part of the manufacturers’ 2011 lineups. We first saw the products in January, we tested them in March, but now we’re spending time with the engineers getting a deeper understanding of the product so you get more information than you’ll find anywhere else.

      Yet other stories are fresh as can be – as I write this, Andy Swanson is slaving away at the shop on the top-end of a sled so we have a quality How-To story for this first issue. Longtime contributor David Wells has his Timeline article in to me, and Tech Professor Phil Mickelson is doing research on his next column. I’m crunching my notes from the just-completed International Snowmobile Congress, while Art Director Randy Kepner is considering his options for our first cover, thanks to all of the great photos taken at Rode Reports by Wayne Davis.

      Yes, it’s summer, but it’s prime Snow Goer time here in a smallish office in suburban Minneapolis!