Which brings about another point: A LOT of us have dogs. They drive the snow-machine and with our superior sense of smell, we locate animals for them.
One important thing about traveling a wilderness that has winter: Look off into all the little valleys below you in those photos. In the summer, they're impossible to travel by machine, and a living hell on foot. Unless you have four legs that are five feet long each.
But in the winter, it freezes and fills with both snow and what we call "overflow":
The valleys you are looking at are all just like this: now they're superhighways. You can zip up them on foot, by snow machine, skiis, dog team - far into the spring in shaded valleys. The front of a valley facing south is having spring. The back of the mountain in the shade is still winter.
This is overflow while it is happening, sorry about the smudge across the camera lense but it was thirty below zero when this was taken. I was on foot, and had walked about six miles, up the main creek immediately in the front in those pictures.
At thirty below zero you still have ground water seeping out, layer upon layer, also mixing with snowfall, and making sheets that can be over ten feet thick. On top, so long as you avoid the hazards, you can fly like the wind. It is incredible the advantage you have on a snowmachine barreling up a valley twice as fast as any animal can run. Works great hunting flocks of Ptarmigan. Walking is a lot of fun for its ease and for stealth.
One hazard is the interface between the overflow and the ice. The edges. This is always water or mush, or extremely weak ice covered by snow. When you step in it... schloooop! It's over your boots and you are wet, maybe fall down into it and get wet all over at thirty below.
For snow machine travel the worst is really deep fresh overflow. One way that happens is if a Chinook comes and it warms up above zero, water surges down the ice-covered valley. If there is a foot of snow, the water can be almost a foot deep and you don't know until you are 50 ft out there and your snow machine bogs down for lack of traction. But you have broken through the snow and the water is exposed, so it is going to freeze fast, and you have to get that machine out of there or else it is there until spring.
March and April, partly into May - the sun is back, it's warm, and you have all these valleys you can storm up. You can travel the ridge lines too. In the summer you are mainly restricted to the ridge lines or trails you have hacked out. But in the winter, millions more acres are available for easy travel. On skiis with a plane you can land all over the place. Snow cats and other tracked rigs - the advantages over animals are tremendous.
If bigfoot existed there would be businesses taking you out to spot them just like they do with the bears. They have to limit the numbers of people allowed to do that because if you know where they hang out regularly then too many people crowd in to see them.
