I’ve been working more on the book – “Star Fire Kids – Midnight Blue Express” the last couple of weeks. I’m nearly done with the interviews, just a handful left. Last night I talked with Herb Howe, winner of the very first Winnipeg to St. Paul race and the guy behind Larsen-Olsen, a major Polaris distributor back in the day.

It was a fun interview for me – Herb likes to talk, and he’s got GREAT stories. I was able to help him out a little bit, as he was telling me about the 1967 race, I told him I have a copy of the film from that one – and would be happy to let him see it. He’s was pretty excited at that, since that is the one piece of film he’s not seen. But he sure remembered it being filmed!

Herb kept his original sled he won the 66 race with. It’s still with him to this day, and he’s a pretty happy guy that he did keep it.

Just caught wind that the Snowmobile Hall of Fame in St. Germain is close to having a new photo book ready. Details are a bit thin at this time, but it’s coming out in honor of C.J. Ramstad, and contains some of his photos. We’ll make more details available as we learn them

So since I can’t really talk too much about that sled, I’ll talk about this. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pretty quiet on here. That’s because we are working hard on a redesign of the site. Lots of new features that have been under wraps for some time, and I’m dying to show them off. But you’ll just have to wait till they are ready. Sorry!

The traffic on the site has rocketed upwards again last month. It happens every year about this time, but this year, it went way up from what it was the year before, and the year before that. Yes, lots of the traffic is people looking at the classifieds and the bull sessions over and over again. But the new traffic… that is unique visitors coming to the domain vintagesleds.com is up… again.

Direct traffic, (people who type in www.vintagesleds.com) is 65.71% of our traffic. Referral traffic from other websites is 11.80% and the search engines send us about 11% between Google, Yahoo and MSN. That would indicate that a lot of the growth of the site is still word of mouth. Very cool. We are very much honored and humbled by that.

The site has grown to a point where we have switched to faster bigger fast servers a few times – the last time having been last weekend. Some of you may have seen a strange message instead of the home page for a bit. From the time the move started till it was cut over, we lost a few posts on the Bull Sessions and classifieds, but other than those two items (we apologize if there was any inconvenience), the switch went smooth.

While it may be hot and your stuffed with barbeque burgers, I’ll bet your sneaking off to a computer every once and awhile to check the web aren’t you? Well, just for you, here’s some photos from last winter that should cool you down. These were emailed in last March from Dan Vander Ark. These are all from the vintage rally just outside of Duluth Minnesota last winter, most taken near the Cloquet River Inn. My thanks to Dan for sending them in and being patient waiting for me to share them!

Enjoy.

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Hardly a day goes by now that I don’t get alerted to another story in the Old Media about vintage sleds. The one I spotted today really caught my eye. It’s from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The article is by Leo Roth, and is titled “Making tracks for vintage sleds“.

In the article, he chronicles the vintage adventures of Mark Elwell and Tony Bellucco. Well worth the read, in particular, there are some great lines in the article: “Anybody who’s into vintage sleds will tell you it’s a sickness, it really is,” a grinning Elwell said. But this sickness won’t kill you. In fact, it will make you feel young again.”

And the best line: “vintage snowmobiling is considered the fastest growing segment of the sport”

Traffic to the site in December was up a whopping 43% – and accounts for the bandwidth availability having been exceeded once again. There is also 33% more visitors than December of 2006. Total pages views in December of 2007 was 2.47 million pages. Yes, 2.47 million. It would seem there are a lot of new people getting into the hobby. Welcome! And thanks to everyone. 2008 is going to be great. From myself, Doc, Brandon, Jim, J.D., Brett and everyone else who helps keep this site plugging along – we wish you all the very best for the new year.

Earlier today, visitors to the site were greeted with this happy message:

Way to go! There was so many people on the site around 3:30 today that you exceeded the available bandwidth. Traffic on the site is about 1/3 higher that it was this time last year… that means we are well on our way to another record setting year. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Very cool.

First – is this dead sexy or what? I’m not sure what looks better, the sled, the car, or just the photo with both in it!

A stunning tribute to a 1970 speed record holder, and a very fast 2007 car. Both black. Both scary sexy. Sled by Bill Adams of Arctic Restoration Specialties.

This is Vintage sledding superstars Edgar Hetten, Marlys Knutson (Polaris) and David Johnson – the man everyone still works for in Roseau, even if he is retired! The photo was taken at this years Hay-Days event when Edgar’s son Ronn visted the event with his new DVD’s from out of Edgar’s Archive. Those videos are now available in the store.

Edgar Hetteen, Marlys Knutson (sp?) and David Johnson