Snowbikes!

How are hard core dirtbikers in the snowbelt beating cabin fever? With a snowbike conversion, of course.

Story and Photos by Matt Allred
Some dirtbikers will go to great lengths to keep on doing it in the dirt, even if that dirt is covered by a thick blanket of snow.

If you live in the Rocky Mountains, the Snowbelt or any other place where the white stuff comes down in buckets, you know what we’re talking about It comes down to squeezing in every last riding session before your favorite trail become impassible. After that, if you want to ride, you either stud-up a set of tires to get in a little ice riding action on your local frozen lake or park your dirtbike for the winter and content yourself with watching supercross on television—the choices are limited.

But there is a growing legion of hard cores who refuse to let heavy snow end their riding season. They take their 450cc thumper or 250-300cc two-stroke, turn it into a snowbike and have a blast while railing snow banks, climbing insane hills and pulling off big air.
Only a handful of snowbike kit manufacturers exist, and Timbersled is one of the top manufacturers in the sport. Timbersled wasn’t the first manufacturer to come along, but the company has earned a solid reputation for developing a durable kit that’s built for serious snowbiking fun.

Timbersled Products, Inc., founder Allen Mangum began designing and testing the Mountain Horse kit about 8 years ago. Originally, the rear suspension was a narrowed-up snowmobile rear suspension, which Timbersled designed and built for long-track snowmobiles. Called the “Mountain Tamer” back then, it was based on a proven aftermarket (non-OEM) rear snowmobile suspension that found popularity among mountain sled riders. The challenge Mangum and his design staff had to overcome in adapting the design for motorcycle use was how to drive the track from a front horizontal drive shaft rather than stretching the drive chain to a horizontal drive shaft located at the rear. Mangum and his trusty staff figured out the problem, and their new design began to compete with the 2Moto snowbike kit just as the snowbike movement began to blossom. The market potential was enough to catch the eye of powersports industry giant Polaris, which acquired Timbersled in April of 2015.

Now as then, Timbersled continues to devote considerable R&D time and resources into upgrading its Mountain Horse kits; the latest version is vastly improved over earlier generations. Over past few years, Timbersled has dialed-in the Mountain Horse’s overall length, shocks and switched to a more convex track. For 2016, there are three basic kit models offered with a number of options available within each kit.