Snowmobile Daredevils: How Wild Stunts, Races, and Roadshows Sold the Snowmobile Dream

Buckle up for a thrilling ride through winter history with Snowmobile Daredevils. It's the action-packed story of how daredevil feats and grassroots races turned a quirky invention into a multimillion-dollar industry by the end of the 1960s.

Feel the ice-cold rush of epic adventures from the 1960 Polaris 1200-mile Alaskan trek, to the 1968 Plaisted expedition with Ski-Doo snowmobiles, which became the first undisputed surface journey to the North Pole.

The story of Snowmobile Daredevils starts in the early 20th century. From those first patents, it only took 50 years for motorized sleighs, tracked car conversions, snowplanes, and the motor toboggan to evolve into modern sleds. Between 1955 and 1960, today's big brands: Polaris, Ski-Doo, and Arctic Cat, all arrived on the scene.

Once snowmobile production picked up speed, the race was on. Manufacturers relied on the marketing mantra of "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday." Indeed, the 1960s were the dawn of legendary snowmobile races, including the Canadian Power Toboggan Championships, the Eagle River World Championship Derby, the grueling I-500 endurance race, and the Midnight Sun cross-country race from Anchorage to Fairbanks.

And no marketing stunt has ever out-classed the 1969 Polaris Thrill team. Stunt drivers performed a gravity-defying loop-the-loop with snowmobiles, jumped through a wall of flames, and more, to market the brand.