The Buried Snowcat on the Boundary Ridge

By George L. Nitti On a wind-scoured ridge above a Montana ski area, a bright red snowcat belonging to the National Weather Service sat half-buried in stiff, wind-packed snow. It had broken down months earlier near a remote weather station and become entombed under six to seven feet of drifted white snow. Now, the agency needed it back.

They called Iron Horse Towing, one of the few operators in the region with the machines and experience to attempt a high-angle snowcat recovery.

Scott Wolff brought two LMC 1800 snowcats, each outfitted with large gateway blades and custom modifications for deep-snow operations. Reaching the stranded machine meant carving a quarter-mile corridor through crusted drifts thick enough to support a standing man.

“This kind of snow is nothing like clearing a driveway,” said Wolff. “It’s dense, it’s layered, and it fights you. In the pictures, you can see how deep the snow is and crusty and nasty. I mean it was drifted on that ridge probably six or seven feet deep, and anytime snow drifts like that, it gets to be really stiff.”

When the crew finally reached the buried weather-service cat, they discovered it was positioned on a slope with an unforgiving drop below. Wolff fabricated a specialized drawbar attachment so one of his snowcats could control the descent from the rear while the second pulled from the front. “I had to make a special drawbar attachment for it so we could hook my snowcat at the back of their snowcat and then the other snowcat in the front…so we could control it on the way down because these hills are insanely steep,” he said.

In the photos he shared, three machines are tethered in a train, inching down the mountain with the broken cat suspended between them like a pendulum on tracks. Behind them, on the far ridge line, the cluster of antennas they’d started from loomed against the sky—proof of just how far up the mountain the recovery had begun.

“One of my biggest fears is a breakdown of my own or getting stuck…It takes a very special skilled operator to operate these things in these areas,” Wolff said. The descent was slow, deliberate, and nerve-racking. A wrong throttle input could slide the entire recovery chain downhill. After hours of controlled movement, the team reached a lower landing where normal travel became possible.

The whole job stretched nearly twelve hours.

Snowcat recoveries pay well, Wolff admitted, but not every stranded driver can afford them. “These machines cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the terrain is dangerous. Some folks try to bargain it down, but I can’t run a cat twenty miles into the backcountry for whatever cash they have in their pocket.”

Still, he loves the work. “These are once-in-a-career jobs for most people. For us, it’s every season.”