If you've had your snowmobile stored all year or just in case you forgot what to check, KLIM’s Snow Athlete Manager, Dustin Pancheri, shares the top tips for getting your sled ready and checking your avalanche safety gear before hitting the backcountry.

• 1. The first thing to check is fuel. Get old fuel out of a snowmobile and put good, clean non-ethanol 91 fuel in it. Bad fuel can cause runnability issues; it can plug things up, and it's easy to switch it out – suck as much out of the tank as possible and replace it with good non-ethanol 91 if it's available.

• 2. The second thing is to go through the clutches, clean them, inspect them, make sure all the rollers look good and that there's no damage or hard marks.

• 3. If the springs have quite a few miles on – around 1,500 – it's good to start with fresh springs. Or if they're more than a couple years old, it's good to replace them. 

• 4. Once the clutches are reinstalled, set the belt deflection, because this really affects the drivability right off of engagement, just how they kind of operate at slow speeds, how smooth they are. Typically, the OEMs will always give a recommended setting for the belt deflection, but the easiest way to do it is to lift the back of the snowball off the ground, and then raise the belt in the secondary and kind of test it until the snowmobile almost wants to start creeping on its own, the track wants to start moving, and just back it off a little bit, so the tracks not creeping. That's the optimal adjustment for the belt deflection. 

• 5. Clean and inspect the belt. If the belt has a lot of miles on it, it's a good idea to start with a fresh belt. These new belts they're so good, they'll go a long time, but the performance starts to go away so even though the belt might still function, they don't perform as well, and the RPM will start to drop. Some belts can last over 1,000 miles, but it's pretty rare. Somebody who is really performance-minded, especially up in the high altitude where we want all the horsepower we can get, using an old belt with high miles on it sacrifices performance.

• 6. It's always a good idea to check the wear items on the machine, so things like hyfaxes, tracks, skis, carbide runners. Those types of things slowly wear over time, especially hyfax. Most of the hyfax, at least the Polaris’, have a small little line all the way down the hyfax, and that's kind of a wear line. If that line isn’t visible, then the hyfax needs to be replaced – it’s borderline wearing through into the railing. 

• 7. Check the carbide runners – those are what help steer in icy conditions underneath the skis – it’s a solid steel long runner. It is possible, if riding a lot of pavement, to wear through those and damage the ski. But it also sacrifices handling, too. 

• 8. Check ski alignment, which rally affects how well the snowmobile handles down the trail. It's pretty easy to mess up ski alignment by tagging a rock or bouncing off a log or a tree, the ski alignment can change, and then the sled wants to dart or pull down the trail, so resetting the ski alignment to the manufacturer spec is always a good thing to do that can help with the handling of the machine. The ski alignment is usually between a quarter- and a half-inch of toe-out. 

• 9. For track tension and overall suspension maintenance, high mileage snowmobiles should have snow shocks rebuilt because the ride quality goes away. And then all the pivoting points typically have grease zerks – those should be greased in the spring when snowmobiles get put away to push the moisture out. But if not, definitely grease them prior to riding.

• 10. The last thing is make sure the snowmobile has a spare belt and spare spark plugs for riding, and go find the pow. Every OEM snowmobile has a spot to carry a spare belt. But if not, keep them in a tunnel bag. 

Top five tips for preparing your avalanche safety gear:

• 1. In both KLIM airbags – the Aspect 16 and the Atlas 26 avalanche packs, the capacitor has to be charged, and there's two ways to charge it. One, there's a USB cable that comes with all the bags. Two, put two double A batteries inside the unit and that will charge the capacitor. It'll actually charge the capacitor about two times. To start the season, the first thing to do is charge the bag, make sure there’s fresh batteries and then physically check the batteries on a battery tester. Don’t just guess that they're good and throw them in there.

• 2. The second thing to do after the bag is charged is put the bag on and physically deploy it to make sure everything is working properly. And then practice restowing the bag according to the directions. If the bag is accidentally deployed on the mountain, and you don't know how to do it, or you restow it improperly and then forget to go back and check it, then when you really do need it in an avalanche and it doesn't work properly, that's a problem. The time to practice is at home or in the garage or someplace where it's easy to understand the directions and practice it.

• 3. Once you've practiced with your bag, you’ve restowed it, you've put fresh batteries in it, you're all charged up, the bag has on/off switch, and when you turn your bag on, there's a series of lights that’'ll go through a check and then one light will come on and it'll either be red, yellow or green. Green indicates a full charge. Yellow indicates a partial charge. Red indicates low capacitor, and/or a flashing red, that means when it went through the check, something didn't check out right and there’s a problem. What is cool about the KLIM bag is when the bag turns on, there’s a green flashing light. If it's just in standby mode, it'll last a month and a half in standby mode. When you come home, never turn your bag off, that way you never forget to turn your avy bag on when you get to the mountain. And then when you have a set of spare batteries in there, which means if you go to load up your buddies and there’s a yellow light, swap the batteries and let the batteries recharge it on the way to the mountain so you have a green light when you get to the mountain. You can't do that with every bag, but you can do that with KLIM’s bags.

• 4. The last thing to understand with the bag is, it's really important when going out riding, the last step before riding is a departure check and within that departure check, that's where everybody in the group checks each other's avalanche safety gear to make sure everything's working properly and ready to be used. So turn to your riding buddy and ask, ‘Hey, make sure I have a shovel and a probe in my bag and make sure my bag’s turned on.’ ‘Yep, you're good to go.’ ‘OK, now let me see yours. Yeah, OK, you're good to go.' That’s how to avoid making a mistake: Do a departure check with the group.

• 5. The beacon, which the proper term for a beacon is a transceiver, should always be stored in the offseason with no batteries because batteries can go bad and leak out and then they'll ruin the transceiver. The first thing to do in the riding season is get a fresh set of batteries, put them in the transceiver, turn the transceiver on and test it with another transceiver to make sure it's working properly. Test the search function, test the send function, and then unlike the backpack, store the transceiver turned off, because those batteries will run down. The first thing to do when doing a departure check in the parking lot is check how much battery the transceiver has. If the transceiver has anything less than 70%, replace the batteries. Because for all we know you're gonna end up getting stuck in the mountain, and you're gonna spend the night and that beacons got to last you a couple days. So make sure that transceiver’s got enough energy to make it two full days.

More safety tips: 

• Keep a spare transceiver in your riding gear bag in case someone forgets one or in case yours happens to break. 

• Keep several spare sets of batteries – double A's and triple A's – in your gear bag at all times because lo and behold, it never fails, somebody forgets to turn their transceiver off last weekend and now the transceiver’s dead. 

• Never use anything but alkaline batteries in a transceiver. Absolutely do not use lithium batteries, because lead acid alkaline batteries slowly deplete its energy storage. The problem with lithium batteries is they dump; they'll show that they're good 60% or 70% and then all of a sudden they're zero. So because of that, it's really hard to gauge how much battery life there is. Therefore, do not use lithium batteries. We only use alkaline batteries. Alkaline batteries, it’ll go 70% 60% and 50% 40% 30%. It's consistent. 

• Practice deploying your probe and your shovel and putting your gear back on and being ready for a search. This is important because even the way you store the shovel in your backpack makes a difference in how fast you can get it out. If you store it so that the button on the handle is the wrong way, then that's five seconds more you’'ve got to do to switch that handle around so it’ll go in my shovel.

• Never put anything else inside the compartment that holds the safety equipment. Only have the probe and the shovel, nothing else. Don’t have a pair of gloves in there, don't have snacks, because if you've got to get that stuff out fast, you don't want to be having to get around stuff you need to be able to deploy your equipment fast. 

• Other things that are also considered safety equipment are a saw and a radio and a GPS, and check the function of each one of those items before you need it.