A Cooter shoots the gap between the Peninsula and Lassen View Resort

As a general rule I try to keep my head down on Labor Day -- ordinarily Lassen View Resort would be exactly the sort of place I would like to avoid. I enjoy wide open spaces with a minimum of people and a double minimum of stupid people and for whatever reason, Labor Day seems to bring both out in numbers.

I mean, you've had all summer and you just now wrap stuff up.

Whatever.

This being a special day I was hanging out by the lake on Labor Day killing time before our burger was ready. As a relative unknown to this particular scene its hard to say whether the spectacle before me was just part of the regular hooliganism or meant to be some sort of final salute.

Across the northeast shore came this horrific roar. Horrific even given the loudest of watercraft I've seen out there. Louder than even the most muscled boat I've seen out on the lake hauling at full tilt.

It was an angry, frantic note, and it seemed to be coming from a vessel no larger than a personal watercraft and man was it flying. As it grew closer, I could see it was no jet ski, no wetbike, no personal watercraft.

This was a snowmobile.

A snowmobile at full tilt, rocking as if out of control and perhaps it was.

Rough path of the snowmobile according to on-site accounts. Map courtesy Google Maps.

I'd seen this sort of thing on television, but usually as some early spring stunt across a small pond. This, however was a Major Lake and if you believed the stories a fairly major distance. The word on the street was that the trip started at Big Springs, nearly a mile across the lake as the crow flies, a close shore skim winding up nearly nicking the Hamilton Branch inlet.

But here he was, meshback cap hung with a complete lack of irony upon his head, high-visibility red bumper trailing behind him from nylon dock line to all better map the wreckage when he eventually sunk -- but he hadn't sunk.

There he was whipping dangerously close to a flock of boats who let up a whoop as he neared shore. They were there to see him land! The driver leaned the snowmobile over and drove it full up onto the hard rock beach made of round stones larger than a man's fist.

You'd think after such a daredevil stunt he'd accept the congratulations from onlookers, grab a brew, whoop it up. Instead he tended quietly to his ride for a few moments before settling down in a nearby beach chair as if perhaps this was the sort of thing he did every day of the week.

Cooter modestly accepts the congratulations of the land lubbers who saw him ashore

For reasons unknown, maybe because they were there and so was the lake and there was still enough time to tune up the rides after the fact before snow season , these three guys decided to leave Big Springs aboard their snowmobiles and motor across the lake. Along the way two snowmobiles succumbed to the limitations of their design and were lost to the lake.

Originally they'd planned on landing on the boat ramp but when the moment arrived a boat trailer was in the process of launching when the lone snowmobiler completed his course.

Later in the afternoon one of the two sunken snowmobiles was trailered past the 'Hut. The water sloshing behind the headlight screen was not surprising.

Neither was the Raiders sticker on the windscreen.