I Took An Open Air 4×4 Off-Roading In Icy Winter And Here’s Why You Should Too

Last weekend, I did something that seemed like a dumb idea. The temperature was a balmy 17 degrees (Fahrenheit, not Celsius), and I thought it was a great time to take a ridiculously high-powered side-by-side out for a drive. Somehow, not only did I not die, but I had an off-roading experience unlike any other. Here’s why you should give winter wheeling a try.

I can be a bit of a stubborn lass. I don’t like giving up my summer activities even when snow is falling. I’ll still ride a motorcycle through an entire Midwestern winter and so long as a lake is at least 45 degrees I’ll still jump in with glee, at least for a short swim. But one thing I haven’t really done is wintertime off-roading. Admittedly, it has always seemed to be more miserable than fun. But, last weekend I decided to try something new and I’m glad I did.

The closest I’ve come to wheeling in the winter was last November when I joined David Tracy and a bunch of readers at Holly Oaks ORV Park near Detroit. David had his $700 Chevrolet Tracker while I had my trusty but rusty $1,700 Volkswagen Touareg VR6. But here’s the thing, that wasn’t a proper winter run. It was still warm enough to get away with wearing a hoodie. The ground was still soft and there was plenty of water to play around in. That was definitely a fall run. At the same time, all of us were driving enclosed vehicles with toasty heaters, anyway.

I was not prepared for what a real winter run would feel like.

The folks of BRP have loaned me a Can-Am Maverick R X RS with Smart-Shox. This is basically the Koenigsegg of side-by-sides. It’s a $44,299 and 240 turbocharged horsepower middle finger to all things sensible. It’s stupid quick, stupid powerful, stupid capable, and just looks crazy with its bizarre control arms. Resident suspension engineer Huibert Mees wrote an excellent breakdown of this machine’s suspension and you should click here to read it.

I’ll have a proper review of the unit soon. This is just going to be what it’s like taking the mad machine for a wintertime speed run at an off-road park.

Off-Roading In Illinois Sort Of Sucks

The off-roading situation here in Illinois is really sad. There was once a time when there were a lot of off-road parks in Illinois and so many of them were open to all kinds of vehicles from Jeeps and side-by-sides to motorcycles and your Honda Civic beater. Unfortunately, many of these parks have either closed down or have fallen on hard financial times and require tapping into the state’s Off-Highway Vehicle Grant Program.

That latter one sounds good until you realize that a park taking DNR grant money is required to close off its terrain to road-legal vehicles. Sadly, that means many people with Jeeps and such usually end up driving to Indiana, Michigan, or northern Wisconsin to get in any real wheeling. So, owning an ATV, dirt bike, or a side-by-side in northern Illinois can be a good thing if you don’t want to have to do a road trip every time you want to go off-road.

In my case, having the Maverick on hand meant that I could go off-roading at Rocky Glen OHV in Rockford, only an hour from home. This park sits on a 120-acre property and advertises some 20 miles of tight trails plus four high-speed tracks. I already got to take the Maverick to a park where I got to let it rip at full throttle. Now, it was time to test out its tight trail performance.

Braving The Cold

I hitched up the loaner trailer to a borrowed GMC Yukon and drove out to Rocky Glen OHV. The thermometer never raised above 20 degrees. When I arrived, I was surprised to see about five other people unloading rigs to have some fun. Now, a grand total of about six people is nothing for a large off-road park. However, I wasn’t surprised. Taking an ATV, side-by-side, or dirt bike wheeling is more of a summer activity. People are done mudding for the year, now it’s time to break out the sleds. But a few of us were still willing to brave the weather for one last jaunt on rubber tires.

As I said before I have not done any real off-roading in the winter, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t know how to be prepared. Back in January, I rode snowmobiles on top of a mountain and through Camp Hale in Colorado. This required me to be bundled up in snowmobile gear. I figured the same gear used for snowmobiling was going to work here. So, I donned the overalls, the toasty coat, gloves, balaclava, and boots.

I quickly figured out two major problems. The first was that snowmobile boots do not work at all in the tiny pedalbox of a side-by-side. The boots are so thick that you end up pressing the throttle and the brake at the same time. I found switching to a standard insulated winter boot to be a good substitute there. The balaclava also seemed to restrict my head’s range of motion while I was sitting in the Maverick. So I tossed that and just kept my helmet visor closed. Overall, I felt pretty darn toasty for such a cold day.

It’s at this point I will note that despite the Can-Am Maverick R X RS and its somewhat ridiculous price tag, it’s pretty short on standard comfort items. It has an infotainment screen that says it plays music, but the rig has no speakers to emit any sound. The seats are also just regular side-by-side seats without any goodies. I loved the heated and cooled seats of the Polaris Slingshot R and think something similar would have been welcome here. Instead, my throne was just as cold as everything else.

Oh well, that’s why I dressed up like Bibendum!

Everything Is Frozen

Hitting the trails was immediately a very different experience than I have ever been through before. By now, it’s been cold enough that the ground was frozen solid. When you go off-roading you’ll notice that there’s usually some give to the terrain. Your tires will usually dig in just a little and to a degree, I think that helps smooth things out a bit.

In this case, the ground was so hard and so frozen that the Maverick drove across the dirt like it was asphalt. Things were so frozen out there that I didn’t even kick up a cloud of dust behind me. The only way I got any kind of drama was by doing a donut or a four-wheel burnout. Only once the tires ripped past the frozen stuff did the dirt give familiar behavior.

I started my day by first hitting some tight trails. Signs at the park warned me about a mud hole that was over 3 feet deep. That sounded like a ton of fun! I quickly drove down the trail to find out that yep, that was all frozen up, too. The ground was hard and frozen all of the way through. The mud hole had frozen hard enough that I just drove on top of it like it wasn’t even there.

This was pretty much the theme of the day. Pretty much every obstacle that would normally be a challenge was now frozen and barely a speed bump for the Maverick. I would point the rig at tall slopes and drive right up them without even needing to click into four-wheel-drive or needing to lock the rear differential. The Maverick was already ridiculously capable, but everything being just frozen enough made this wheeling on easy mode.

Admittedly, I was pretty disappointed at the lack of a challenge, but there was an unintended benefit. Sometimes, I pulled off the side of the trail, turned off the machine, and just stood there. If this were summertime, you’d hear Harley-Davidsons roaring off in the distance and two-stroke dirt bikes buzzing behind your head.

On that day there was a still quiet that you just don’t get in the summertime. I stood at a riverbank as fatally cold water lapped up against building ice on the shoreline. It was a sort of peace I would normally have to go to the Pacific Northwest to find.

I then turned back toward the park. Three of the other people already broke their rigs and the two remaining dirt bikes were too far away for me to even hear them. Instead, it was just a gentle rustle of trees slowly swaying in the frosty breeze followed by the crunch of dead leaves under my boots. I normally hate winter, but this was good. I wanted to pitch a chair, grab a cold one, and waste the time away. Mind you, the thermometer indicated a brisk 19 degrees by this point, and those units are in Fahrenheit.

Frozen Off-Roading Is Different

Once I stopped dreaming, I hopped into the Maverick, fired up its mighty engine, and punched the throttle as a turbocharger spooled up just within earshot. The power delivery of the Maverick is instant and brutal. You don’t get a chance to really think about what you’ve done or where you’re going because you’re hitting 60 mph at legitimate sports car quickness and the speedometer is continuing to rise almost faster than it can keep up with. I’ve driven wicked fast side-by-sides before and somehow this is even faster. You could outrun real cars with this thing and it might not be even close. Oh, and it has a really nice DCT rather than the typical lame CVTs these things usually have, but I’ll save that for the real review.

What was intensely fun was the Maverick’s battle for traction. I would punch the throttle, sending all four wheels spooling up like that turbo and the vehicle rocketing forward. In the summer, even a high-powered side-by-side would hook up as it continued thundering down the trail ahead. This time? Well, everything was frozen. So, even as the speedometer hit 75 mph in just a handful of seconds I felt like the Maverick was floating and its oscillations told me that its tires might not have had the best traction on the frozen ground. I am equal parts daredevil and dumb, so this was exhilarating.

I did it over and over, rushing through the frozen air with glee. My gear choices largely made sense. My core was so blazing hot that I had to open my jacket. However, my head started getting a little cold because I took off the balaclava and let a little skin show. Generally, you never want skin to show on a terribly cold day like this one, so I eventually turned down the taps a little.

Something that was a bit of unexpected fun was driving through what would normally have been huge water crossings and mud holes. All of these areas were frozen, but not quite frozen enough. So, the Maverick would either skid uncontrollably across the ice, or fall through, splashing my body and helmet with mud water that instantly froze.

This was far more fascinating than these same holes would have been during the summer. In the summer, you’d just click into four-wheel-drive, maybe put it into low range, and enjoy making a huge splash. This time, I put it into 4Lo, broke through the ice, and used brute force to keep breaking through chunks of ice to get to the other side. One time, I got stuck in an iced-over mud hole. I stopped, reversed, then hit the ice again with ramming speed. When I reached the other side I took this picture. Look how thick the ice was!

This was the same off-roading I knew and loved, but different. I still conquered hills and rocks, but the terrain felt a lot harder and tighter than it did during the summer. For the Maverick it must have been the off-roading equivalent of driving around a parking lot. This machine has so much capability that you have to drive it at the limit to even begin to challenge it. Otherwise, you can basically beat every obstacle in an off-road park just off idle.

Heck, the Maverick was so fast that I took it onto a dirt bike track and found myself outrunning the couple of dirtbikes by a wide margin. I got bigger airtime jumps, too.

Let It Go

Honestly, the best part about all of this is that it felt as if I owned the park that day. There were so few other people out there that I was essentially by myself. Yet, I still had a ton of fun. The hardest part was realizing that the sun went down at 4:30 pm, a time when, during the summer, things would only be heating up at an off-road event.

At the end of the day, I was glad that I did it. I somehow caught a cold that weekend. I don’t know how or why, but everything I did was totally worth it. Going wheeling in the winter was a total blast and I recommend that everyone do it at least once. It was different enough to make things exciting all over again. The trails weren’t clogged up with other people, the air wasn’t full of engines banging off of rev limiters, there was no dust, no pets getting into your path, nobody slamming beers, and things were just chill, and I mean that in both ways.

If you ever get the chance, go on a winter off-roading run. You’ll have a chilly blast. But next time, I might take something a bit less overpowered because I like being challenged.