Palmer hill climber crowned king

PALMER — Snowmachine hill climbers just want the view from the top. That's why Palmer's Marty Mobley races snowmachines uphill. But he does not launch from an ordinary, run-of-the-mill sled.

Mobley's modified motor monster is equipped with a 185-horsepower, 800cc engine, and sits about half a foot higher than a stock racing machine. It has screw-tipped, two-and-a-quarter-inch fingers on his paddle track for those really rocky outcroppings. The seat is suspended with twice as much travel as his stock Polaris 600 racing sled, giving Mobley plenty of room to recoil from those really nasty landings. The machine is more than two hundred pounds lighter than his stock Polaris sled, but supports an additional 60 horsepower.

The trick to riding high is to ride light, Mobley said.

"The steeper, rougher and uglier, the better," Mobley said at his Palmer shop on Tuesday. "Over the roughest, rockiest, nastiest stuff. That's when I prevail."

The machine on which he rides has no name because it is a homemade sled, "built from the ground up," he said. "It has $3,000 worth of titanium alone."

Titanium is an ultra-light metal with super strength and a long memory. It's designed for hard pack, he said.

"This is the meanest sled in the state, without a doubt," Mobley said. "We're doing some things with snowmachines that other dealerships don't even know what we're doing. They're stuck on the lake still."

He loaded up his two snowmachines, his wife, Alice, and his two sons, Austin, 2, and Michael, 11, and traveled to Valdez for the Mountain Man competition on April 7-8.

After 18 trips up Odyssey Mountain, he racked up enough wins to bring home the Mountain Man Hill Climb Championship for the third straight year, including a final 40-second ascent up its 50-degree slopes.

While making a name for himself within the state, many Outside race organizers try to get Mobley to race in their races. One of the most prestigious hill-climbing races in the country takes place in Jackson Hole, Wyo., every spring. Mobley claims to be the only Alaskan who has been invited to the event, and he has been invited to it for three straight years.

Mobley works as a parts manager for Hartley Motors' Honda shop on the Parks Highway, but his mission is to earn Lower 48 respect for Alaska's hill climbers.

"I want to let people in the Lower 48 know that Alaska has some of the best snowmachiners in the world," Mobley said. "I'm almost there."

A lot of people don't like hill climbers because of the bad rap they get from high-marking amateurs who ignore avalanche safety rules, he said.

Mobley goes out of his way to ride up to amateur risk takers to tell them "highmarking doesn't take any talent," telling them to refrain from continuing their acts of stupidity.

"I lost my best friend Aaron Arthur in the Turnagain avalanche," he said. "He was my riding partner. We were up there shooting a movie at the time. The hill climb was a real close time for us. Through that, we gained much knowledge of avalanche safety."

Arthur was one of six snowmachiners killed in a March 21, 1999 Turnagain Pass avalanche. He was buried under a giant slab of snow for two months before searchers were able to recover his body.

One way Mobley, his riding partners and his son, Michael, try to prevent snowmachine accidents is to regularly meet and communicate while riding in the mountains in order to identify the dangerous spots. Places like Hatcher and Turnagain passes, which both have prime snowmachine conditions right now, have many avalanche dangers in the spring, he said.

The key to avalanche safety is to stop at a safe place and, as a group, determine which slopes to stay away from, Mobley said.

"The entire group has to agree," he said. "[Most] slides are going to happen in the same spot. We know what snow is going to slide. It's prime time right now, just stay off the sun facing slopes."

Mobley said you won't see any of his hill-climbing friends doing high-marking loop-the-loops on the mountain sides, either.

"The guys that are experienced riders go straight to the top of the hill," he said. "If they're climbing on a hill, they plan on going to the top."