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It's a little lengthy, thought i'd do a little write up, don't be too harsh on me.
A little about myself, I’m 33 years old, I’ve been riding since I was 3, I’m from MN, ride mostly cross-country type terrain- Mixture of trails, and ditch lines in the north woods. Lots of side hilling, and playing in meadows/drift lines. I’ve ridden around 24,000 miles in my life. For the sake of this read, think Novice in the mountains, but very experienced on shorter skid sleds.
Day one, I got selected to drive the Rev-XM. Picked it up, first thing I noticed is it handles nothing like my XP cross country sled. In fact a little terrifying on the trail up to the back-country. Once in the back-country I was surprised how well these sleds stay on top of the snow, that 1-2ft felt like 6 inches of powder. The sled was easy to roll on its side, but for me was hard at first to stay there, the tipping point/rotation was much different than my shorty. It tips sideways, and not back and sideways like I’m used to… Definitely a learning curve the first day. Not sure if on purpose, or accident but this was the most technical day of riding with the fewest breaks. After about 2 hours on the sled I really felt like I was getting the hang of it…. In fact as we rotated sleds a few times, I grew more and more confident. We did a few climbs very fun sled, keeps the nose down and charges up the hills…. We ended up getting very fatigued that day, and then the M800 crapped the bed…. Ran out of gas, a bit alarming because both the Etec and Polaris were over half tank… How could that be?.... more to come…. Second half of the day was working on recovering the M, tried tipping sleds on side to get gas in Gatorade bottles to fill the M up… ended up heading back to gown buying a Jerry that leaked and carrying it in my backpack back to get the M (26 miles one way)…. was a fun day but a ton of work.
2nd day. 6 inches of fresh snow. My day on the Pro-R…. After about 20 pulls she fired to life (no lie)…. Let it warm up a little, hopped on and with a few clunks and a bang we were off and down the road… Topped off the tank, surprisingly the M only took 6 gallons of fuel this AM, plus the 2 we tossed in it in the BC, hmmmm that doesn’t add up to 11?!?!?!?! . Anyway about half way out of town we needed to relieve ourselves alongside the trail…. Slowed down… clunk bang, clunk bang, bang, slight boom, into a clunk….. The Pro just died…. I’m no clutch expert but it was locked open, only way to start it was to lift the track, get it spinning, then ride brake/gas to keep it running at slow speeds, back to rental office… This is the only ’13 they had, no problem I’ll take the ’12. Got up to the back-country, by far the warmest ride of the three sleds, and actually wasn’t horrifying on the trails to get there. Once in the back-country I noticed my boots are wider than the running boards… where are those nice boards from yesterdays sled with no snow build-up? After a few carves everything was caked with snow, this is the sled I was most looking forward to riding, and it was the hardest one for me…. I kept falling off, the boards would cake over, and my boot would slip right off. At one point as I was lying in a pile of snow with the Pro slowly creeping away when I saw the XM of yesterday dance by me in beautiful grace. The rider with both feet planted on each running board buried it to the left (did a 180), then to the right (did a 180) and off it went over the meadow. At this point it was approaching lunch and the M800 was now out of gas for the day, just enough to get back, well the RMK, and XM were still at ¾ so we ended up parking the M and switching on/off between the other two… Back on the XM, today I was much more confident, was picking much more technical side-hills, downhill turn ups/out, and just having a blast carving with it…. I never did get the hang of the Pro, and somehow I ended up riding the XM the rest of the day…. Found that you really only need to start with a slight counter steer to get the weight moving left/right, then just put pressure on that board to carve/side hill in that direction, definitely the easiest of the three sleds.
Day 3, Blue bird day, I walked out to the XM, thinking it’s going to be a good day but my buddy was sitting on it, he gave me the M800’s key and told me to ride that today… 8 Pulls later and it roared to life…. Topped it off, and up the hill we went…. The only way I can describe this sled is like this…. It’s much like when you turn 21, head to the bar and are taken home by a cute 35 year old …. It’s great in every way, you are proud, can’t wait to tell your buddies, looks great, but the next morning you want nothing to do with her issues…. Get on the gas and the track would trench, the skis would dig deep in the snow, it basically did everything wrong but on that day it was a blast. Super easy to initiate the turn/carve, with the trenching track made cat-walks a blast. I couldn’t get enough, but just like that cougar after about an hour-hour and a half… it was out of gas and needed to rest.
Well that’s it, Favorite sled to ride was the M800, absolute blast, had the lowest starting expectations, but as you can see it robbed us of allot of riding time, over those three days, possible faulty fuel pick up in the tank???? Who knows, it’s a Cat, could be anything.…
Next favorite was the XM, best all-around sled, did everything very well for this novice guy, with the exception of the dash letting me know the brake was on when it clearly wasn’t, sled was flawless. Zero down time on this sled.
Least favorite, the Pro-R, had the highest expectation for this sled, maybe it's overhyped????, just wasn’t for me or I wasn’t for it, at least the 12 I rode wasn’t… Couldn’t figure it out, it kept bucking me.. And like the M, robbed us of a lot of valuable time on the snow… no good.
