A $125000 snow machine is the latest luxury vehicle for ...

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Way back in the snow-choked mountains, miles from any road, curb appeal is still a thing.

Consider the Tucker Sno-Cat.

It sits on four treads, seemingly designed for a tank, that nevertheless appear to float atop fluffy snow that&#;s swimming pools-deep. The cab is painted an industrial orange that contrasts cartoonishly against the cottony landscape.

A Tucker, like all great vehicles, is a cross between a serious machine &#; purpose-built for a job &#; and a child&#;s toy. It&#;s difficult to look at one and not feel an urge to climb inside, crank up the heater, and drive somewhere or, rather, nowhere in particular.

Mark Abma, a professional skier who lives in British Columbia, knows that feeling well. For years, he experienced it every time he&#;d swing by his buddy&#;s welding shop and glance at the old Tucker rusting away in the back lot.

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Abma travels most of the year and is one of very few people paid to ride around in helicopters hunting fresh powder, yet he committed much of last winter to resurrecting the long sleeping snowcat.

&#;I&#;d been asking for 10 years what it would take to get it running,&#; he says. &#;We finally decided to make a go of it.&#;

With the help of several unpaid volunteers, Abma spent five months refurbishing the 48-year-old machine. Now, when he isn&#;t flying into some remote spine of snow in Alaska, Abma cranks up his Tucker, drives up a snow-packed ravine, and spends his days hiking up and skiing back to the &#;cat.

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&#;It&#;s kind of a mobile base camp,&#; he says of the ride, which tops out at 5 mph. &#;It&#;s definitely not about trying to get anywhere fast.&#;

Abma, it turns out, is not alone in his ardor. Demand for Tucker Sno-Cats &#; both new and used &#; is peaking, thanks to affluent landowners, classic collectors and gearheads with a love of snow. In the world of transportation, this is one of the most fascinating niche markets at the moment.

Tucker is celebrating its 75th year cranking out snow machines from its headquarters in Medford, Ore. It&#;s best known for outfitting the first overland crossing of the Antarctic in . Four of its machines made the trip under the command of Vivian Fuchs, navigating through brutal cold and several dicey situations.

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Over the years, Tucker&#;s rivals either went out of business or slowly evolved their vehicles for ski resorts that needed to comb out acres of corduroy runs. Treads got wider and heavier. Tucker, however, didn&#;t go that route: It stuck to making machines with four narrower treads that articulate to drive independently, perching on the snow like an agile animal. (Hence, the &#;cat&#; moniker.)

On most of its machines, including Abma&#;s, the treads wrap around hollow pontoons made of steel or fiberglass, so the rigs float on powder like a party boat on a lake. As such, Tuckers are best suited to traveling over snow, rather than tamping it down, which has turned out to be a useful hedge against global warming and the economic downturns that buffet the global ski industry.

Today the company makes 50 to 100 machines a year and is run by Marilee Tucker Sullivan, granddaughter of founder E.M. Tucker.

&#;We&#;re a niche company,&#; Sullivan says, &#;and it&#;s worked out quite well for us.&#;

Tucker&#;s best customers include the U.S. military, oil drilling crews in Alaska and North Dakota, and utilities that need to service snow-blitzed power lines. This year, Tucker drew almost $600,000 in government contracts, including an order to service seven of its machines at the U.S. Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in California&#;s Sierra Nevada.

The fastest-growing group of customers, however, is private landowners who want to get to their mountain retreats in style. Snowmobiles, after all, are cold and relatively crappy for listening to classical music.

The most popular personal Sno-Cat is Tucker&#;s Xtra Lite, an entry-level rig that starts at $125,000.

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&#;From there, I tell my customers, the sky&#;s the limit,&#; says John Meilicke, the company&#;s sales manager. A few months ago, a customer with a spread near Lake Tahoe ordered a Tucker in Ferrari red. Meilicke was happy to swap out the company&#;s trademark orange, for a price.

The smart money is arguably on the older machines, which are more affordable and appreciating quickly. The company often built machines to custom specifications and kept poor records, so there is no telling how many vintage Tuckers are rusting away in barns and weed-choked lots. The number, though, is low; Meilicke estimates a couple thousand, at most.

Jesse Cook, who runs an auto shop near Portland, Ore., owns 10 of them in various states of resurrection. Cook has lots of practice fixing and flipping cars, but he can&#;t quite bring himself to sell one of his Tuckers.

&#;It&#;s definitely a sickness,&#; he says. &#;If you&#;re in the Tucker world, they say, &#;You&#;ve been drinking too much orange Kool-Aid.&#;&#;

Cook uses all of his machines, towing them up to the logging roads around Mt. Hood and driving off into the wilderness. &#;It&#;s like a mix of everything I love together,&#; he explains. &#;I love the build, the restoration, and I love winter.&#;

The downsides: Tuckers tend to be noisy, get abysmal gas mileage and are extremely hard to track down.

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&#;I don&#;t know where you&#;d find one,&#; Cook says. &#;And if I did, I wouldn&#;t tell you, because I&#;d go buy it for myself.&#;

The scarcity, in part, has fueled demand. Cook says values for vintage Tucker Sno-Cats have tripled in the past five years, with prices ranging from $10,000 for a rust-frozen heap to well above $100,000 for a fully restored rig. The most-coveted models include the so-called &#;rock &#;n&#; roll&#; machines that crossed the Antarctic.

Tucker is cashing in on its history as well. Three years ago, the company started a service reselling and refurbishing old machines. Headed by Jeff McNeil, the founder&#;s great-grandson, it has become one of the company&#;s most profitable lines of business.

Meanwhile, two secretive collectors have cornered the market. The Tucker fraternity won&#;t divulge their names but suspect the men have amassed more than 200 vintage Tuckers.

&#;They are more precious to them than cars,&#; McNeil says. &#;They are fanatics.&#;

Refurbishing a Tucker is easier than one might think. The engines were sourced from various places over the years, but Tucker favored Chrysler&#;s flat-head six-cylinder, which is still easy to find. Larger Tuckers were bolted to big, eight-cylinder Dodge Hemis, another engine produced en masse. Cabins were similarly simple, aluminum pods that approximate the fuselage of a World War II bomber.

Would-be buyers, however, should look carefully at the tracks and pontoons. The fiberglass tends to crack, and replacing a full set of rollers can cost $12,000.

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When McNeil isn&#;t working in the shop, he spends much of his time on Google Earth, hunting satellite footage for vehicles his ancestors made decades ago.

&#;Sometimes you can see them sitting in yards, abandoned,&#; he says. &#;Then you just start calling people to see if they are interested in selling them.&#;

Stock writes for Bloomberg.

Vail Mountain uses both PistenBully and Prinoth snowcats to groom its slopes. The workhorse Prinoth Bison X, which I rode in with Stephen Becht, is made in Italy, costs more than a Ferrari F8 Spider (about $350,000), weighs 23,000 pounds, and has 410 horsepower. It completes most of its work at six to eight miles per hour. To break down its key components and why each is integral to the overall job, we enlisted Jesse Gibson, Prinoth&#;s regional manager in Grand Junction.

JOYSTICK

The all-electric joystick (an upgrade over the hydraulic systems of yore) controls everything on the blade and almost everything on the tiller. Gibson calls it &#;very operator intuitive. It could run virtually everything on the cat at the same time if you had enough fingers to push the buttons.&#;

CAB

With heated glass windows, climate control, a 13-inch futuristic touch-screen control panel, and heated seats with air-ride suspension, this is not your grandpa&#;s snowcat cockpit. The three-person compartment is reinforced so that it won&#;t crush under the cat&#;s weight in the event of a rollover, but that rarely happens thanks to its low center of gravity.

TILLER

The tiller&#;s role is to leave the corduroy finish that guests like so much. It refines the rough surface left by the blade and tracks, tooling it with hundreds of grooves, like the teeth of a comb, which are less than an inch deep.

BLADE

Up to 18 feet wide, the blade moves in 12 different directions. It loosens and levels the snow with a serrated bottom edge. The driver constantly adjusts the blade&#;s height and angle so it drags over the surface, creating a rolling wave of snow to fill in thin spots.

TRACKS

The snowcat&#;s tank-like treads are made up of 66-inch-wide steel bars that grip the snow and provide propulsion and braking. The tracks are about four inches deep, but still need a hard surface to grab. They help churn up the snow for the tiller too.

CUTTER BARS

These are the two red coiled bars under the back of the cat. They chew up the snow once more before evenly distributing it across the tiller. The driver can adjust how fast the cutter bars are spinning to enhance the snow&#;s consistency.

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