I few years ago I was getting ready to go to work at the Bugaboos during a snow storm in Golden.  I had some time so I drove in to town to get some more diesel for our back up generator.  We were living off the grid at the time.  I couldn’t make it back up the road to the house in my Golf, so I left it on the road and walked up to the house.  My plan was to grab the snowmachine, drive down to the car with my luggage, pick up the diesel can, drive to the house, then walk back to the car and go to work.  I started loading my stuff on to the snowmachine.  I strapped my ski pack into the little basket behind the seat and decided to just put my duffel on the seat in front of me.  Everything looked good.  I started driving down the road, no troubles.  I got to the first right hand switchback in the road and all hell broke loose.  Suddenly the machine was revving at full throttle and hurling itself over the road bank, into the air,  into the forest.  I didn’t have time to steer or grab the brakes.  I just went with it and leaned away from the first tree I was about to hit.  I flew over the handlebars as the snowmachine hit the tree, then dropped between trees to the frozen ground.  I kept rolling because I thought the machine would fall on me.  Luckily, one ski of the machine hung up on the tree it hit which kept it from falling on me.  I lay there stunned for a moment while I gingerly assessed my right hip.  Everything seemed OK.  I slowly got up and took in the snowmachine wedged in the tree.  I collected my baggage that was scattered in the snow.  I had to get to work, but I didn’t want Heidi to come home to this scene either.  Pulling on the machine didn’t do any good, it was really wedged in there.  I decided to limp to the house to get a chainsaw to cut the tree down.  I figured I wouldn’t do much more damage to the machine than I already had.  Once that was done and the snowmachine was upright and running, I had to drive it down through the forest to the next road below.  I got it back to the house, walked back down the road and took my bags to the car.  Again, I made it to work on time.  The thing that went wrong this time was that when I turned right on the machine, I inadvertently pushed the throttle lever into my duffel bag.  Its not a good idea to have something on your lap when you are driving one of those things.