The late E. M. Tucker, Sr. of Tucker SNO-CAT Corporation,was one of 13 children, born in a log cabin on Jump-Off Joe Creek in 1892near Grants Pass, Oregon. He spent his early boyhood near Trail, Oregonin a stone house built by his father in 1901. The house overlooks a broadstretch of Rogue River and is still a landmark on the Rogue.

During his youth he walked to school through deep snow,and even at this early age he began working on different devices for transportation over snow which eventually lead to the development of the world famed TuckerSNO-CAT vehicle. In the early twenties Mr. Tucker built several spiraldriven machines, but he had very little success with the principle involved. After these experiences, Mr. Tucker realized that unless he could come up with a completely different system, he would never achieve his desire to build a vehicle to travel over deep, soft snow with a minimum amount of mechanical trouble and expense.

Mr. Tucker worked in Los Angeles on models, perfecting the idea of an over-snow transportation. He then moved to Grass Valley,California, where the first production line was established. This successful venture was terminated by a move to Medford, Oregon, determined by Mr.Tucker's long expressed desire to return to the Rogue River Valley. Mr.Tucker spent 50 years in building and improving his snow machines, and his firm is recognized as the oldest successful manufacturer of snow vehicles in the world.

The newest model in production is the Tucker-Terra. It has four all rubber tracks. Some of the uses for the Tucker-Terra in winter and summer are: Snow Grooming, Snow Removal, Search & Rescue, Ambulance, Avalanche Control, Oil & Gas Exploration, Mining, Telecommunication Operations, Personnel & Cargo Carrier, Mowing, Agriculture, Airport Runway Snow Removal.

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"No other machine can match these crazy Cats traveling over snow on any type of terrain." By Montgomery M. Atwater

It was January 13, 1952 the winter of the Big Snow.The Donner Pass was cluttered with the roofs of abandoned cars. Pride ofthe Southern Pacific, the City of San Francisco’s huge diesel thrust itsplow into the clogging mass of an avalanche. Like some prehistoric monstercaught in the quicksand, the luxury train struggled but could not move.

For a day Southern Pacific men and machines foughtto rescue its train and passengers. In rapid succession the storm swallowedfour huge rotary snowplows. One it smashed with an avalanche, killing thecrew. The train’s engine finally ran out of fuel. Cold, darkness and fearseeped in through the metal walls of the Pullmans as the snow drifted higheraround them.

On the second day the railroad called for help. TheArmy sent a fleet of Weasels, those rugged little snow buggies so wellknown to the mountain troops of World War II. They wallowed helplesslyin the white quagmire. News accounts began referring to the passengers on the train as the "Second Donner Party".

On the third day, two Tucker Sno-Cats calmly floatedacross the sea of snow that had blocked every other effort.

Rescuing the streamliner is the most spectacular exploit of the incredible Sno-Cats. But professionals of over-snow travel can think of many that were actually more difficult. In 1950, for instance, the Bell Telephone Company was trying to complete a new microwave station on Mt.Rose, not far from the Donner Pass, a year ahead of schedule. When avalanches obliterated the construction road a fleet of Sno-Cats took over. In 1955,the telephone company issued five of its coveted awards for heroism to the Sno-Cat jockeys who rescued 22 motorists storm bound in a Utah pass. Logically a sixth award might have gone to the inventor of the unique machinet hat did the job.

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Emmitt Tucker can’t explain what drove him to spend half a lifetime on this project. Part of it was a perfectly normal ambition to make some money. As far back as 1914 he realized that there was a market that would really travel on snow.

There’s no great trick to designing a machine that will travel on well-packed snow and moderate grades, Tucker will tell you with a shrug. Dozens of inventors have gone that far with the problem. Because he insisted on a vehicle that would maneuver on every type of snow in rough country, Tucker at one point discarded a machine he had been working on for more than 20 years and began all over again.

This forerunner of the Sno-Cat on which Tucker labored from 1914 to 1938 is interesting in itself. For one thing it was a new and radical approach to the double-barreled problem of travel over-snow flotation and traction. Most designers have tried to solve it with a sled or a tractor in one from or another Tucker’s spiral-driven machine got its flotation from a cylinder or pontoon. For traction he welded a fin, corkscrew-fashionto the cylinder. When the assembly was rotated, it floated and pulled itself forward like an auger.

In spite of its promising beginning, the spiral machine turned out to be an inventor’s nightmare. Explaining why in simple termsis not easy. The first law of designing a snowbuggy is that its p.s.i.(pounds per square inch) must be approximately the same as a skier’s. This is a simple rule but translating it into metal and horsepower leads the engineer into an impasse. He starts with a nice wide base runner, track, pontoon, whatever he happens to fancy. He adds a body to carry passengers and cargo. He adds an engine, transmission gear and controls. Nervously he watches the table of weight, which always goes up faster than he likes. Thus flotation and traction lead him around in a vicious and frustrating circle.

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A skier’s p.s.i. is about half a pound. Nothing that goes more than a few tenths above that figure can travel on soft snow. It doesn’t give a designer much room to maneuver. Tucker spent years and built dozen of models of the spiral machine in the attempt to find a winning combination of flotation and traction.

No one, not even his own family, can predict how the brain of an inventor will react. After many failures with his corkscrew design, Emmitt Tucker went to bed one night in 1938 convinced that he was all done with snowbuggies and woke up next morning with an entirely new design blueprinted in his mind.

The test model that began to take shape in his garage was revolutionary. Yet it included one idea from spiral-the pontoon methodof flotation. This had always been the spiral machine’s best feature. The worst was the amount of power it took to spin that bulky screw in the snow. What Tucker literally dreamed-up was a new way of applying power. Instead of the spiral fins welded to a rotating pontoon, he saw the pontoon floating free with a track revolving around it.

This is the design, unlike anything that had been tried before, which at last made it possible for a machine to compete with a man on skis. Tucker was certain that it would work from the moment the picture was clear in his mind. He had to build it piece by piece, with hacksaw and file, of salvaged parts in his spare time. In the winter of 1941 he finally loaded the first Sno-Cat onto a trailer and started for the proving ground he knew so well, Crater Lake.

In a small town where Tucker stopped for lunch a stranger began to ask questions. Since the man seemed to be genuinely interested Tucker invited him along to watch the tests. It turned out that the stranger was manager of a mine near Mt. Shasta. He had a serious problem of hauling supplies in that big-snow country and was so impressed by the performance of the Sno-Cat that he bought the test model on the spot.

The Sno-Cat had to wait for its first real boost until after the war. At that time the Soil Conservation Service of the Departmentof Agriculture was rapidly expanding its network of snow survey courses.

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By one of those happy coincidences R.A. Work, chiefo f the snow survey unit, was a personal friend of Tucker and knew all about the Sno-Cat. Between them they concocted an over-snow demonstration to end all demonstrations. It was a midwinter journey from the California border north to the Columbia River, along the crest of the Cascade Mountains. What it amounted to was 600 miles of the roughest, toughest, deepest snow country in any land.

It was an epic journey in March 1948, tougher thananything of the sort that had ever been attempted. Snowfall was heavierthan usual that winter, so heavy that many of the trail markers had beenburied. The network of trails and logging roads Work expected to followthrough the dense coastal forest was choked with fallen timber. Soft snowor hard, wet snow or dry, across sidehills, up steep grades, over fallenlogs, the Sno-Cat navigated the wilderness from Mt. Shasta to Mt. Hood.

The high point of the trip was a chance meeting witha party of engineers. This group had come directly up from the lowlandson a highway grade with a different type of snow machine.

Naturally the drivers got into an argument over themerits of their snowbuggies. And naturally the argument had to be settledby a tug-of-war. Thus on the summit of the Cascades in midwinter, two roaringsnowbuggies fought it out before an audience of whiskery mountaineers,50 miles from civilization. Both machines buried themselves. But the Sno-Catgot out of its hole under its own power and then rescued its adversary.

In 1950 the snow surveyors organized a come-one, come-allfield trial for over-snow vehicles at Sun Valley, Idaho. By this time Tuckerhad made the final major improvement to the Sno-Cat design, the four-pontoonmodel. Fifteen different types of snowbuggies were entered in the teststhat included obstacle courses, hill climbing, and sidehilling in all typesof snow. The Sno-Cat won. There wasn’t any second.

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The Sno-Cat is still the yardstick. It looks like something out of a bad dream. Although its top speed is about 15 miles per hour,it costs as much as a custom-built sports car. It is appallingly rough and noisy. But its p.s.i. is .66 and its power factor compared to a skieris one to 500. Perhaps the greatest compliment ever paid to this machine and its inventor is that at his factory at Medford, Ore., Tucker and hissons built eight huge snow cruisers for the Antarctic expedition. These machines are self-contained, mobile weather stations for use during the forthcoming International Geophysical Year. Though they weigh 8,000 pounds each, they will tread on the snow as lightly as a skier will.

In addition to the armed forces, utilities companies whose troubleshooters must maintain power, communications and fuel lines in mountainous country use the Sno-Cat. Loggers, miners, ski area operators and game wardens also use the rugged Cats.

Emmitt Tucker is today a tall, slender, erect man of 64. With a sparkle in his eye he will tell you that he isn’t much interested in over-snow transportation any more. It’s a completed job. Then he’ll get his hands on the wheel of a Sno-Cat and make it do tricks no one else dares to try. You remember those hands, the big, long fingered, superbly dexterous hands that built the incredible Sno-Cat.

Reprinted from MECHANIX ILLUSTRATED Copyright 1957 Fawcett Publications, Inc. Not responsible for typographical errors. Copyright©1997 ALE Publishing. Sno-Cat is a registered trademark of Tucker Sno-CatCorporation's over the snow vehicles

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