For ice fishing on Lake of the Woods, vintage 'Bombers' rumble on

Before Gregg Hennum sold Sportsman's Lodge in 2021, his family's well-known Lake of the Woods fishing resort maintained a fleet of more than 20 Bombardier snow buses to get anglers to and from the walleyes.

Those caterpillar-tracked machines were so critical to making money during winter, he kept four for himself. Around Lake of the Woods, they're known as "Bombers.''

"We've put thousands and thousands and thousands of miles on them," said Hennum, who now operates a year-round, cross-lake transportation service to deliver goods and shuttle passengers. "Even if money was no object … I wouldn't replace them with anything else."

Despite their vintage engineering (Bombardier stopped making the vehicles in 1979), the bug-shaped snowmobiles have grown in stature from oddball curiosities in the Northwest Angle to iconic winter workhorses. Manufactured in Quebec starting in the 1940s, they can be found in Russia, Iceland, Alaska and all across Canada.

On Lake of the Woods three days after Christmas, a Bomber-related death drew statewide attention and cast a pall over the emerging ice fishing season. But within the local fishing community, the tragedy did nothing to shake people's confidence in the machines. Roughly 70 Bombers are believed to be in commercial use around the lake, each shuttling thousands of anglers every year to ice houses miles away from shore.

Lake of the Woods County Sheriff Gary Fish said the fatal plunge and possible drowning happened one-quarter mile south of Flag Island and remains under investigation pending autopsy results. There's been no published finding so far of a probable cause.

According to reports from the scene, a Bomber operated by an Angle Inlet resort was taking a group of customers to a fishing location shortly after 8 a.m. when the machine broke through the ice on Dec. 28. The Inlet is located in the northwest corner of Minnesota's Northwest Angle. According to a preliminary report from the sheriff's office, the ice was 12 inches thick and the water was 10-feet deep. The driver, along with another nearby party, immediately assisted passengers with their exit from the vehicle. The front end of the machine was still atop the ice, a witness said, while the tail end was underwater.

Seven of the eight passengers were able to escape, the sheriff's report said, but the body of John Frey, 78, from Prairie du Sac, Wis., was recovered from the vehicle hours later.

One day later, Angle Outpost Resort wrote a solemn message on its Facebook site. "We're devastated by the loss of our longtime guest and fellow angler. Thank you in advance for comments that respect him, his family and friends, and the Lake of the Woods fishing community. Your understanding and prayers are deeply appreciated."

The last time a resort-operated transport vehicle broke through the ice with fatal consequences on Lake of the Woods was in late December 1997. That's when a van retrofitted with skis in front and tracks in back hit a snow-covered crack and sank very quickly off the south shore north of Baudette. The vehicle was not a Bomber. Four passengers from Beaver Dam, Wis., drowned and three others escaped. They were on their way to a fishing shack.

No more shivering

Local historians say the usage of Bombers for ice fishing on Lake of the Woods started to take off around the same time that Quebec-based Bombardier discontinued production of the rear-engined vehicles.

Sportsman's, located at the mouth of the Rainy River, had introduced air taxi service in the '70s using a ski plane. The concept didn't catch on because whiteouts were canceling trips and the seating was limited. The lodge owners replaced the Cessna 185 with a Bomber, which proved worthy of duplicating.

Steve Ballard at neighboring Ballard's Resort said he took notice. The Bomber's passenger cabin was heated and roomy. It handled well on snow and ice and moved at a good pace. He followed suit and bought one for his own resort in 1979.

"It was the cat's meow," Ballard said. "It didn't matter how much it snowed, you just drove over it."

No longer would his guests have to brace themselves for a shivering ride on a conventional snowmobile or in an unheated trailer to reach one of the resort's ice houses for a day of fishing.

Bombers allowed people to go from a heated cabin to a heated vehicle to a heated ice shack.

"It still works for us," he said.

Hennum said his family greatly expanded Sportsman's fleet of Bombers starting in the early '90s. At one point during that run, a geological company in Alaska put 10 up for sale. Hennum's father bought them all, along with a load of spare parts.

The machines also caught on at other Lake of the Woods resorts, including outfits on Oak Island and on the mainland of Angle Inlet. Various Bombers still in operation around the lake came from as far away as Newfoundland, Yellowstone National Park (via public auction), ski resorts, electric power utilities, mining companies and private sellers.

At Arnesen's Rocky Point Resort near Warroad, the ice fishing team has fashioned its own fleet of Bomber-like transport vehicles by radically customizing Chevy vans.

Hennum said the initial use of Bombers sparked a significant increase in ice fishing on Lake of the Woods. The trend intensified as the industry introduced waves of new gear and, later, from an explosion of luxurious, wheeled fish houses. Since the 1980s, winter angling pressure on the Minnesota side of Lake of the Woods has increased five to six times, exceeding the amount of fishing in summer. Last winter, Baudette area fisheries managers estimated a record ice fishing pressure of 3.2 million angler hours. (An angler hour is one person fishing for one hour.)

'Like driving a bridge'

Hennum and Lake of the Woods Tourism Director Joe Henry said Bombers are relatively lightweight and designed to evenly distribute pressure on the ice. They're easy for passengers to enter and exit and they're legally allowed to run on the lake's large network of groomed snowmobile trails.

Bomber owners also like how they travel over ice cracks, especially when the frames and tracks are stretched through mechanical modification.

"That's been a game-changer in terms of wear and tear,'' Hennum said. "By stretching them, they seem a lot safer on the ice because it's kind of like driving a bridge when you get to a crack.''

"We'll run them on a foot of ice all day long,'' he added.

Ballard said there was a time when old Bombers could be purchased for as little as a couple of thousand dollars apiece. But today, he said, there are no more hidden gems. "Everyone knows what they're worth," he said. A well-restored 1970s model can go for more than $70,000, with older versions selling for half that or less, if they're in running condition.

Private owners as well as commercial users keep the machines alive with machine shop ingenuity, part swapping and sharing of techniques. At Sportsman's Lodge, for instance, mechanics have equipped Bombers with power steering systems scavenged from used cars.

Across the board, it's also common for owners to swap out the original flathead engines, upgrade the heaters, wire up GPS navigation screens, add CB radios, and install LED light systems. Hennum said four of the seven Bombers he owns are now configured with small Cummins diesel engines. For extra eye appeal, he's used vinyl wraps to theme one of his Bombers as a pirate ship and another as a tribute to the military.

"We rebuild them from the ground up because we use the heck out of these things," Hennum said.

Passion for the past

Charles Bouchard grew up in the same region of Quebec where Joseph-Armand Bombardier in 1937 designed and produced the forerunner to a long line of Bombers. The original bodies were blunt-nosed and made of wood. In the 1950s, the company shifted from wood to sheet metal and the snow buses took on more of a tear-drop shape.

Bouchard, a collector of the machines and a self-made Bombardier historian, said the early models were sold to mail carriers, schools, doctors, hotel owners, undertakers, lawyers, dairy route drivers, lumber barons and the like. Bombardier, the young mechanic, was motivated to invent a vehicle that could "float on snow'' after his son died from a lack of medical care when their village was isolated by winter.

Bouchard said Bomber production surged in the post-war era, peaked in the 1950s at about 1,000 units a year and was still going strong in the 1960s for back-country purposes, including winter fish netting on Lake Winnipeg. Bombardier, the inventor, died in 1964 after creating personal-use Ski-Doo snowmobiles.

By 1963, according to his obituary in the New York Times, the company had produced about 13,000 Bombers. Now, Bouchard said, there's no telling how many are left in the world.

"They've stood the test of time and everyone around here who has one knows each other," said Dave Shaw, a Bomber enthusiast and co-owner of Fabtech Manufacturing in Roseau, a production welding shop.

He said the combination of mechanical expertise around Lake of the Woods and the marriage of Bombers to ice fishing should keep them alive for a long time — ideally for the better part of three months every year.