New Customer Base

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. “It’s a great market for us, and we’ve definitely noticed a spike this year,” says John Meilicke, the company’s sales manager.

The most popular personal Sno-Cat is Tucker’s 2000Xtra Lite, an entry-level rig that starts at $125,000.

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

Vintage Scarcity

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 Mount 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.