Cat Cave Museum hosts open house April 16

Tayt Wuethrich “blames” the whole thing on a rusting piece of orange junk he found behind a stranger’s barn seven years ago. Without that, he might never have this timeconsuming near-obsession with classic old racing snowmobiles that’s literally large enough to fill a museum.

A museum it is, this “Cat Cave” just west of Greenwood on Clark County Road G. It’s filled with about 60 vintage racing sleds -Arctic Cats mainly -- and after two years it’s at the point where Wuethrich and his girlfriend, Sarah Shaw, are ready to open it to the public. There will be an open house for the Cat Cave on April 16 from 9 a.m.-4 p.m., and those attending can expect to see an assortment of sleds they’ve likely never laid eyes on before.

Oh, that piece of orange junk? Wuethrich found that one day while driving near Dorchester. He spotted it tangled in the weeds behind the barn, wheeled in, and asked the owner about it. As soon as he saw the jalopy’s engine, he knew it was something rare.

The old Ski Daddler AMF had an 800-cc engine under its hood, and through his knowledge of racing sleds, Wuethrich knew that was unique. Those Hirth engines were only used for a short time in the early 1970s, and Wuethrich recognized it.

“I said, “That’s gotta be a rare sled. They only made like a hundred of them,’” Wuethrich said.

After hauling the Ski-Daddler home, Wuethrich and his friend, Darrell Deegan, set to restoring it. It wasn’t as simple as it first sounded, as finding parts for old snowmobiles -- much less rare ones -- requires some hunting. Online and elsewhere he found what he needed, right down to a brand new still-in-the-box seat from some guy in Connecticut.

Wuethrich was, as they say, hooked.

“Trying to find all the parts for that really got my blood flowing, and it was fun,” Wuethrich said.

With that, the genesis of the Cat Cave was born. In the seven years since, Wuethrich has collected some 60 vintage sleds, not to mention a few Arctic Cat mini-bikes and a wide assortment of black, green and purple Arctic Cat wear. He scours online sources for the stuff, and snaps it up whenever it’s available.

“There’s always boxes at the door,” Shaw said. “It’s like, ‘What did you buy now?’” Wuethrich still has some original sleds, from his younger days. His parents drove Scorpions back in the day when sledding first became popular, and he has his dad’s machine on a rack. He also has the 1988 Wildcat 650 he drove when young, a machine that sold for about $2,500 when he bought it. A comparable machine today would run about $14,000, he said.

Wuethrich said he was on a snowmobile as soon as he was old enough to drive one. He had a classic Kitty Cat, with its tiny 50-cc engine that would slide him over the snow at maybe 10 mph.

“I’ve had sleds my whole life,” Wuethrich said. “I’ve been driving sleds since I was little.”

Not until the Ski-Daddler, though, did he get serious about not only restoring jalopies, but collecting rare ones. His focus is on racing sleds from the early 1970s, as he recalls marveling at their power while attending past world championship races in Eagle River.

The second classic sled Wuethrich bought for his would-be museum was a 1973 Arctic Cat Formula II racer. He found that one in Portage, from a guy named Tim Webster, who turned out to be the brother of the late Mike Webster, an NFL all-pro center for the Pittsburgh Steelers in their 1970s heyday. He’s also a collector and a buyer and seller of rare racing sleds, and through him Wuethrich began to expand his stock.

As he made more contacts in the vintage racing sled world, Wuethrich found numerous machines that fit his niche. He bought them from across Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, Maine, wherever they lurked in somebody’s garage. A lot of the old machines are available now, Wuethrich said, because the guys who used to race them are now old, and the families don’t want to keep them any longer.

“It’s because the old guys are selling all these sleds,” he said. “Their kids aren’t interested. A lot of those guys were old racers.”

Wuethrich’s most prized sled is a 1971 Arctic Cat King Kat, perhaps the most coveted of the old muscle racing machines. It was a 4-cylinder beast with the 800-cc engine protruding from the front hood. Arctic Cat says there were only 124 of them ever made, and Wuethrich’s restored machine is one of the surviving ones.

“I’ll bet there’s maybe only 20 left around, because they all got crashed racing them,” he said.

So fast was the 1971 King Kat, Wuethrich said the company stopped building them. There was too much juice in those engines for racers to hang onto them in the turns.

“After 1971, they banned ‘em,” Wuethrich said. “People were getting killed.”

That model year was also the last in which Arctic Cat built a machine with an exposed air-cooled engine. That’s the look Wuethrich likes.

“It (1971) is the only year that they had the motor sticking out of the hood, and I just fell in love with them,” he said.

The 1971 King Kat is the centerpiece of a unique display in the Cat Cave. It is a collection of all seven racing sleds Arctic Cat built in the 1971 model year, and it won Wuethrich an award at the recent national snowmobile show in Marshfield.

Wuethrich has a special affinity for the 1971 Cats for two reasons: he likes the exposed engine look, and it’s the year he was born.

After that year, the engines went back under the hood and the look changed forever.

“Between 1971 and ‘72, Arctic Cat just went total Kawasaki (engines),” he said. “Otherwise, they were just throwing in motors to sell machines.”

Speaking of selling machines, Wuethrich does a little of that to tweak his collection, or will make a swap like the time he traded a vintage gasoline pump for a sled.

He said he’s “buying and selling all the time,” and Sarah confirms that.

“If you ever see him, he’s constantly on his phone,” she said.

But that’s how a collection is built, Wuethrich insists. One has to be watching, and ready to pounce when a new old Cat comes on the market.

“You’ve gotta move quick, ‘cuz they’ll go,” he said of the market. “The ones I want are usually rare.”

How rare? Well, try the 1970 650 Puma, a 3-cylinder machine Wuethrich bought from Tim Webster. He said Arctic Cat has documented how many of each machine it built, and there apparently was only one. He has it.

Just last week, three sleds arrived at the Cat Cave, and while they are not Arctic Cats, they are rare. There a 1974 Alouette Villain, “one of only five-ish” ever made, Wuethrich says; a Kohler Bon-ski, one of only three built; and a 1973 Speedway 650, equally unique.

Wuethrich said he was talking to a guy about parts in Minnesota, and discovered the three almost one-of-a-kind sleds were available.

“This guy was gonna sell all of his sleds,” Wuethrich said. “I said, ‘You can’t be doing that.’ They’re so rare. I couldn’t see them go somewhere else.”

Other eclectic collectibles Wuethrich owns are a prototype built by the legendary Wahl Racing organization. They welded together a set of four skis in an attempt to improve a racing sled’s maneuverability.

“They were trying to turn left better,” Wuethrich said.

It didn’t work. Wuethrich also has an old Arctic Cat he bought from someone in New York who had welded two 440-cc engines together to make an 880. It has four cylinders and eight spark plugs, but did not pan out, either.

“It looks cool,” Wuethrich grins. Wuethrich and Shaw have spent the better part of two years getting the Cat Cave ready for the public. They plan to add hardware to get more sleds onto an upper level so the display can expand more, as Wuethrich said it’s a dynamic display that will never really be finished. The idea for the Cat Cave came sometime after Wuethrich restored that first sled, and began to find the rare ones that were at long last being given up by old racers. He said he started the museum, “When I couldn’t move over in the other shed. I kept tripping over snowmobiles.”

And to think, had he not glanced behind an old barn one day to see his first treasure.

Looking around the Cat Cave, “I blame it on the Ski-Daddler,” he says.

ORANGE CLASSIC- The AMF Ski-Daddler racing sled Tayt Wuethrich found behind a barn near Dorchester and restored was the start of his 60-sled collection.