Hey, winter’s over, Gilby! Well, just as you restore your motorcycles in the winter, you restore your snowmobiles, or other snow-related vehicles in the summer. This (currently not running) 1970s PasseParTout Tracked Vehicle can be found listed here on Facebook Marketplace in an incredible area for snowmobiles and snowmobile history: Keene, New Hampshire. The seller is asking $2,500 or best offer, and here is the original listing.

I’m bummed about the photos here. This is such a unique and cool vehicle, but the photos are an odd mix of mostly verticals and extreme, almost panoramic horizontal photos. Every single one of them is cut off in some way, making it even worse. Every single one. I don’t get it, but it happens so often that I shouldn’t be surprised anymore. No matter how bad the photos are, this is one very, very cool vehicle. Here’s a similar one in action on YouTube. They weren’t just for winter, but were marketed towards companies and other organizations as work vehicles.

Having tracks and no skis, it wasn’t just a winter vehicle, and the PasseParTout could do almost anything but float. Info on them is a bit sparse, but let me check my showmobile trilogy set of bibles, invaluable information on everything made to pass over or through snow, written by Mr. Pierre Pellerin. There it is in Volume 2, pages 503 and 504! I’m tellin’ ya, if any of you snowmobile history fans don’t have this three-book set, you’re missing out. As I expected, this unusual diagonal-braced frame isn’t shown, and I don’t see it online. Is this custom?

The PasseParTout, or PTP, is French for “go anywhere,” and it would. As with Pierre, himself being from Quebec, the PTP was first made by a company called Valcartier Industries, Inc. in Quebec in 1969. The company was originally a maker of, of all odd things, munitions and ice skating blades. There’s a combo you don’t hear too often. The company’s owner thought the military may want such a vehicle, but when that didn’t pan out, he switched to the consumer recreation market. Production eventually moved to Alberta and finally to Michigan, and 1980 was the last year for this model.

I wish we had better photos, and more of them showing the controls and other details. The engine appears to be a Canadian Curtiss Wright (CCW), which would have been available for the first time in 1971. It had 30 horsepower and was $100 more than the 22.5-hp Sachs engine. It’s a two-cylinder, and this one isn’t currently running. This rig should have a CVT-type transmission, as snowmobiles would have had. Have any of you heard of this unusual tracked vehicle?