Snowmobile Interstate Brings Maine Winter Prosperity

LITTLETON, Maine —  When William Lynds, the first Ski-doo dealer in Maine, sold his first snowmobile in 1960, there were no snowmobile trails. You just plowed through the woods, he remembers, and “made your own wherever you went.”

Last year, when Mike Keim sat down at his kitchen table to assemble the state’s first snowmobiling atlas, things had changed.

Today, Maine is crisscrossed by 15,000 miles of groomed snowmobile trails, among them the state’s portion of a vast interstate system. Hop on your Ski-doo, your Polaris or your Arctic Cat here in Littleton and you can travel for 30,000 uninterrupted miles through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Brunswick and Quebec.

Tired? Hungry? Low on gas? You can have dinner, refill your tank or get a motel room without ever leaving the snowmobile interstate.

Of course, you’d know most of this if you were one of the 25,000 people who have plunked down $11.95 for Keim’s “Snowmobile Trail Guide to Maine.”

Snowmobiling is to Maine what golf is to Florida, revving up the local economy and turning summer vacation towns into year-round tourist attractions.

Scott Ramsay is supervisor of Maine’s Off-Road Vehicle Division, which is itself a manifestation of the snowmobiling phenomenon. He says snowmobiling contributed $150 million to the state’s economy in 1990, the last year they did a study. Of course, it would be more now.

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Take Marty Gervais’ family business, the 50-room Shiretown Motor Inn just off I-95 in Houlton.

It used to be that “once December and January came around, we would do nothing,” he says. “We would have only two or three rooms occupied on Saturday and Sunday nights.” Today, they light the “no vacancy’ sign most every night from January through March.

Across the road, at the Traveler’s Irving Big Stop, manager Randy Campbell says his restaurant business is up 25% on weekends when the snow is deep enough for the snowmobiliers. That kind of business is worth competing for, which is why Bob Lalone strung 300 yards of lights and signs in Monticello, Maine, to direct snowmobilers from the interstate trail system to his Blue Moose Restaurant.

It’s not just the tourists who are zooming over the trails.

Littleton Town Manager Roberta Schools laughs when asked how many of the town’s 956 residents are snowmobilers. “Probably 900 of them,” she says. Including the town manager. She loves the nature trails, she says. And she loves the speed.

For a lot of snowmobilers, speed is what it is all about. You can spend $3,000 for a 340-cubic centimeter, two-cylinder Yamaha, but increasingly people are spending as much as $6,000 more, opting for bigger engines that can propel you through the snow at more than 100 mph.

Sure, it’s fun; but sometimes it means trouble. So far this season, Maine has attributed six of seven fatal snowmobile accidents to a combination of speed and drinking.

The combination is such a concern that the American Council of Snowmobile Assns., based in East Lansing, Mich., has launched a campaign warning of the dangers. Its slogan: “It’s a cold, hard fact. Drinking and snowmobiling don’t mix!”

The council represents 2,200 snowmobile clubs in 27 states, a sure sign that the snowmobiling phenomenon spreads well beyond Maine.

Nationwide, there are about 2 million snowmobilers in the United States, with Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin at the top of the list. The number has been growing at 100,000 or so a year during the 1990s, but this year, with interest exploding, it may grow by 300,000 or more, says Edward J. Klim, president of the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Assn.

The growth represents a comeback of sorts from the sharp decline in interest in the fledgling hobby in the late 1970s and much of the 1980s--a decline Klim attributes first to the gasoline crisis and then to the recession years.

Today, snowmobilers nationwide spend more than $2 billion a year on sleds, clothing, accessories, gasoline, food and lodging, according to university studies. Throw in another $1 billion annually for Canada. In all, North American snowmobilers can cruise 200,000 miles of groomed trails, most of them in the states and provinces along the international boundary.

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Nowhere is the impact more important than in Maine.

That’s why the state pays more than 100 towns and nearly 250 snowmobiling clubs to groom the trails, the payments totaling more than $1 million a year. That seems like a lot, Ramsay says, until you realize that “for our million-dollar investment, we’re getting $150 million back.”

The Meduxnekeag Ramblers, a club planning a potluck dinner to raise money for its activities, just bought a $90,000 Tucker Sno-Cat to groom the 100 miles of trails it cares for in and around Littleton. The volunteer groomers operating the machines get free meals at local restaurants.

Heidi Watson, a 42-year-old schoolteacher who sometimes operates the Tucker, has seen the way 700 or 800 snowmobiles (or snow sleds, as she calls them) can tear up a trail over a weekend. “Now,” she says, “the trails are so much better with that groomer.”

Watson, for one, takes advantage of the improvement. “Up here in the wintertime there’s not much else you can do other than skiiing or something like that,” she says. “I like that, too, but I go faster on my snow sled.”