MEXICO – Access to a major snowmobile trail artery that crosses Oxford and Franklin counties from Errol, N.H., to Wilton, may be in danger, according to the president of Mexico Trailblazers Snowmobile Club, which maintains the nearly 60-mile stretch of ITS 82.
Nick Brown said Tuesday night that he hasn’t been able to fill positions of vice president, trail master, treasurer and secretary.
“If these positions cannot be filled, the club will no longer be able to run,” he said. Should the club dissolve, it would no longer maintain the stretch that gives New Hampshire sledders access to Rangeley and central Maine.
That’s why he said he hopes people will step forward to run the club at its Wednesday night meeting at Mexico’s town hall.
“The ITS trail is one of the major trails that will be shut down if the club dissolves,” Brown said.
When a club dissolves, it means that all trail signs go away. Additionally, those sections fall into disrepair as bridges and culverts deteriorate, and, property owners close their land to traffic, Brown explained.
“The young people don’t want anything to do with the clubs, and that’s because they think these trails are there all the time. Well, they’re not,” said Brown, 49, a lifelong resident of Mexico and club member since the ’70s.
Club members secure rights of passage annually, establish, reroute and maintain the trails.
“It’s a really big thing, you know, and people just got to realize that these trails don’t just pop up out of nowhere. The clubs are the ones responsible for doing them,” Brown said.
He doesn’t expect the club to fold, but wants to alert people to the worst-case scenario.
“I just need to make people aware of how fragile the trail system is in Maine. The structure could crumble at any time if clubs that maintain it fall apart,” he said.
The ITS 82 trail, which links Dixfield to Rumford, is too strategic to lose. On any given weekend, Brown said between 500 and 1,000 sledders drive through the system, leaving behind a chunk of tourist dollars.
“Maine says that when a snowmobiler comes into town, he spends at least $20 on gas and food. If that trail’s bringing 500 sleds into town every weekend, that’s a lot of money. In Mexico alone, I’d estimate that $100,000 is brought in during the winter just by snowmobilers,” he said.
The Trailblazers club has about 70 to 80 members in a town that has 300 to 400 registered snowmobile owners. The average age of members is between the late 40s to 50s.
Trail Master Gary Wentzell, who also runs a garage and is Mexico’s fire chief, said Tuesday afternoon that he and another four or five members who “have been doing everything, are pretty much burned out.”
About 289 clubs maintain 13,000 miles of trail in Maine, but several are teetering on the edge of closing, said Brown, a former regional coordinator.
“There’s going to come a time when the state of Maine requires that if you own a snowmobile in a town, they will require you to join a club. There’s already a bill in the works to do this. In New Hampshire, it’s already law,” he said.
“So, I’m going to cross my fingers and see what we can do Wednesday night,” Brown added.
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