During a typical Maine winter, Neil Sorensen can be found driving 5 miles an hour, four times a week, somewhere on 40 miles of snowmobile trail in the Peru woods.
Sorensen, 66, is a volunteer groomer operator with the Peru Snowmobile Club. Another is 76-year-old Glen Tompkins. Both are retired.
Both are also examples of a statewide problem among the more than 290 snowmobile clubs tasked with maintaining 13,000 miles of Maine trails: a lack of younger volunteers willing to work long hours.
Roxbury Slippery Sliders club President Dick Bonney said Thursday afternoon that it takes one of their groomers a good 36 hours at a top speed of 5 mph to do one trip on their 90 miles of trails. A typical winter means 400 to 500 hours of grooming.
Many more hours are spent on a ton of required paperwork, trail and equipment maintenance, and running the club.
“It’s a hobby, it’s not a living,” Bonney said, although the clubs are run as businesses.
Some believe the problem threatens to shut down the trail system, which is tied to the economies of towns like Rangeley and Greenwood that depend on snowmobile traffic.
“All it’s going to take is a few clubs here and there to bow out, and it would put a real hurting on snowmobiling in Maine,” Bonney said.
When clubs dissolve, members remove their directional signs, stop grooming and maintaining trails, and property owners close their land to traffic.
“If the volunteers quit, the whole thing falls apart,” Rumford Polar Bears Snowmobile Club Treasurer Ronald Russell, 65, said Thursday night.
Existing trails are there because club officers must annually get permission from landowners.
That leads to other problems – increasing changes in land ownership and development pressures.
The Polar Bears must get permission from more than 100 property owners; Peru, 28.
“And, some don’t want to give us access, and I don’t blame them,” Peru club President Rick Hebert said Thursday afternoon.
“For us, if one landowner shuts off access, it’s a major problem,” Polar Bears President Rob Cameron said Thursday night.
But Bob Meyers, executive director of the Maine Snowmobile Association in Augusta, doesn’t think the problems have reached critical mass yet.
“I’m concerned, but I wouldn’t characterize it as a crisis. Is (the trail system) in imminent danger of falling apart? I don’t think so,” he said Wednesday afternoon.
He does, however, believe there is a need for heightened awareness.
“We have a $350 million industry, and it’s built on the backs of volunteers, and everybody needs to be mindful of that,” Meyers said.
But, officers of River Valley area clubs doubt Meyers’s reasoning that others would step in should clubs dissolve.
“That’s wishful thinking. If Mexico’s club dissolved, that would put a dead end on anything going into and out of Mexico,” Bonney said.
Mexico Trailblazers Snowmobile Club President Nick Brown said recently that the organization was on its last legs.
Officers and the handful of people doing all the work are burning out, and, until Feb. 1, for several years no members had volunteered to take over.
“We vote next week on them, so we can continue for another year, but I hope some more people step up to the plate,” Brown said Wednesday afternoon.
Like Mexico, that’s Hebert’s biggest worry.
“Our officers haven’t changed in the past five years, only because no one even attempts to run. People just don’t seem to care,” he said.
Clubs get reimbursed through state and municipal grants – for which they must apply annually – that are based on the number of miles groomed and a percentage of the number of sled registrations.
That doesn’t cover the thousands of dollars spent annually on trails and equipment maintenance, fuel, and groomers. Proceeds from fundraisers attempt to tackle those costs.
Cameron said the Polar Bears are not as bad off as Mexico’s club. However, the average age of their 150 members is 50; late 60s for those who do most of the work.
None of the officers interviewed was looking forward to next year after this winter’s lack of snow, which means less grooming miles, fewer sled registrations and not much grant money.
“There’s no snow, so there’s no interest. But I do think it will be a wakeup call to the state, not to see that revenue,” Russell said.
But none expect the state to step in and help out. To ask such a question elicits immediate laughter.
“With the Legislature, it’s not that they don’t understand (the problems), they just don’t care,” said Cameron, a former Maine legislator.
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