RANGELEY – It’s sort of the golden rule of winter on top of Chick Hill:

Don’t lick your lips.

Using ski resort-worthy guns, the treatment plant here makes snow out of millions of gallons of treated – but not disinfected – wastewater. The wind up here blows something fierce. You go outside and lick your lips, it’s probably going to be salty, warns Superintendent Jerome “Frenchie” Guevremont. Don’t put too much thought into why.

Just don’t lick your lips.

Welcome to the Chick Hill Pollution Control Facility, home to sage advice and three self-described “great big bacterias walking around.”

(That’d be Guevremont and plant operators Tom Haggan and Dale Quimby.)

Seven snow guns make up to 50-foot-high mounds of deceptively white snow. Every hour or two, someone’s got to check them on a close drive-by to make sure ice isn’t building up and bending equipment. Depending on wind direction, that someone’s likely to come back covered in a fine, frozen spray of formerly unmentionables. It sticks to everything, even helmet shields – meaning that out in the field, you’ve got to lift that shield to see, which exposes your face to the elements, and then…

“It’s going to get on you,” Quimby said, prepping to head out on a snowmobile.

“Raw sewer water anyway, it’s 99.9 percent water. It’s really more of a psychological thing than anything else.”

So unflinchingly rational. But still, he doesn’t take his coat home at night.

After the town built its new treatment plant in 1996, it discovered the 30-million-gallon storage lagoon wasn’t going to be big enough to keep wastewater over the winter. Guevremont said making snow turned out to be cheaper than building a second lagoon. The Department of Environmental Protection licenses the process.

(In the summer, they simply run the water through a sprinkler system on three different fields. Not surprisingly, the grass grows really, really fast.)

Four pump stations in town bring the water uphill. They all get regular checks but just one – station No. 2, at the site of the former treatment plant – has an intake screen that’s got to be cleared once or twice a day with a pitchfork. That bit’s pretty nasty.

“You never know what you’ll find in that,” Guevremont said. Sometimes it’s fish heads. Last week it was a condom, blown up like a balloon. “The people are nice to us. Around Christmastime, you get ribbons and bows sent to us.”

The guys found live goldfish once in the lagoon – they’d been flushed, pumped and survived.

“My guess is they were probably shaking their little heads when they got here,” he said.

The fish were around long enough for him to grab a photo. Guevremont thinks they were eventually picked off in the storage lagoon by resident ducks. (Yeah, he doesn’t recommend duck hunting in the immediate area…)

As several unconventional photo albums attest, he, Quimby and Haggan grab snapshots of almost everything. Visiting moose, deer and turkeys. Interesting animal droppings. Guevremont uses his glove for scale. One bear scat? A doozy.

In other photos, the men pretend to play on the piles of “fresh” snow. There’s another of the old lagoon dock with a sign: “No Diving.”

Quimby jumped into one of the smaller treatment lagoons last summer to rescue two dogs. The water is 10 feet deep, and the lagoon’s got an angled liner like a pool, so there’s not much to grip. The bigger of the two dogs put up quite a fight.

“He’s our little hero,” Guevremont quipped. “We got him a write-up in the local paper.”

The lagoons are frozen over now, but warm enough on the bottom to keep things flowing. Every day, 200,000 gallons get flushed up from town.

They made almost 18 million gallons’ worth of snow last year. It stayed until July 4.

Come the end of spring, that white snow starts to look pretty brown.