Since 1999 the Maine Winter Sports Center staff and volunteers have worked around the state to re-establish skiing as a lifestyle in Maine. At the heart of this effort is the goal of creating a new economic and cultural model for Maine’s rural communities — one that keeps young families together and attracts businesses looking for a high quality of life for their employees. In this model, community-run nonprofit ski areas provide an epicenter for programs for all ages and serve as economic engines for these communities.

Maine has a rich history of skiing dating back to 1870, when 21 families were recruited from Stockholm, Sweden to help settle northern Maine. The climate and topography were very similar and Governor Joshua Chamberlain thought the hard-working Swedish temperament was just what was called for to settle the vast, virgin forests of Aroostook County.

They cut roads, built villages and made new lives for themselves. They also brought skiing with them to their new home as an inseparable part of their lifestyle. During the winter they skied for transportation and hunting — and also for recreation. Soon after their arrival, winter carnivals began to develop with sprinting races, jumping competitions and marathon races that covered 180 miles in four days. These were truly hearty people who loved the winter.

Skiing spread throughout the state and into the mountains of western Maine to towns like Rumford, Livermore Falls and Farmington. Olympians like Chummy Broomhall, Jim Miller, Jack Lufkin, Leslie Bancroft, Dan Simoneau, Marcus Nash, Julie Parisien and Kirsten Clark, to name a few, are the products of that heritage.

In the past 30 years the economic foundations of these communities have come under intense pressure. Shoe production and woolen mills have virtually disappeared from western Maine towns and the paper mills have fallen on hard times as well. The potato and lumbering industries of northern Maine have also suffered. The result has been high unemployment rates, an exodus of the young population and a degradation of the quality of life in Maine’s rural communities.

In these difficult economic times the communities have had little money to invest in the infrastructure of their communities. Spending on skiing infrastructure has been hit especially hard, creating a vicious cycle of degraded skiing experiences and diminished revenues at the community areas. The result is an alarming rate of ski area closures over the last 20 years and a loss of resources critical to sustaining a skiing culture in Maine.

Over that same period, Mainers — in fact, people all across the U.S., have become less active in the outdoors, choosing instead to spend their leisure time watching TV, surfing the Internet and pursuing other sedentary activities. Skiing has been replaced by snowmobiling as the dominant outdoor winter pastime in Maine. With Maine at the top nationally in the incidence of childhood smoking, obesity, type II diabetes and asthma, our concern is not only for the future of skiing in Maine, but the health of our children as well. In fact, if the health trends in our state are not addressed, this looming health crisis will bring our economy to its knees within this generation. Increased health care costs, lower productivity, higher mortality rates and higher insurance costs will overwhelm an already-stressed taxpayer base beyond its limits.

With this as the backdrop, a year was taken to develop a comprehensive and integrated community-based economic and cultural development model for the rural communities of Maine. We did a thorough review of programs from around the world and found some common threads running through the programs that had success and missing where there was failure.

For more information, visit www.mainewsc.org.

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