RANGELEY — Despite the continued snow drought, the Rangeley Lakes Snowmobile Club is offering limited riding.

It has opened some of its northern Oxford County trails along the New Hampshire border in the Parmachenee Lake-Bosebuck Mountain area.

“It’s a little hard to get to at the moment, because you have to drive all the way up to the New Hampshire border and go up to Bosebuck Camps, but they are plowing out some parking places up there before you have to come down into their actual establishment,” Steve Dudley, club president, said Friday afternoon.

Additionally, the Pittsburg Ridge Runners Snowmobile Club in Pittsburg, N.H., is opening its trails to the north and east of the lakes and will have its Connector Trail (NH 20) with Maine open.

Bosebuck Camps are open, with gas and food, and will have parking areas cleared on Parmachenee Road, he said.

“From Bosebuck, if you have a New Hampshire sticker, of course, you could head over to Pittsburg or any unplowed roads.”

He said land managers up there “have approved us being on anything that isn’t being actively used for logging at this time.”

“There’s quite a road complex up there to the Canadian border,” Dudley said.

The Rangeley club maintains 150 miles of trails. There is a firm ice base with 5 to 8 inches of new snow in the Parmachenee-Bosebuck area.

“It’s actually fairly decent riding as long as you’re careful, because it is very icy underneath,” Dudley said.

“Some of our signed trails are open up in there, though I’m not sure how far east or south you could come on those, but I had a guy email me that he had ridden 160 miles up there three days ago. He’s either dizzy or found a lot of side roads.”

Speaking of ice, Rangeley and Mooselookmeguntic lakes froze over on Wednesday. However, due to poor ice conditions, Dudley strongly cautioned people about riding on them.

“I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “In fact, I could look down on Rangeley Lake on my way home this afternoon and it’s all frozen over, but there’s a lot of wet spots, so that convinces me.”

Should the snow drought continue into February, Dudley believes the economic impact locally will be serious as far as snowmobiling goes.

“It all just ripples down with fuel and, of course, people who are in the recreational businesses that sell clothing and parts and repairs,” he said.

“Last year, our club bought $28,000 worth of off-road diesel to do grooming. It’s a big chunk for a little town.”

The Rangeley club is also one of the few clubs in Maine that has a payroll for groomer drivers.

“That’s probably $20,000 a year, because we hire some of those guys to do fall work,” Dudley said.

The drought also further compounds economic woes for Maine snowmobile clubs that rely on annual grants from the state, which are based on a minimum number of hours spent grooming trails.

“The state tells you, ‘OK, based on your proposal, we will give you as much as,’ and that figure like for Rangeley is $85,000,” Dudley said.

“It’s very helpful. So we need to get like 1,400 grooming hours to get that money. So if we got to February, which has happened where we don’t groom a lot because of the weather, then it’s impossible to catch up and you don’t get that money; you get less.”

That money, which is generated by snowmobile registration fees, however, doesn’t arrive from the state until June.

“Last year’s award is basically funding this whole year,” he said. “Because we have debt on two groomer tractors we had purchased, we’re like, ‘Gee, we really need $30,000 right away and we need the rest to carry us all the way into the season.’”

Rangeley, however, is fortunate in that the town and surrounding plantations have warrant articles at town meetings to fund the snowmobile club. That’s $48,000 in taxpayer money, Dudley said.

“It makes a huge difference in having new equipment and being able to get a big group of drivers, as we can pay them $10 an hour,” he said.

“If we didn’t have that $48,000, it would be a much different picture up here, because we just couldn’t do as much.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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