RUMFORD — Black Mountain Ski Resort is using money it received in a Recreational Trail Program grant to renovate some of the cross country trails, according to trail designer Fred Bailey.
Bailey said Chisholm Ski Club member Paul Jones wrote an application on behalf of Black Mountain to receive money from the state’s Recreational Trail Program.
According to the State of Maine’s Division of Parks and Public Lands website, the Recreational Trail Program “transfers a percentage of gasoline taxes paid on non-highway recreational use in off-highway vehicles from the Highway Trust Fund into a separate fund for trail development, improvement and maintenance.”
“It was a very complicated application process,” Bailey said. “Basically, we had to convince the State of Maine that Black Mountain was a good place for them to invest their money.”
The grant will fund $35,000 worth of the renovations, which Bailey said includes “widening parts of the trails, cleaning up rocks and debris that might be in the way and cleaning out some of the ditches that hadn’t been touched up in awhile.”
Black Mountain will have to come up with the remaining $8,000, which Bailey said will likely be covered by the several fundraisers that the resort has scheduled.
“A lot of the renovations that we’re doing are just a continuation of work that began awhile ago,” Bailey said. “Black Mountain had to do some work on their trails in order to meet certain standards so they could host national races. They had to rush with a lot of the work and never got around to completely finishing it. That’s what this grant money is paying for.”
Bailey, an Andover resident who runs a trail design firm when he’s not working at the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum in Bethel, said he was asked to spearhead the project after Jones’ wife became sick.
“The club asked if I could step in and help out, since I’ve done projects like this in the past,” Bailey said. “It’s definitely keeping me busy, but it’s a fun project and it’s going to help cut down on the cost for Black Mountain.”
Bailey said work on the renovations began about two weeks ago and he expects everything to be finished “in a couple of weeks.”
The project is being done by Savage Contracting Inc. of Bethel.
mdaigle@sunjournal.com
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