Making Tracks: How I Learned to Love Snowmobiling in Maine

Making Tracks

How I Learned to Love Snowmobiling in Maine

Matt Weber

Other Outdoor Books by Islandport Press

Evergreens

By John Holyoke

Skiing with Henry Knox

By Sam Brakeley

Backtrack

By V. Paul Reynolds

Ghost Buck

By Dean Bennett

A Life Lived Outdoors

By George Smith

My Life in the Maine Woods

By Annette Jackson

Nine Mile Bridge

By Helen Hamlin

In Maine

By John N. Cole

Suddenly, the Cider Didn’t Taste So Good

By John Ford

Leave Some for Seed

By Tom Hennessey

Birds of a Feather

By Paul J. Fournier

These and other Maine books available at

www.islandportpress.com

Islandport Press

PO Box 10

Yarmouth, Maine 04096

www.islandportpress.com

[email protected]

Copyright © 2019 Matt Weber

First Islandport Press edition, October 2019

ISBN: 978-1-944762-75-9

ebook ISBN: 978-1-944762-84-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931593

Printed in the USA

Dean L. Lunt, Publisher

Book design by Teresa Lagrange

Cover photo by Matt D’Agata: A trail cut on the Maine/

Canadian border.

Back cover photo by Kevin Bennett

All interior photos courtesy of Matt Weber unless otherwise indicated.

To Mary, who puts up with me always heading off somewhere. She is my true passion.

Contents

Author’s Note ix

1. The Beginning 1

2. Learning to Ride Right 19

3. The Western Mountains 33

4. Katahdin and Moosehead Region 49

5. Eastern Maine 71

6. The County 95

Resources 135

Acknowledgments 144

Author’s Note

I have always been an avid reader and was surprised, and dismayed, to find out that no one has ever written a book about snowmobiling in Maine, as far as I know. This isn’t a how-to or a guidebook but rather a recounting of how I got into snowmobiling a few years ago and wound up exploring the entire state. I’ve separated my rides and adventures into four basic geographic areas: Aroostook County, the state’s largest county; the Katahdin and Moosehead region, from Jackman to Baxter State Park; Eastern Maine—the whole of Washington and Hancock Counties, and a chunk of Waldo and Penobscot—generally everything east of Interstate 95; and lastly, the Western Mountains, including the Rangeley Lakes region, Farmington, and Sugarloaf.

I should throw in a few disclaimers:

I would qualify myself as an avid and experienced rider but certainly no pro. Keep in mind that I have only ridden about 9,000 miles on a sled. That may sound like a lot, but there are riders who do more than that in a single season. Indeed, I know of one rider who has ridden more than 200,000 miles in his lifetime. He’s been at it for a while—and I’ve got a long way to go!

I have only a rudimentary knowledge of sleds and how they work. I suppose I am sort of interested in the mechanics behind them, but mostly I want the thing to start up in the morning and keep my hands warm while I’m riding. As the saying goes, I know just enough to be dangerous! After I lost a bogey wheel up in Caribou, I told my wife, Mary, about it like I’d been losing bogey wheels all my life.

Every one of my trips starts at home, on Monhegan. Snowmobiles aren’t allowed on the island—nor are all-terrain vehicles, for that matter—but everyone here knows that when the snow is flying up north I’ll be headed for the harbor to hop in my boat and steam to the mainland. This boat ride takes an hour one way, and when I get to Port Clyde I’m still an hour’s ride in the truck to Liberty and the sleds. So, for me, going for a ride is kind of a process and I try to do my due diligence in regard to weather and trail conditions. It’s a long way to come back if the riding is no good.

I almost certainly wouldn’t have, and couldn’t have, started riding without having the family farm up in Liberty. Everyone there either joins in, or puts up with, snowmobiling. Undoubtedly, it gets old walking around the great heaping piles of gear that are inevitably left in the middle of the most convenient space. Namely the living room.

Matt Weber

Monhegan, 2019

1. The Beginning

My family has always enjoyed snow. My brothers and I were encouraged to go out and blow off some steam when it snowed. Our winters were full of skis, sleds, snow forts, wet mittens and coats, and epic battles shoveling the driveway. Some adults reminisce about the snowball fights of their youth, but when you’re the youngest of three brothers, snowball fights aren’t so much fun. Many of us believe that winters past were tougher than today’s—darker, colder, and snowier. In fact, winters now are just as savage as they were thirty years ago. Maine still gets massive nor’easters, and brutal shots of cold Arctic air. The sun still sets at four in December. Maybe the one difference is that in this age of digital communication everyone knows what a polar vortex is and when it’s showing up.

Just a mile down the road from Orono, the tidy village of Stillwater, Maine, where we grew up, was our winter playground. Our old farmhouse was on a hill that leveled off to a stream, and my brothers and I spent most of our free time on that hill continuously improving our sledding run. The dog was kicked out of her doghouse (which she never used anyway) because we needed to use it as the foundation for a jump. We lugged pot after pot of cold water from the kitchen to ice down the snow until it resembled a bobsled run. Dual slalom courses were constructed, complete with banked sides, although I don’t think we ever timed the runs. We’d careen down the chute and then fly off the jump and land in a pile of snow. After a few days without a fresh snow, that landing got awfully hard, I can tell you.

At the very bottom of our hill was a trail that, after crossing a stream, meandered off into the woods for miles. In the spring we got industrious trying to dam the runoff. During the summer we hunted frogs and whatever else moved. Fall was fort building time, and in the winter, once in a while, a loud smoking snowmobile could be seen passing along the trail.

That trail turned out to be a leg of the Great Caribou Bog ski race. Every January, a snowmobiler would come along placing flags and route markers, and the following weekend hundreds of cross-country skiers would come gliding by. The first thirty or so were the serious ones. After watching for a couple of years, my buddies and I hatched a plan to sabotage the race. This we accomplished by digging a massive pit directly in the middle of the trail. I would say it was six feet long and maybe three feet deep. No crevasse, by any means, but it did the trick. The leader of the race that day came screaming around the corner, concentrating on his breathing, saw the hole stretched out in front of him at the last second, and leapt completely over it, landing with a grunt. From our fort, dug fifty yards away under a drift, it was a magnificent effort and we were thrilled with him, and ourselves.

Twenty minutes later two race officials roared up on those old yellow Ski-Doo Safaris and proceeded to shovel the hole back in. (In hindsight, we’re lucky no one got hurt.) When they drove off, I watched until they were out of sight thinking how marvelous those machines were, and so too the tracks they left behind. To this day, when I see snowmobile tracks along the side of the road or heading off across a field, I think they’re cool. I always wonder who made them and where they were going.

The first time I ever rode on a snowmobile, my mother had set me up for a day with a fur trapper she found through the local fish and game club, so I could tag along as he tended his lines. At that time, I was reading a lot of books about hunting dogs and the outdoors and was convinced that I would probably be a trapper when I got done with school.

It was a Saturday, and he showed up before daylight. Off I went with this fellow who didn’t talk much and probably wasn’t too keen to have a chubby eleven-year-old boy getting in his way. We drove out past Milford, onto what I now suspect was the Stud Mill Road. In the back of his pickup was a snowmobile. I watched, solemn and wide-eyed, as he backed it off the battered truck and loaded on his gear. On the back of the snowmobile was a metal rack for snowshoes, ax, basket, and the other odds and ends a trapper requires. Then he yanked on the pull cord to start it and that first-ever whiff of two-stroke smoke hit me.

The rest of the day is kind of fuzzy. I do remember never being able to see the traps until we were right on top of them, whether there was something in them or not. At some point we crossed a big stream to retrieve a beaver. During the crossing, I stumbled, and he hauled me up by the scruff of my coat, dripping and shivering. When I got dropped off at the end of the day, I knew that I was not destined to pursue a career of trapping (you know how hard that is?) but that if I could get a snowmobile for next Christmas that would be all I ever needed.

Eight years passed before I sat on a snowmobile again, and it would be nearly a quarter of a century before I purchased one for my own use.

i

In the fall of 1994, after a mostly unremarkable career at Old Town High, I deferred my acceptance to the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. I visited the job fair at Sugarloaf Mountain, landed a job with the snowmaking crew, and lucked into a bunk room of a condo owned by one of the ski instructors. Sugarloaf is the second highest mountain in Maine, and the largest of the state’s numerous alpine skiing operations. I had learned to downhill ski there years before, and although I never anticipated working there, snowmaking turned out to be the one job that has outshone all the others as the favorite thing I’ve done to earn money. I was put on the weekend day shift: Friday to Sunday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. one week, Thursday to Sunday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. the next. Days off, I skied.

My boss, Danny Barker, was a local from nearby Stratton who had been blowing snow at Sugarloaf since he was out of school, and he knew the mountain inside and out. One of his favorite tricks was to meet one of us at the top of say, the Skidder trail, offering to take your gun run for you if you could knock him off his feet. This was tempting to us snowmakers because gun runs were, and still are, the bread and butter of the job. Twelve-hour shifts of trudging down, and sometimes up, those long Sugarloaf trails, manhandling snowguns and digging out snow-covered hoses is a long day’s work, and it was tempting to see if the boss could still hack it.

Of course, he could. He spent more time on that mountain than probably any other person alive. Danno was