CARIBOU, Maine — Three days before Christmas, Gary Marquis was grooming a snowmobile trail. The superintendent of the Caribou Parks and Recreation Department was just outside town filling a mudhole on Interconnected Trail System 90 near Woodland.
“We’ve got almost three feet of snow on the ground and the ground never had a chance to freeze with all the snow that has fallen so far. That’s what the clubs are fighting right now,” Marquis said on Dec. 22. “Anything in the swamps is very hard to get through right now. [Snowmobile riders] have to be very careful.”
Not that Marquis was complaining. He said he and other Aroostook County snowmobilers were experiencing what Maine Snowmobile Association Executive Director Bob Meyers was hoping the rest of Maine would soon see — a good old-fashioned winter. That means temperatures of zero to 20 degrees Fahrenheit and deep, powdery snow that melts little until springtime.
“It means cold the way we remember. It means a lot of snow and having it stay. That’s the thing. When you get a great snowstorm and then it’s 45 degrees and raining, it’s sad,” Meyers said. “Last year it never got cold, we never got much snow. There was nothing there.”
National Weather Service officials said they couldn’t guarantee the realization of Meyers’ hopes, but Maine’s 282 snowmobile clubs — the backbone of a snowmobile industry that draws revenues of $300 million to $350 million to the state annually — are off to a good start with the snow that’s fallen and with its timing.
“To have groomed trails since two weeks ago is very rare. That is the old-style winters we used to have and to have those kinds of snow on the ground is very good,” Marquis said. “It means we could have a very good season.”
According to the weather service office in Caribou, as of Thursday, 49.2 inches of snow had fallen so far this winter in Caribou. That’s about 16.6 inches above normal. Last year at this time, only 16.3 inches had fallen in Caribou, a good indication of how abysmal the season was, said Tim Duda, a meteorologist with the Caribou office.
“We are well ahead of where we were last year at this time,” Duda said last week.
Perhaps most revealingly, the snowpack — the amount of snow remaining on the ground after storms — was about 18 inches in Caribou, and 15 to 20 inches across Aroostook on Thursday, said Rich Norton, meteorologist at the weather service in Caribou. Sangerville had 9 inch snowpack, Fort Kent had 12 inches and East Sangerville had 9 inches on ground. Van Buren had 13 inches.
“The best snowmobiling is obviously in Aroostook County right now,” Norton said.
The Nor’easter expected to start Thursday afternoon and carry well into Friday, with accumulations of up to 16 inches expected in the northernmost parts of the state, will likely offset damage done to the snowpack by the warm weather.
Grooming in northern Penobscot County, which began last week, is off to a good start, particularly in the areas north and northwest of Millinocket, Meyers said. Areas south toward Lincoln and Bangor hadn’t really gotten started with grooming yet due to minimal snow accumulations.
In Bangor, about 11.7 inches of snow had fallen as of Thursday. That’s a typical amount, Duda said. Last year at this time, a piddling 4.5 inches had fallen. Much of what has hit the ground so far this year is gone, however, with the snowpack in the Bangor pretty much gone as of Thursday morning.
The hard reality for snowmobilers in the last few decades has been that winter doesn’t really get going in Maine until Jan. 1 or later, and a real winter for snowmobilers is typically the kind that buries Bangor or the Maine coast in snow as well as Aroostook County.
The last good season for snowmobiling statewide, the winter of 2014-15, featured a February 2015 that was among the coldest on record. Snowfall records already had been set that month in Boston and in Eastport, and — after tying a 46-year-old record on Feb. 9 of that year — Bangor made the list with a new high mark for snowfall for that time of year.
Between Jan. 24 and Feb. 20 that winter, 60.8 inches fell in Bangor, surpassing the 59.4 inches that fell in Bangor between Feb. 1 and March 3, 1969. Snowfall records for Bangor have been kept since 1926, according to the National Weather Service.
Duda said the weather service hadn’t any predictions for the amounts of snowfall expected next month or in February. So for now, snowmobilers, particularly those in Caribou, were happy to get on the trails while the snow was still there.
Snowmobiler Paul Henry Lessard of St. Francis said he had already put 500 miles on his new sled in just the past two weeks.
“There’s not much room for improvement,” Lessard said last week of trail conditions in the St. John Valley.
The New Hampshire native who now lives in St. Francis was in Fort Kent to pick up a new “Bigfoot” decal at Precision Printing and Design, which will go on his Arctic Cat sled. An avid snowmobiler, Lessard said he has ridden every winter since 1971, including many trips from Pittsburg, New Hampshire, all the way to Fort Kent.
Bob Plourde, owner of the snowmobile dealer Plourde & Plourde in Caribou and Madawaska, said people seem to be looking forward to good snowmobiling this winter.
“The main conversation last year was that we had no snow, and that it came very late,” Plourde said, “but the people are very happy this year.”
Plourde, who has owned the two shops since 1971, says snowmobilers were able to start riding six to eight weeks earlier this year than last.
“I think it’s going to be an outstanding year for people in the snowmobile industry, motels, gas stations, and anything else associated with tourism,” he said. “It affects the whole northern Maine economy since it’s all we have in the winter. There’s not much else going on during this time of year that generates tourism.”
Meyers said the state’s snowmobile trails would be impossible to maintain without the efforts of the volunteers who belong to the association’s clubs — plus 2,200 businesses that are also MSA members. The volunteers groom the state’s 14,500 miles of Interconnected Trail System trails and lesser arteries. Their efforts receive about $4 million in state grants generated annually by snowmobile registry fees and a small percentage of state gas tax funds, Meyers said.
All snowmobilers, Meyers said, “should always be mindful that 95 percent of our trails are on private land. They should be respectful of that. When we have the weather, the clubs do a remarkable job doing beautiful trails.”
The clubs’ efforts support most all forms of Maine businesses, Meyers said, and are very well-known. His office in Augusta receives calls regularly from around North America from tourists looking to come to Maine to ride.
“I had a man from West Virginia call and Christmas morning he and his wife are hooking up the trailer and heading to Maine to go snowmobiling for a week. That’s a serious commitment and it speaks volumes to the quality of the trails we offer,” he said.
BDN Writer Bill Trotter and writers Don Eno of the St. John Valley Times and Christopher Bouchard of the Aroostook Republican & News contributed to this report.