8924-R1_MSA_December2024_Newsletter

Understanding Trail Diversity: Why Snowmobile Experiences Vary Within the Same Area By Chris Gamache Y ears ago, I was getting ques tions about why a trail went

time grooming these trails. You can be within the same town and get a great ride on an ITS trail and then turn onto a club trail and get a bumpier ride, or the opposite can be true on a weekend afternoon due to the number of riders using the ITS trails vs club trails. Trail condi tions depend on when you are riding and the type of trail you are riding on. State Grant in Aid programs, or Association guide lines, dictate what trails are the highest priority for winter main tenance (grooming). Not all clubs are using the same equipment either.Trail width is a major factor on what groomer is used on the trail. You also have landowner wishes to contend with. Not all landowners want a 30’ wide thru way on their prop erty. If you have a landowner that limits you to an 8’ width you can’t do it with a 10’ wide groomer, even if the rest of your trails are 10’ wide. And some clubs cannot afford a larger/ wider machine and may have to work with older or smaller groomers. In late January of 2019 I rode a loop through western Maine on the ‘free weekend’ with one of my District Supervisors (he’s still there but I am not) for the Trails Bureau (Clint S). We rode

up through Success and Cam bridge NH and then into Grafton Notch and down into Bethel ME. Along the way we encountered the groomer operator for the Newry SC. If you have not rid den here, it is a really cool ride and they have a section of trail that has to be a nightmare to maintain. The section of trail is just north of Bethel (or at least it was) and it goes up and over Mt Will. It is a short, very steep, sec tion of trail. The club groomed this with a 4’ drag pulled behind a Skandic!! A full size groomer would have all it could do to pull this section of trail. We stopped and talk to him for about 15 min utes and we were shocked with what the club had to work with for equipment. We thanked him for his work and took off south into Bethel. When we got a lit tle further on, we stopped and talked more about that experi ence. I remember telling Clint that no one should ever com plain about a trail. Riders have little knowledge of what goes into creating not only the physi cal corridor in the off season, but also little idea of what it takes to keep them flat for riders during the season. So, trail conditions have about 50 things that contribute to them. Riders think there are about 2. Trail conditions are not a guar antee. We hope for snow, we hope it’s the right snow (not too dry, not too wet, just right), we hope the temps are cold enough but not brutal and we hope the groomers have been out. If you get these 4 hopes to line up it’s a great day, but we often only get 1. Enjoy great trails when you get them, expect to have rough trails every day you ride (at some point in time) and thank the club and association volunteers for spending their time so you can enjoy yours.

from a flat, smooth, recently groomed surface to a spine banging mogul run. The riders were on the same trail system within the same town/general area, but the trails were very different. One answer does not apply to this question. There is a variety of reasons and not all make sense all the time. Just because you are riding within a town, or one clubs trail network, does not mean that all the trails in that area are treated the same. Why?Trail classifications make a huge difference on its condition: ITS Trail, club trail or something in-between. Maine trails are clas sified in the ITS classification or club trail. NH has the Corridor Trail System and Vermont has their own classifications. Corri dor/ITS level trails are the snow mobile equivalent of the high way system. These trails are numbered and are used to make an interconnected web of trails that traverse the state. They are consistently numbered to aid in long distance travel, and to help get riders to significant areas of rider support (lodging, food, fuel, clubhouses, etc). These trails typically get more fund ing for grooming than club trails and therefore clubs spend more

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