9211-R1_MSA_November2025_Newsletter

The Trip By Jan

I took notes from her perspective and some of the wording and descriptions in what I have written here are from her, exactly as she relayed them to me. Unfortunately I never wrote the article and never got my Dad’s account of it either. They are no longer with us, so I write this from those notes and from my memories of what they did tell me. Dot and Reggie were good friends of Mom and Dad for many years and lived not too far from them in the North Conway, New Hampshire, area. Reg gie helped rebuild the camp Mom and Dad later bought on Ambajejus Lake in Millinocket and they did a lot of fish ing and hunting together. For this trip the four of them each took a snowmachine and a tow sled loaded with gear. Dad towed a big box of supplies as everything they needed had to be brought in. The camp at that time was very rustic and had no sup plies in it. Everything including gas, propane, tools, food, clothing and gear for the cold weather had to be packed on those tow sleds. This arrangement, while necessary, dragged them down and caused the trip to take longer than it would have with lighter loads. They left North Conway very early in the morning, 3 or 4 am, as the plan was to make it into camp by that eve ning before dark. To get from North

Conway to Millinocket is normally a 4 to 5 hour trip depending on traffic and how fast you’re able to go. But they ran into a blinding snowstorm on I-95 which slowed their progress consider ably. It was so bad they had to get off the interstate and take side roads to Millinocket, even having to back track a few times when they ran into unplowed roads. They didn’t arrive there until 4 pm that afternoon. As they only had four or five days of vacation, they decided to go ahead into camp that evening even though it was still snowing heavily. They would go by vehicle for as long as they could then by snowmachine from there. As my Mom would later say, their desire to get into camp perhaps overruled better judgement and all this in a 1970 Oldsmobile station wagon and a four place open snowmobile trailer. The road was plowed only to the ranger station and impassable by vehicle beyond that. They parked at what was Great Northern’s camp at that time, geared up and continued on their way with the snowmachines and tow sleds. Up the road, they ran into a mess of stuck vehicles which they had to navigate around. According to the accounts of the people there, they were surprised by how quickly the

S nowmachines were always a part of our family. I remember as a teenager riding one through the woods by our house when the sport was still young and machines not so easy to handle. They weren’t called sleds as they are today and weren’t sleek, well-designed machines as they are now either. We always had several kicking around while growing up. While you may not know me or my sister Jill, perhaps you know our brother, Mark Chinnock. We are part of that out door-oriented, sled riding family from 50 years ago, headed by our Mom and Dad, Fud and Margit Chinnock. Our parents lived their dream and at one time had a cabin on Spider Lake in the Allagash of Maine. The first time we ever went there we had to hike a good distance through the woods to get to it, leaving our car on the logging road above and backpacking in sup plies. I was in my early teens, maybe 14 or 15, making the timeline of this first visit sometime in the mid to late 1960’s. The cabin was constructed of 100-year-old logs with a big old pot belly stove in the middle. It sat right on the lake, quickly becoming my parents’ favorite place to be. That period of time was different than today, rougher perhaps, in a way those who love the back country cherished. In the early part of the 1970’s before I graduated from high school in 1972, Mom and Dad took a snowmachine trip up there midwinter with their friends Reggie and Dot. The trip was a rugged one and turned into the trip from hell as they would come to call it. The following account was narrated to me by Mom years ago as I intended to write a story about their experiences.

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