MONMOUTH – It looks like a jacked-up monster truck.

But rather than tires, the 1989 Chevy Blazer has tanklike tracks. And instead of taking this funny-looking contraption on the road, Phil Wright drives it through snowy fields and woods to groom snowmobile trails.

Across Maine, a growing number of snowmobile clubs are buying old sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, putting studded tracks on them, and using them to groom vast networks of trails.

The converted vehicles – a combination of Yankee frugality and ingenuity – are growing in number. Five years ago, there wasn’t a single one in Maine. Today there are two or three dozen.

When Wright, a member of the Cochnewagan Trailblazers snowmobile club, first saw one of them, he had the same reaction many people do: Wow! “When you’re grooming trails and you stop at a road and cars are going by, you can see people slowing down to get a closer look at it,” Wright said.

Trail grooming is serious business in Maine.

Nearly 100,000 registered snowmobiles and 13,000 miles of trails crisscross the state. Snowmobilers last winter rode a combined 150 million miles on those trails, according to the Maine Snowmobile Association.

The trail network for the most part is cared for by volunteers who belong to the 281 snowmobile clubs in the state.

Volunteers normally tow 4-foot-wide steel grooming drags behind snowmobiles to flatten the snow and terrain. Sometimes, it takes riders several trips in the blustery cold to complete the job.

The converted vehicles, though, can tow heavier and larger drags to smooth out trails. Wright drags a groomer that is 7 feet wide and 15 feet long with five plow blades to level out the trails.

Bruce Milliken of the Hillside Family Riders club in Lewiston is believed to have built the first converted vehicle in the state. He said he visited a New Hampshire man who had one, liked what he saw and built one for his snowmobile club a few years ago using a 1991 Geo Tracker.

Milliken also built a few of the groomers for other clubs – until a Minnesota company complained that he was infringing on its patent for similar track systems.

But that hasn’t stopped others from making their own grooming vehicles out of old Blazers, Trackers, Chevy S-10s, Broncos and Jeeps.

Who can blame them? The machines groom snow quickly and efficiently, and allow volunteers to ride in a heated cab as they rumble through deep snow. The machines are too big to groom every trail, but they can do most of them.

“It’ll do in one trip what it would take those other machines 10 trips to do,” said Don Dakin, a member of the Poodunck Snowmobile Club in Dixfield, which converted a 1995 Geo Tracker two years ago. “It’s a groomer’s dream.”

It’s a low-cost alternative to large manufactured snow groomers, which can cost $50,000 or more.

The Cochnewagan Trailblazers’ groomer, for instance, cost $10,100 – $1,800 for a Blazer with 133,000 miles on the odometer, $4,800 for the tracks, and $3,500 for the groomer that is dragged behind the vehicle.

There’s no doubt the contraptions turn heads.

It’s quite a sight to see the track-powered SUVs going places that a normal SUV driver could only dream of. When spring comes, the tracks can be removed and replaced by tires.

“It’s pretty cool,” said Bob Meyers, executive director of the Maine Snowmobile Association. “What else can you say? You take a junk vehicle and turn it into something great.”