‘White gold’ trucked in for western Maine snowmobile trails

WEST FORKS – This winter’s lack of snow doesn’t worry some Mainers who depend on it to make their businesses’ cash registers ring. They’re trucking the stuff in.

“If Mother Nature doesn’t come here, we’re going to her,” said Peter Dostie, who with a few other local business owners has mustered backhoes, a six-wheel-drive dump truck, snowplows, and grooming machines into service hauling in what many Mainers call “white gold.”

Using snow from piles around two town halls, a school parking lot and a local ball park, they are firming up eight miles of a trail that skirts the Kennebec River in western Maine on the way to higher elevations, where the snow from earlier in the season still covers hundreds of miles of trails.

Dostie is owner of the Hawk’s Nest Restaurant and Pub in The Forks, a tiny town about 40 miles east of the Canadian border that caters to whitewater rafters in the summer and snowmobilers who come from as far away as Massachusetts and New York in the winter.

“Yesterday, this was all soft,” said Matt Melcher, who has been driving the groomer along the Kennebec and U.S. Route 201. “Now at least it’s hardened up so you can ride on it.”

Dostie said the work had to be suspended Wednesday night when the transmission in the bucket loader broke. Besides, weather forecasters are predicting a major storm in Maine on Sunday that could bring up to a foot of new snow and help salvage the season.

“The most important thing is the riders; we take care of the riders and they take care of us,” said Dostie. The trail work has cost $1,200 so far.

This winter has been unusually warm in Maine and marked by rainstorms that washed away the snow in much of the state. That kind of weather has been devastating for the snowmobile industry and the riders, said Bob Meyers, executive director of the Maine Snowmobile Association.

“This certainly has an economic impact. You can attribute 3,300 full-time equivalent positions to snowmobiling statewide,” Meyers said. He said the West Forks area is a major throughway in the state’s 13,000 miles of trails.