BELFAST – With nary a snowflake in sight, open water in the lakes and the ground soft enough for planting, members of the Maine Snowmobile Association gazed at the bare landscape longing for winters past.

A few dozen of the 30,000-strong organization were on hand for the MSA’s coastal and central Maine regional meeting at Troy Howard Middle School on Saturday. To a member, all lamented the strange lack of snow this winter. If snowmobilers thought last year was bad, this year is stacking up to be even worse, they said. On a normal winter Saturday, they would be on the trails, instead of chewing the fat and downing spaghetti and meatballs in a middle school cafeteria.

“That’s why I’m here today: I can’t ride,” Scott Ramsay of the Maine Department of Conservation told the gathering.

Harvey Chesley, MSA president, said the economy of northern Maine could not withstand another poor winter. He said the snowmobile community was not just riders and dealers, it was also the many small businesses that count on providing goods and hospitality to the riders of Maine and from out of state.

“People are very pessimistic,” Chesley said. “We’re hearing from business owners north of Newport, Greenville, Millinocket and Aroostook County who are really hurting. Last year they were down 60-70 percent. If that happens again this year, a lot of them could really be in trouble.”

That observation was echoed by Ken Ingalls, vice president of the MSA’s central region. Ingalls said the association needed to keep the faith and work harder as an organization to support those in need. He described this winter as “an oddity” and reminded members of the poor winters that hit during the 1970s and ’80s.

“Our economy is a vacation-land economy, and a lot of people are really hurting this year from Mother Nature,” Ingalls said. “These kind of meetings should be celebrations, but they’re not, because we’ve got bare ground. … This kind of weather has been exasperating to all of us.”

Ramsay noted that last winter’s poor snowfall was to blame for a 25 percent decrease in snowmobile registrations and resulted in a loss of $350,000 in revenue. He said that as of last week, just 2,700 of the state’s 100,000 snowmobiles had been registered for the 2007 season.

“We’ll probably see more ATV [all-terrain vehicle] registrations than snowmobile registrations this year,” said Ramsay. He said that at last count 62,000 ATVs were registered in Maine.

That information was troubling to some snowmobile club members because the growing use of ATVs has created friction with private landowners. Unlike snowmobilers who travel on groomed trails and are relatively unobtrusive, some ATV riders have been known to rip through fields and woods, leaving behind a swath of ruts.

“A lot of our land is being posted because of people misusing their ATVs,” Capt. Joel Wilkinson of the Maine Warden Service told the gathering. “Landowners appreciate that you guys take care of the land, that you clean up their land.”

Wilkinson said the shift in land ownership, from the old days when benign timber companies granted public access to hundreds of thousands of acres to plots controlled by land trusts, preservationists and corporations with an eye on the bottom line, will continue to curtail access. He predicted that sports people of the future could be confronted with fees if they want to use private land.

“We all know that if people don’t let us on their land we won’t be able to recreate,” Wilkinson said. “There needs to be some kind of an initiative, other than the kindness of their hearts, for people to open their land. Maine is changing.”

Paul Davis of Sangerville, a retired state senator, claimed that state government was working against the very people who support it. He cited last year’s Katahdin Lake transaction that blocked snowmobile access to thousands of acres as the most recent example of a growing trend.

“We have to get more political or we’re going to lose it,” Davis said. “We can’t let the Land for Maine’s Future buy land and then prohibit the people paying for it to use it.”