Maine reached a troubling milestone over the weekend that could redefine the very meaning of healthy outdoor recreation.

When a 22-year-old Massachusetts man missed a turn, fell off his sled and struck a tree, he became the 13th snowmobiler to die on Maine’s trails this season. Adelio Tema’s death breaks the record of 12 fatalities in a single season, a number that had been reached three times before. But with plenty of time left in Maine’s snowmobile season, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that we probably haven’t seen the end of the carnage quite yet. The best that can be said about this latest death by snowmobile is that it was caused by driver inexperience, rather than by speed and alcohol. And that’s worth mentioning, since speed and alcohol have been the biggest factors by far in the mounting death toll along Maine’s wilderness rapid-transit system.

Sgt. Doug Tibbetts has no ready answers for what has become the scourge of Maine’s outdoor recreation industry. Nor does anyone else at the Maine Warden Service, which spent much of Monday fielding calls from the media about Sunday’s record-setting accident.

“I think we’ve done all we can as an agency,” Tibbetts said. “We do public education every year about the need to be careful out there, about the dangers of speed, but it doesn’t seem to get through to some people.”

Tibbetts said he could think of no other form of outdoor recreation in which an increasing death rate would be considered an acceptable risk for enthusiasts to take in the pursuit of their pleasure.

“Can you imagine if we had 13 hunters shot and killed in a single season?” he asked. “They’d shut down the hunting season if that happened. Or what if we had 13 people killed on ski slopes in Maine? Or 13 people killed in boating collisions? People would be absolutely shocked and outraged. But when it comes to snowmobiling, people seem to be more willing to accept fatalities.”

Maine imposes no speed limits on snowmobiles. The only regulation on the books, in fact, is that riders must maintain a “reasonable and prudent speed according to existing conditions.” Enforcing the law is extremely difficult, however, since what is imprudent to a warden might not be considered at all imprudent to the rider going 80 miles an hour who swears he was in full control of his machine the whole time.

“It’s also hard to enforce the law in a state as big as Maine,” Tibbetts said. “These accidents happen at all hours of the day and night, and with about 90 wardens out there, we simply don’t have the manpower.”

The ever-increasing horsepower and speed of modern sleds, Tibbetts said, also are causing some longtime snowmobilers in Maine to rethink the safety of their beloved recreation.

“We hear stories from people who say they won’t go on the trails on weekends anymore because it’s just too dangerous,” he said. “There are too many sleds going way too fast. This has become a very complex issue, and the wardens don’t have the answers. The public has to decide if it wants to do something to make snowmobiling safer. Otherwise, they’ll keep going from year to year, hoping the next winter will be better, while the wardens pick up the pieces.”