Improvements made to ski trails, buildings at golf course

by Dan McClelland

Town committee reports were light Thursday, given the arrival of three new town board members and the appointment of new town committees that evening.

The main report came from John Gillis, who as a town councilman is on the committee that oversees the summer and winter operations at the local golf course. It was a logical appointment. Mr. Gillis has been building and maintaining the trail system on the golf course campus with his small team of volunteers for many years.

During the second half of December and in early January when there were no town roads to plow and sand, the town highway crew worked on the trails there, cutting trees and pulling stumps. Mulch was added in places to level the trail terrain.

Referring to that work Thursday Mr. Gillis reported that “The James C. Frenette Recreational Trails now offer a new grooming pattern and I just wanted to let Highway Superintendent Bill Dechene know that it's skiing nicely. It's been well received by the skiers.”

He said his crew began grooming those trails on December 19 but “the weather has been hit and miss” since.

Mr. Gillis said on January 12 they did “the first full groom of the trails. We still need another four to six inches of snow to get our trails in good condition.”

“Skiing under the lights has been a big hit!”

He offered that evening a robust thanks to all those who have recently donated to the trail improvements. To those generous donors he said: “Your donations were the matching funds which helped the town get a new grooming drag worth almost $10,000 with no cost to town taxpayers. You also helped light up the trails and helped the town purchase trail counters!”

Mr. Gill remembered that last February the town board approved the order of four trail counters for the trail system. “I installed them on various sections of the trail.”

He explained they pick up a passing heat source “and while they will count a deer I have them set high enough they will not count passing dogs.”

In his data collections taken over the past ten months he said he deducted five to nine percent for “misreads, wildlife and groomer passes” and came up with the following statistics. “Total user visits on the golf course loop were 2,012. Of those people the ones who also went up the Cranberry Pond loop were 1,110. Of the original 2,012 those who went down the original Hull's Brook Loop were 425.

The counts were gathered between March 1 and December 31 last year. The busiest month was last March with 655 visitors, he told the board that evening.

“In June, July and August- our slowest months- we had an average of 82 visits per month.”

He said he and his team members have talked about the need to purchase two more counting machines to put on the upper trails “so we can gauge the use there. We're now seeing how the lower trails are being used. We know a smaller group use the upper trails but we'd like exact data of that use.”

Mr. Gillis said he knows trail use is busiest in January and February each year. He predicted that visitor counts for the 12-month period ending this coming March 1 would exceed 3,000.

“With the counters all over I can tell if a person went out and back or went all around and we'll be well over 3,000 visitors.”

New Supervisor Clint Hollingsworth said the town's trail system is already a major town asset that will just continue to grow in popularity. He predicted exponential growth in use in coming years.

Mr. Gillis said his numbers do not include “the sliders” who frequent the golf course's sliding hill most winter weekends. He said on a typical weekend, about half the people are headed for the ski trails while the other half are going sliding on sleds and toboggans. “So we're seeing potentially a thousand people a month using the country club facility in the winter months for recreation.”

The supervisor said he believed it certainly an asset worthy of continued town investment.

“-And it's a sustaining asset,” added Mary Fontana.

“We're in the process of shifting gears here, John, and we're going to make some real things happen there,” the supervisor promised.

In another matter at the golf course, Miss Fontana said the town had received a notification from Friends Construction that won the town contract last fall to make winterization improvements to the pro shop building and the maintenance garage. She said there are some issues with the garage roof that will need to be addressed in the spring.

Mr. Hollingsworth said that Councilman Rick Donah had forwarded him some photos of the work the firm did there in recent weeks during a time he was quarantined and he said what he saw he liked. The local contractor said the Friends company “did an amazing job in the garage.”

“We're expecting the doors when they get here,” Mr. Gillis commented on a supply-chain set back the contracting firm ran into during its work this past month. It is currently awaiting the two new overhead doors it needs for both ends of the garage.

Councilman Donah said he skied the nordic trains in recent days and on one of those visits he checked out the garage work. He said the contractors really cleaned up the building and their improvements were impressive.

“It was a bare bones building before” with a lot of clutter inside. -And while it looks like they have a little more to do” the place is really shaping up.

In a different matter, he proposed that the town try to purchase or acquire a rescue sled to assist skiers or hikers who might become injured on one of the trails. Mr. Donah thought that possibly the Big Tupper Ski Patrol volunteers might have one to loan to the town temporarily. The renovated garage might be the place to store any new sled the town can acquire and keep it out of harm's way.

Mr. Gillis said his team does have an emergency sled that is all set up to “go into a tow hitch” of one of the nordic machines. “What we don't have is the gear that goes on it!”

He said fortunately the only accident where the sled was employed over the past eight or nine year occurred on the sliding hill.

Mr. Gillis said he hoped gear could be found in the ski patrol's inventory that could outfit the sled with safety gear, at least in the meantime, until the town could buy its own. Mr. Donah also said he hoped a way could be found to make that happen.

As for operating an emergency sled should an accident happen at the golf course, Mr. Gillis noted that he and several other members of his grooming team were former members of the Big Tupper Ski Patrol. He said he knows of others here who are still ski patrol-certified who could be called upon in emergencies at the town trail system.

“We definitely need a first response mechanism in place,” suggested Mr. Donah.

The board members that evening agreed developing a safety protocol for the town facility makes a lot of good sense, given the growing popularity of the place.