Topics >  Start-up >  Writing a Business Plan > 

The Money Trail

In much of the northern U.S., a hidden, lush economy thrives along thousands of miles of snowmobile trails. Here's how this winterland boom began and what the locals are doing to reap the rewards.

A hidden economy thrives where you'd least expect it--along the thousands of miles of snowmobile trails that blaze through the northern United States

We pull onto route 85 in Shirley, Maine, heading north. Signs tick off the distances to Canada and New Hampshire, as well as to gas stations, restaurants, and cocktail lounges. Traffic is light; going 60, we pass a few slowpokes, and we're passed by one guy doing at least 90. Everywhere I look there's snow--including two feet of it on the road beneath me.

Route 85 is a snowmobile trail, one of a vast network of high-speed snow boulevards that snake across Maine and much of the northern part of the United States, through regions that often lack so much as a single blue highway on maps. For the next two days I'll be looping through a modest-size patch of the state, most of it inaccessible to cars during the winter. And yet everywhere I go, I'll be close to thriving businesses, some of them so constantly packed with free-spending customers that the owners would gladly trade some of their profits for a little break from the action.

Welcome to the snowmobile economy.

Though the snowmobile boom hasn't made it onto the radar screen of the rest of the country, it's rippling through the northern states' economies like a shaved-ice tsunami. Maine alone has established some 12,000 miles of actively maintained trails, many of them following logging roads and railroad tracks.

The heart of the trail network is the Interstate Trail System (ITS), a web of broad, straight, well-groomed trails that allow snowmobilers, often called sledders, to cruise at up to 100 miles an hour not only through northern Maine but also as far west as Michigan, and well into Canada. The ability to travel large distances at high speeds on the ITS has in effect extended the potential market for every sled-oriented lodge and restaurant.

In Maine that change has created an unexpected windfall for some entrepreneurs in the "snow travel" industry, which has evolved over the past three years or so; others are scrambling to redraw their business plans. But some business owners wonder if the opportunities are worth the sacrifices required to take advantage of them. All in all, it's a case study in how even the sleepiest industries can suddenly find themselves in a cauldron of change.

MONDAY EVENING: Arrival
It's a little after 6 when I leave the Bangor airport in my rental car, under a canopy of luminous clouds and an implied moon. A few blocks away, as I ponder the complete absence of rush-hour traffic here in one of Maine's largest cities, I'm startled by the headlight beams of two snowmobiles that have suddenly emerged at my side, as if disgorged from the ground, just five feet away. They are moving parallel to me but a lot faster. The machines are almost eerily quiet, and in seconds their taillights disappear in a swirl of snow ahead of me on a path that apparently runs alongside the highway for some hundred yards.

The 90-minute ride to the southern tip of Moosehead Lake takes me past fairly standard Maine secondary-highway scenery--namely, an endless stream of small Cape houses broken up by patches of small construction-contracting and industrial-service companies. Every driveway seems to have either an old sport-utility vehicle or a pickup truck, and maybe half of those driveways have anywhere from one to four snowmobiles.

In Shirley, I'm welcomed to the Evergreen Lodge by owners Bruce and Sonda Hamilton. Bruce is going to be my guide for the next two days. He and Sonda show off the elegantly woodsy facilities--the Caribou Room, the Bobcat Room, the Coyote Room, and so forth--with good-humored pride.

The Evergreen had been run as a bed-and-breakfast for 12 years before Bruce and Sonda bought it, 2 years ago. Like almost every other lodge in the region, it had stayed open only from June through the end of the foliage season, in early October. "When the last leaves fell, everyone was out of here," says Bruce Hamilton. There had been a small winter trade in the area in the 1970s, when the ski resort at nearby Big Squaw Mountain was in its heyday and snowmobiles became briefly popular. But the resort lost most of its business to better-heeled competitors closer to Boston and New York City, and the snowmobile fad petered out as most riders became disenchanted with the noisy, breakdown-prone machines. By the 1980s the region had once again come to think of itself as an almost entirely summer-oriented economy--a place where tourists could hike the mountains that ring the lake, spend the day sailing, or drift into the woods and catch sight of a moose or two. From the owners' point of view, winter was for relaxing, repairing, and, for the minority who could afford it, heading south for a vacation break from the cold.

Read more:

6 Secrets to a Successful Start-up

How I Hire the World's Best Employees

What's for Dinner? Ask These 7 Start-ups

David H. Freedman

A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.

Sign-up for our Start-up Newsletter

Email Address: