Snowmobile clubs race to clear trails wrecked by Brainerd summer storms

Most years John Terwilliger doesn't think about snowmobile trails until the leaves fall.

He runs the Gull Lake Drifters snowmobile club — the caretakers of 120 miles of trail in the Brainerd Lakes area. In a typical year, he and a few friends hop on ATVs and make sure the trails are clear of brush and fallen trees in late November, after deer hunting season. Usually it takes them a few weekends. This year, Terwilliger said it will take a lot longer.

"It's really bad," he said. "The trees fell like dominoes."

In July a violent storm cut through the Brainerd Lakes area. Straight-line winds dropped thousands of trees across roads and power lines. More than 1,000 homes and businesses around Gull Lake lost power for days. The state kicked in nearly $1 million in disaster aid for the hardest hit counties.

Major roads were cleared a few days after the wind died down, but crews are just now tackling the hundreds of miles of snowmobile trail weaving through the area.

A dozen snowmobile clubs in the region are subsidized by the state to maintain trails, according to Wade Miller, Brainerd area parks and trails supervisor. The Gull Lake Drifters' territory was hit hardest.

"The storm had a bull's-eye on their trails," Miller said.

Terwilliger said roughly half the club trails from Cragun's Resort to Breezy Point were heavily damaged. Some of the trails are too clogged with fallen trees to get in and survey.

Some of the hardest hit miles run through Pillsbury State Forest, where DNR crews are handling most of the heavy lifting. Miller said eight foresters with chainsaws and a bulldozer worked full time for three weeks to clear 17 miles of trail.

"We have 30-year employees and they've never seen anything as devastating as this," Miller said. "You might go down the trail 50 feet and there might be 30 trees down."

Those are miles the Drifters don't have to clear, but the club might have a problem if the rest of their trails took as much damage.

Terwilliger and half a dozen other club volunteers started work earlier this week on a section of trail through popple trees on Gull Lake's east side. It took half a day to clear less than a mile. At that rate, clearing another 50 miles could take months.

The Drifters get roughly $400 a mile for trail maintenance from the state. Members volunteer so the money goes to fueling grooming machinery and the John Deere tractor they use to move trees.

This year Terwilliger worries they might burn through the money too soon, and literally run out of gas.

"It's always a real possibility," he said.