There are many factors that can complicate or slow down a rescue. Cell phones may not work, roads may be far away, and rescuers and pilots of medical helicopters may have to use precious time finding a safe place to land. That’s why Bob LaFontaine, the coastal region vice president of the Maine Snowmobile Association, had a brainstorm two years ago that identifying helicopter landing zones in the woods before accidents happened could help save lives.

Snowmobile riders have been working with LifeFlight of Maine ever since to find appropriate spots near some of Maine’s 13,000 miles of trail, and LaFontaine is thrilled with the results.

“The snowmobile clubs just went out and did a good job,” he said recently. “What would happen if there was a four-wheeler accident three miles in the woods? We’re trying to save time.”

So far, 300 landing zones have been identified in the coastal region alone, he said, in terrain that stretches from Waldo County down toward Augusta. LaFontaine proudly held up one of the bright orange signs that will be used to mark the landing zones. The reflective plastic sign was emblazoned with the GPS coordinates of the spot where it will be placed.

Remote landing zones need to be 100 square feet, firm and level, and clear of power lines and tree branches, he said. The zones also have to be dry — LifeFlight cannot land on frozen lakes and ponds, he said.

When club riders find such an area, they tell LaFontaine, who alerts officials with LifeFlight of Maine and passes on the coordinates. If the site is acceptable, and landowner permission is granted, the sign project moves forward. MedComm, a separate organization that provides communications specialists for LifeFlight and other ground ambulance services, will maintain a database of the trail coordinates as well as panoramic photographs of each landing zone.

“The landing zones still keep coming in, more and more and more,” LaFontaine said, adding that snowmobile clubs in northern Maine have been interested in participating. “I’m really happy this is happening.”

The first phase of the project was to identify the landing zones, while the second phase is to get them marked. LaFontaine said that a fire department in southern Maine donated $500 so that the Maine Snowmobile Association could get the first batch of signs made.

LifeFlight crew members and local rescue personnel also will be training snowmobilers on how to report a serious accident and how to set up a landing zone if necessary.

“We’re just glad that everything has taken place,” LaFontaine said. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it.”

For information on how snowmobile clubs can schedule communications and ground safety training, contact LaFontaine at bobiswim@gmail.com or call the LifeFlight Foundation at 230-7092.

There are only three homes on Shadagee Rd., along with Georgia Tolman’s snowshoe repair shop.  It dead ends and turns into a snowmobile trail.

Though there are signs that say dead end, a number of people have been directed to head down the muddy or often snow-covered trail by their mapping systems, saying the road was a through-way to the town of Industry.

So, Georgia Tolman usually has to pull them out with her pickup truck.

Tolman says between 2 and 3 people a week come down the road looking for a through way. She says she’s asked the town for a sign, but eventually had to put her own up.

Folks in Greenville say they expect the season to last into April.

For more than 40 years members of the Moosehead Riders, the local snowmobile club in Greenville, have been monitoring and grooming more than sixty miles of trail.

They tell us even with less snowfall this season, they’re out grooming at least three days a week.

“We still have good riding up into the mountains, plenty of snow in those mountains, sometimes you have to follow a path to get on the trail but there’s still good riding to be had,” Said the chair of the Riders, Chris Shields.

Town officials say while the snow may not look plentiful, there is still plenty on the trails, especially at higher elevations and areas blocked by trees.

Shields says he expects the trails to be ride-ready into mid-April, or beyond if there is another snowstorm.

Two Massachusetts men were hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries after two accidents at 2:30 a.m. Sunday in Rangeley. Wardens say one of the men’s machines struck a parked camper trailer, and the other crashed into a clump of trees when he swerved to avoid the first machine.

In Greenville, a Lyman man suffered a serious leg injury Saturday afternoon when his snowmobile hit a 2-foot-high patch of packed ice on Moosehead Lake, launched into the air and flipped over.

And in Bradstreet Township near Jackman, a Winslow man suffered a broken arm after crashing into another snowmobiler at 11 a.m. Sunday.

Warmer than average temperatures over the past several weeks have created conditions normally not seen until April, leaving some wondering whether the state’s economically important snowmobiling season is over for the year.

“Absolutely not,” Matt Polstein, owner of Twin Pine Camps in Millinocket, said Tuesday. “We have a good, ridable product right now.”

Granted, the quality of that snow varies greatly around the state depending on where last weekend’s snow-rain line passed, but overall trails are open for business from The Forks to Aroostook County.

“Part of our system got more than 2 feet of snow last weekend,” Polstein said. “But just over that snowline in slightly lower elevations, we got 3 to 4 inches.”

That was the same story in the Greenville area, where Moosehead Snowmobile Riders club President Tom McCormack said up to a foot of snow fell over the weekend, and even with above-freezing temperatures, snow is sticking around.

“We’ve been grooming, but definitely going out after dark when it cools down some,” McCormack said.

In fact, it is temperature more than snowfall — or lack thereof — that is playing havoc with the trails.

“We need some consistent cold to freeze things up,” Polstein said. “We’ve been grooming but the snow is wet and heavy, and we are doing more filling in of holes than smoothing things out.”

In The Forks, Russell Walters, president of Northern Outdoors, said the season definitely is not over, but he has had to get a bit creative with his clientele.

“In the Kennebec River Valley area, the trails are just too soft and getting really beat up going in and out of town,” Walters said. “So we moved our rental sleds to a location near the ITS trails about eight miles out and are taking our guests there to begin their rides.”

Elevation played a huge role when it came to the recent snow haves and have-nots, Walters said.

“Four [hundred] to 500 [feet] can make all the difference,” he said. “Where we got 4 or 5 inches [here], up in Jackman they are dealing with a couple of feet.”

According to Tamara Cowen at Cozy Cove Cabins in Jackman, riders are flocking to the area to take advantage of all that new snow.

“There is so much new snow and so many people, the groomers could not get the trails groomed fast enough,” Cowen said. “What we got was a heavy, wet snow [and] we got around 18 inches — I should know because I moved it all with shovels and a plow.”

Cowen said it is the efforts of local volunteers that are keeping the riders happy on those trails.

“The [snowmobile] clubs are incredible,” she said. “They are doing a great job opening and rerouting trails and are just an incredible team.”

Back in Greenville, McCormack said the trails remain open, even over the lakes, which have areas of glare ice or slush.

“We have plenty of snow now,” McCormack said, “but who knows what’s coming?”

According to the National Weather Service, northern Maine will see daytime highs in the low 30s with temperatures dropping to the low teens at night through Saturday.

In the Forks and Greenville areas, those nighttime lows are forecast to drop to the midteens.

“That cold is what we need right now,” Walters said. “We can currently accommodate our guests by trailering them to the snow, but it’s not the utopia we like of riding our trails right out of our driveway.”

Polstein said about 80 percent to 90 percent of his system is snow-covered and he expects his team of groomers to be on the trails every night this week as temperatures fall.

“It’s going to be pretty tough, but we are getting out there,” Kathy Mazzuchelli, the voice of northern Maine snowmobiling, said Tuesday morning. “Luckily we had a great base from the snow in December [and] that’s what we’ve been working with for two months.”

Sledding will be spotty in northern Maine, with better conditions the farther north riders go, Mazzuchelli said.

Areas northwest of Millinocket saw substantial snow over the weekend along the ITS 85 corridor, with the area north of Shin Pond getting 11 inches, she said.

“But south of Oxbow, there is limited snow coverage,” she added.

Mazzuchelli said the trails north of a line starting at Ashland and going to Van Buren are still in pretty good shape, but proper grooming and snowmobilers who exercise patience will be key to keeping them that way.

“All the clubs have not been able to groom,” she said. “Riders don’t understand you can’t groom wet, heavy snow when it’s warm [because] it may look pretty, but the first snowmobile that goes across it tears it up and then the sun hits that and melts it faster.”

Given the expected cool-down, Mazzuchelli said, most grooming operations are expected to restart this week in northern Maine and things should really improve by the weekend.

“Riders do need to use extreme caution on lakes and rivers,” she said. “On one lake in the Fish River chain, the ice depth went from 36 to 24 inches in a week, so riders need to stay within the marked corridors.” She did not specify which lake.

Mazzuchelli, Polstein, Walters and McCormack agree there is still plenty of snowmobiling left in Maine, and riders should not go by what trails look like at road crossings or close to roads.

“Once you get out into the system, it’s still good sledding,” Mazzuchelli said. “We are not dead yet — the weather made us roll over for a while but we are not dead yet.”

Complete trail conditions and information can be found on the Maine Snowmobile Association Web site at www.mesnow.com.

CHINA, Maine — Searchers looking for a missing teenager Monday night found snowmobile tracks leading into the open waters of the west cove of China Lake, according to the Maine Warden Service.

Richard “Shaw” Jackson, 18, an Erskine Academy junior, has been missing since Friday night. More than a dozen wardens, other law enforcement officials and volunteers from the community and 13 area snowmobile clubs have been looking for him since Saturday morning.

“We’re not certain those are his tracks near the cove,” Col. Joel Wilkinson of the warden service said Tuesday in a press release. “But this is an area of concern and we are putting resources there, and we are continuing to search in other areas as well.”

Agency spokeswoman Deborah Turcotte stressed Tuesday evening that it is still a search for a missing person.

“We need to continue our search on the trails,” she said.

Wardens had not yet been able to get sonar gear to the site for an underwater search of the lake, which has deep water, Turcotte said.

Jackson last was seen between 8 and 9 p.m. Friday heading back to his home from Pinkham Fuel, where he had work done on his black Yamaha snowmobile, according to the press release.

Wardens searching Tuesday used airboats, snowmobiles and an airplane to look for Jackson before stopping for the night.

“Of course, the snowmobile clubs have been very generous,” Turcotte said. “People are just stepping up and helping out.”

Although wardens have interviewed family members as to Jackson’s whereabouts, there is still no indication of which way he might have gone, Turcotte said.

By Tuesday night, a group called “Help find Richard ‘Shaw’ Jackson” on the social networking Web site Facebook had more than 1,048 members.

Anyone who may have seen Jackson after 9 p.m. Friday is asked to call the Maine State Police in Augusta at 624-7076.

State police say 43-year-old Brian Miller was killed friday afternoon when his snowmobile collided with a pick up truck in Parsonfield.

Troopers say Miller was killed instantly in the crash.

State Police say Miller was traveling down the middle of Elm Street when his sled collided head-on with the truck.

The driver of the truck and a young passenger were not injured.

Police have not released their names.

Their investigating rather lack of visibility due to the snow was a factor in the crash.

The airport put up plastic fences and signs warning snowmobilers to stay away several years ago, but the signs have been ripped up and the fences cut. Airport operator Kristina Wallace says if snowmobilers continue to ride in the area, the airport could lose $1.2 million in federal funding for a new runway.

She told the Morning Sentinel that a single piece of ice tracked across a runway could damage a plane. And she says riding on the runway is just plain dangerous for snowmobilers and pilots, who would have to pull up if a snowmobile crossed a runway as a plane was touching down.