|
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Finding your bearings
Copyright © 2005 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
 |
Also on this page: THE IN-LINEUP | |||||||||||||||||
There is no Rollerbladers Coalition of Maine. No Pine Tree In-line Skating Association. So it's not surprising that Maine has a dearth of prime skating paths, smoothly-paved straightaways buffered from public thoroughfares thick with cars and trucks and roving packs of cyclists wearing frightening shirts with lots of words. Let's face it: To truly enjoy the skating experience, to hunch over and grasp your opposite wrist behind your back as you make deep-V strides as if sashaying over the frozen canals of Holland, you need some room. Room to roam. Room to glide from side to side. Room to build up speed without encountering repeated street crossings or sand traps. Perhaps this is why rollerblading has never caught on with the general populace. We're simply in the way. To drivers, we take up too much of the road. To pedestrians, we travel too fast for sidewalks. To cyclists, we weave too much. Increasingly, we who skate on pavement by means of boots with wheels are lumped in with skateboarders and pointed to the ramps and rails of skate parks. For those who prefer gliding to grinding, however, off-road options are limited. You won't find any 25-mile paths like the Cape Cod Rail Trail or even anything approaching Greater Boston's 11-mile Minuteman Commuter Bikeway, but there are a few places in Maine where you can stretch your skating legs free from fear of inattentive motorists, gravel-strewn shoulders and, worst of all, the driver's side door unexpectedly opening from a parked car you had assumed was unoccupied. (Speaking of which, has there ever been a more appropriately named athlete than the Olympic speed skater from Alaska? Apolo Ohno.) EASTERN PROMENADE TRAIL On a recent Friday, we tossed our blades in the back seat and set out to find the skating paths best traveled. Our first stop was a familiar route: the Eastern Promenade Trail, which runs from India Street to Tukey's Bridge. Skating alongside Casco Bay is a treat, and you are wise to concentrate on the view of islands rather than that of churning chocolate from the wastewater treatment plant. But, hey, any bike path is a welcome respite from regular roads. This one crosses railroad tracks twice - on a flat section near Portland Yacht Services and, as if to challenge us, on a turn at the bottom of a small hill. The path stretches 2.3 miles from Tukey's Bridge to the Old Port, so you can skate there and back in less than 25 minutes. Unless, as is the case most sunny days, the path is crowded. LISBON'S PAPERMILL TRAIL In our quest to find the hidden gems for blading, we next journeyed to Lisbon and came across the Papermill Trail at Miller Park, off Route 196 just south of the Sabattus River bridge. Billed as a bicycle/pedestrian trail, the 8-foot paved path follows the Sabattus River eight-tenths of a mile to Lisbon Community School. Short but sweet, the trail is blissful for blading as long as traffic is light. Views of the river and the rushing sounds of nearby rapids make this trail - completed only last fall - particularly pleasant. On the downside, an end-to-end skate takes fewer than five minutes. Town manager Curt Lunt said plans and money are in place to extend the trail along Mill Street and Upland Road this summer and connect Lisbon Center with Lisbon, more than doubling the path's length and adding an open farmland feel to it. Lunt said ultimately the town hopes to extend the path in the opposite direction, along the Androscoggin River, to connect Lisbon Village with Lisbon Falls. The Papermill Trail - remnants of a dam near an old mill gave it the name - is a good place to start. "There are a lot of nice trails around," Lunt said, "but I don't think any as pretty as that one." KENNEBEC RIVER RAIL TRAIL Another path with blading potential is the Kennebec River Rail Trail, but a visit to the state capital revealed the challenges involved in creating a multi-use trail of substantial length that satisfies cyclists, pedestrians and in-line skaters. Starting from the Hannaford parking lot in Gardiner, we encountered sand and gravel over early sections of the path, which quickly narrowed alongside a railroad bed to about four feet. The surface was rough enough to loosen bearings, or at least to give your feet the jiggles. Because the KRRT is a work in progress, the trail ends abruptly at Hill Street across from a pancake house, a little more than a mile from the start. Eventually, the trail will stretch between the Kennebec River and busy Route 201 from Gardiner through Farmingdale and Hallowell to the capitol in Augusta, a distance of 6.5 miles. For now, the only desirable option for bladers is to start in Augusta, either from Capitol Park or from a parking lot off Water Street at the Maine State Housing Authority. If you embark from the park, you can slalom down a hill with an 8 percent grade that takes you whizzing past - is this a bike-path requirement? - a wastewater treatment plant. Cross the railroad tracks and you're on the main trail, and what a trail it is. Wide, smooth, serene - the Augusta section of the KRRT leads you along a weathered split-rail fence high above the river, seemingly worlds away from the noise and congestion of automobile traffic. Crouching like Ohno, you place one hand on the small of your back, swing the other arm, make long V-strides and think, this is the way multi-use trail life should be. Until you reach Hallowell. Oh, Hallowell. Rather, whoa, Hallowell. Without much warning, save for a small blue sign at the town line, this path of paradise turns to dust. Stone dust, to be exact. Great for joggers, impassable for rollerbladers. Here's a plea to Hallowell: please pave. Not the entire width. Leave a 3-foot section for those on two feet and pave the rest for those whose wheels depend on it. Please? ANDROSCOGGIN RIVER BICYCLE PATH On to Brunswick. Here, off Water Street and under a railroad bridge, you find the entrance to the Androscoggin River Bicycle Path. Pass between the black posts and encounter abundant amenities for the non-motorized set. Most noticeable is an off-center stripe to separate those with wheels from those without. There are also signs, benches, bathrooms, pet-waste receptacles. (What, no sewage treatment plant? Oh, there it is. Across Route 1.) The path's 14-foot width allows for plenty of users, as well as crossover strides that make hill-climbing easier. The northern terminus is a healthy 2.6 miles from the start, so you can work up a decent sweat before having to turn around. About the only drawback of this path is the incessant noise from cars and trucks speeding along the adjacent Route 1. It gets loud. Disconcertingly loud. SOUTH PORTLAND GREENBELT Just when we thought Maine had yet to create the perfect blading path, we stumbled across South Portland's Greenbelt extension, completed last summer. We had long used the section from Hannaford to Bug Light, but, as with Yarmouth's Beth Condon Pathway, whatever rhythm we mustered would end at the multiple road crossings. Only this spring did we venture west and south from Mill Creek Park, parallel to Broadway beyond the approach to the Casco Bay Bridge. At first the path was rough, with winter's sand still prevalent. We passed rusting oil tanks and industrial buildings with graffiti. For two blocks on Chestnut Street the trail disappears before resuming at North Kelsey. It becomes wider along railroad tracks and intersects with Broadway at an Irving station, across the street from Amato's. Cross Broadway and the going remains rough - gritty twigs, buds and stones that a South Portland official promised would be swept away by the time you read this. Thing is, you're in the woods now, away from automobile traffic. After a bit, the trail emerges into a grassy field and winds through mounds of . . . buried garbage. It's a capped landfill. (No doubt to make up for the fact that the older greenbelt section somehow managed to avoid South Portland's wastewater treatment plant.) Then again, you take your bike paths wherever you can get them. For all our harping on their faults, their pleasures still represent, to our jaundiced eyes, the best and most concrete return on our tax dollars. Back to the path, where the best is yet to come. We're now on a 10-foot wide ribbon that has taken us from urban grit to bucolic grace. Birds chirp. Surrounding terrain becomes flat. Athletic fields abound. This is the 145-acre Wainwright Farms Recreation Complex and, for a blader, as close to heaven as you're going to find in Maine. "We're actually working to build a loop trail around the fields there," said Jim Gailey, South Portland's director of community development and a rollerblader himself. Gailey said the city also plans to grind and repave the existing greenbelt (begun in 1979) from the bridge to Bug Light. "It is wavy," Gailey said. "I jumped on it about two years ago with my Rollerblades and it just chatters your teeth." So by summer's end, you should be able to skate 5.7 mostly smooth miles from Wainwright to Bug Light with only a few automotive interruptions. Gailey chuckles when he remembers how adjacent landowners used to rail against the greenbelt, fearing erosion of privacy. Now real-estate ads herald the path's proximity. "It's one of those amenities that the city can offer everyone, from mothers with baby carriages to senior citizens," he said. "Everyone can enjoy it." None more so than the Rollerblade Coalition of Maine, however loosely aligned we may be. Staff Writer Glenn Jordan can be contacted at 791-6425 or at:
|
||||||||||||||||||
