Why Mark Fernald Spends His Winters Grooming Acadia.

Carrie Jones

Mar 14, 2026

ACADIA NATIONAL PARK—On the morning he turned 73, Mark Fernald sat in the Friends of Acadia office wearing a gray beanie and his signature blue fleece, looking like a man who had already spent a good portion of his life outdoors and was in no hurry to stop.

All winter long, before many people on Mount Desert Island have poured their first cup of coffee, Fernald climbs onto a snowmobile and heads out onto Acadia’s quiet carriage roads. He drags a groomer behind him through fresh snow, smoothing miles of trail so strangers—skiers he may never meet and friends he adores—can glide through the woods as the sun rises.

This year he logged nearly 90 hours grooming the park’s winter trails, covering close to a thousand miles.

Fernald shrugs at the number.

“Well,” he said with a small smile, “I don’t work in the wintertime.”

For winter sports enthusiasts on Mount Desert Island, it was an exceptional season. The snow fell. The ice froze. Skiers and snowshoers took to the trails. But those trails do not groom themselves.

Those trails need volunteers like Fernald, who has groomed the dirt carriage of Acadia National Park all winter long, earning a gold medal in a mock Olympics medal ceremony set up by FOA for all the hours he spent outside this winter making it so that others could enjoy the park.

“It was 90 some hours. I would say a thousand…. Yeah, like a thousand miles total,” Fernald said of his time grooming this season.

He has more hours than any of the other volunteers, but he’s humble about why that is.

“Well, I think. I the reason I groom the most is because I don’t work in the wintertime. I’m a lobster fisherman, and I work eight months of the year, so I take the winter months off, and everybody else has got jobs that groom, so they only get to groom on the weekends or after work,” Fernald said.

It’s more than that, too.

“I feel like everybody’s counting on us to get out there, so I keep doing it,” Fernald said. “I appreciate everybody being so thankful that I groom. I get a lot of thank yous.”

On top of those hours grooming the carriage roads were the hours of skiing them. Mark was 55 when he started skate skiing after years of skiing classic.

It became his passion.

So, yes, he’s skied almost 700 miles this season and was out there 22 days in a row in the month of February. Skate skiing allows him to go fast.

“I classic skied for 55 years, but my friends, like Matt Gerrish and David Kief, they started skate skiing,” Fernald said. “I couldn’t believe how fast it was. And thought, ‘Well, I never could do that.’ But then, finally, I bit the bullet and I bought the equipment and the first year I put 750 miles on my skate skis.”

Having never taken lessons, he didn’t feel like he had the technique down but by the end of the year, he was hooked.

“It’s exhilarating,” Fernald said. “You’re just skiing on your edges, you know, you’re just on your edges of your skis. It kills you when you first start and you can’t even go a quarter mile without it just destroying your muscles. But after you get it, it’s just totally exhilarating. I love classic skiing too. I waited until I was 55 before I started, but at least I started.”

The speed isn’t the only reward for getting out early. Those fast, quiet mornings on the carriage roads also mean Fernald often has the park to himself—and sometimes encounters wildlife most skiers never see.

“I get to see a lot of things that a lot of people don’t see because I usually go early,” Fernald said. “Sometimes I get home, change my clothes after grooming for two hours, and get back out there, and I’m the first one skiing. I always think that’s a good day when that happens.”

Being out that early means he sees wildlife most people never do.

“I’ve seen bobcats that stop and stare right back at you,” he said. “I got attacked by an owl three times one winter when they hit me in the back of the head three times.”

It happened while he was skiing near Eagle Lake.

“He knocked my hat off and almost knocked me over,” Fernald said.

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THE WINTER SEASON

Sometimes the four main groomers—Fernald, Matt Gerrish, Phil Lichtenstein, and Jake Bison—work before the sun rises. Sometimes they groom the trail and they are the first ones to ski it. And sometimes, they meet an angry owl.

It’s all worth it, according to Fernald, who seems to thrive outside. He’s a sixth-generation lobsterman from Little Cranberry Island and spends the colder half of the year “off island” at his home on Norway Drive in Bar Harbor.

He was recruited by Dr. Robert Massucco, who had been his dentist, known affectionately as Dr. Bob.

Dr. Bob not only brightened a generation of smiles on Mount Desert Island, he also created a legacy of volunteer groomers.

One of those is Bar Harbor’s Matt Gerrish, who was recruited by his friend Mike Gilfillan to become a volunteer winter trail groomer.

“Dr. Massucco taught Mike to skate ski in the 1980s. In turn, Mike taught me in the 1990s, and I started volunteering shortly after,” Gerrish has told FOA.

Boat captain and Mount Desert Warrant Committee member Phil Lichtenstein was recruited by Friends of Acadia’s Paige Steele at a College of the Atlantic alumni event in 2014.

He’d grown up skiing at Okemo Mountain in Vermont. Since 1996 when he started at the College of the Atlantic, he’s been skiing and biking on the Park’s carriage roads.

According to FOA Vice President of Communications and Marketing Perrin Donniger, Jake Bison is the youngest and newest groomer, having just started volunteering last year. Originally from Michigan where he snowmobiled, he’s a “lover of winter.” He usually grooms after work.

“I see how happy it (skiing) makes people, and I want to help them get out there,” he has said.

He’s also a stewardship volunteer crew leader with Friends of Acadia during the rest of the year.

They are always looking for more volunteer groomers.

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THE HISTORY

The grooming effort that skiers depend on today began in a much humbler way.

According to a Friends of Acadia article by Shannon Bryan, “the AWTA was started by a small group of local skiers in the late 1980s who groomed the carriage roads with creative homemade setups like bed springs and cinder blocks. In 1990, the AWTA formally partnered with Friends of Acadia, who provided financial and fundraising assistance, and Acadia National Park, who provided maintenance and other support. Gradually, those homemade rigs were replaced with specialized equipment.”

In 2005 Elizabeth R. “Leila” Bright’s family created a fund to honor her. That fund was for equipment.

“Leila loved skiing in Acadia, and those funds enable the purchase and maintenance of grooming equipment, fuel, volunteer and staff training and support, and other needs—in perpetuity,” Bryan wrote.

When Fernald was recruited by Dr. Bob, he knew about those stories. They did indeed start off, he said, with those bed springs and cinderblocks. They’d do anything to groom the trails, to get to ski, to help others to ski, too.

The equipment is a lot different now and its maintained by the Park.

“It was his snowmobile, too, and he talked to the park into letting them use it,” Fernald said.

“He sweet-talked them,” Nikki Burtis, FOA’s stewardship manager, said.

“And then they bought some mechanical equipment for the mechanical drags,” Fernald said.

“So it was just people interested in skiing ungroomed, and so they kind of DIY’d it with a box spring in their personal snowmobile, and now it’s a whole program with its own endowment,” Burtis explained.

“Bob Massucco moved here from Denver, Colorado, and he was a good skier, and he wanted to skate ski, and he talked the park into letting them throw a metal box spring behind his sled.”

Burtis laughed. “It never hurts to ask.”

“That was in the 70s sometime—and then Bob talked me—he was my dentist also, so he talked me into starting the groom, too. That’s how I got started,” Fernald explained. “He saw me up there skiing a lot, so that’s how I got started.”

“Like many of the programs at Friends of Acadia, lot of this one sort of started as, you know, real volunteer operation,” Donniger said.

Now, Burtis said, they have state of the art equipment for the volunteers to use like a Ginzu groomer, snowmobiles, and a tracked Kubota for Brown Mountain.

“Friends of Acadia sort of joined and helped to kind of get the right equipment and operationalize it a little bit,” Perrin explained.

They break the trail, compact the snow with a roller and then create corduroy with the groomer.

Burtis is an enthusiastic fan of Fernald and the volunteer groomers. She’s leaving her position at the end of the month to focus on her farm.

The organization announced that Brian Sale will be the new stewardship manager and will be overseeing all of Friends of Acadia’s stewardship volunteer programs, including the Drop-in Stewardship Volunteer Program, service group volunteerism, the Acadia Winter Trails Association’s ski trail grooming efforts, Take Pride in Acadia Day, and the Earth Day Roadside Clean-up, which is coming up on April 25.

“We are excited to have Brian joining the staff,” Stephanie Clement, FOA’s Vice President of Conservation said in the release. “His love of Acadia is strong, and we’re looking forward to working with him to foster volunteer stewardship in the park.”

That love is the reason Burtis worked at FOA and its part of the reason that Fernald and the other groomers get up before the sun working the trails.

The tools have changed since those early days when skiers dragged box springs and cinder blocks behind their snowmobiles just to smooth the snow.

Now there are specialized groomers and tracked machines and an endowment to keep the program running.

But the heart of it remains the same.

Somewhere before dawn or somewhere after sunset, when Acadia is still quiet and the snow lies unbroken, someone like Mark Fernald is out there cutting the first tracks—past frozen ponds and stone bridges and the dark shapes of spruce trees—so that by the time the rest of the world wakes up, the trails are ready.

And if you happen to be the first skier out that morning, gliding across fresh corduroy in the pale winter light, you might never know the volunteer who made it possible.

But he was there.

Hours earlier.

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Acadia Winter Trails Association

You can find grooming updates on the Friends of Acadia Facebook page.

More about Friends of Acadia here, how to donate here, and how to volunteer here.

In the original version of this article, I had a typo on a year. That has been corrected at 10:02 a.m., March 16.

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