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Bangor’s top wintertime attraction has long been the Maine high school basketball tournaments, held for more than 60 years at the Cross Insurance Center and at its predecessor, the Bangor Auditorium, attracting tens of thousands of spectators over eight days.
But for much of the 1970s, the tourneys had a rival that threatened to dethrone it as the top event in the Queen City: the Paul Bunyan Open, a weekend-long snowmobile race held in late January at Bass Park between 1968 and 1979.
In the 1960s, snowmobiling was still a young sport. The first recreational snowmobiles were introduced in 1957, and within a decade, there were more than 200,000 snowmobiles in use in the U.S. and Canada. Snowmobile races and rodeos began to be held in the late 1960s, and Bangor’s Paul Bunyan Open was among the first ever in the U.S. — even preceding the International 500 event in Michigan, today the largest snowmobile race in the world.
The brainchild of the Bangor Junior Chamber of Commerce, also known as the Jaycees, the first Paul Bunyan Open was held on Jan. 28, 1968. The top winners for the inaugural event were Barry Randall of Randolf, Vermont, George Lowell of Freeport and Tim White of Lancaster, New Hampshire. The event attracted 4,000 spectators.
In 1969 the event expanded to two days, and attendance grew to 7,000. In 1970, however, the event really caught its stride. More than 16,000 people crammed inside Bass Park to watch more than 200 competitors. The prize money topped $7,000 — worth about $55,000 in 2014 — and people came from all over the Northeast, the Midwest and Canada to attend or compete.
Raymond Seamans of Prospect, who once worked for Polaris Snowmobiles and who has long been a historian of snowmobiling in Maine, attended the first five years of the event.
“The story of the Jaycees fronting $4,000 in 1968 to get the ball rolling on the races is fascinating. That was a huge sum at the time,” Seamans said. “Just three years later paid attendance was over 16,000 people. It was a really big deal.”
Snowmobile racers whiz down the track at the 1973 edition of the Paul Bunyan Open at Bass Park in Bangor.
It seemed that the Paul Bunyan Open could only get bigger and better, with attendance growing to 18,000 in 1971. All the major snowmobile manufacturers — Polaris, Arctic Cat, Yamaha, Ski Doo and Moto-Ski — were sponsors and fielded teams for the races. Yamaha brought a team of Japanese snowmobilers to compete, and the Japanese embassy in Washington D.C. shipped a Japanese flag to be flown at the event alongside the U.S. and Canada.
In 1972, organizers added a week-long winter carnival leading up to the races, adding sports like hockey, ice skating, snowshoeing and sports car ice racing on Pushaw Lake, as well as the annual Bunyan Ball the night before the race kickoff. Bangor saw a big economic boost from the visitors that poured into the city for the weekend.
Bangor Daily News outdoors writer Bud Leavitt was arguably the event’s biggest champion, previewing the races each year with his trademark blend of folksy Maine humor and keen eye for describing sports action. He called it a “wild west show on steel skis” and noted the “buzz-saw din” of the engines; the “wickedly slick” banked track; the “uproarious” cheers of the crowd and the “wiry and determined” competitors.
But the event had a big problem from the start: a lack of snow. Maine’s snowfall can vary widely year to year — sometimes we get clobbered, and sometimes we hardly get anything, or the weather is too warm for it to stick around. For the Paul Bunyan races, snow had to be trucked in from places like Bangor International Airport and the Bangor Municipal Golf Course for volunteers to turn it into a snowmobile track. It was grueling work that could be undone with one warm day.
Attendance began to flag in the later years, with the 1977 event attracting around 8,000 people, less than half the number of spectators it had six years earlier. In 1979, a heavy rain storm forced the cancellation of one of the two days of racing. Later that year, the national energy crisis saw gas prices skyrocket. In the fall of 1979, facing a mounting financial shortfall, after 12 years the Jaycees made the decision to cancel the event.
In the years since, no similar event has had lasting success in Bangor. Several local nonprofits attempted to recreate some of the fun and excitement with East Coast Snocross, a racing and snocross event that lasted from 2015 to 2020 at Bass Park and at Speedway 95 in Hermon. The pandemic put a stop to that event, however, and it has not returned since.
For more than a decade, however, for one weekend a year Bangor was the top snowmobiling destination in the country — an event that many that were around to enjoy it still remember fondly.
