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I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I To investigate the grooming process and what it entails, Anoka and Hennepin County Parks and Recreation departments were contacted for informational interviews on cross country skiing. The authors located a park that implemented a maintenance program similar to that which could be devised for the Trott Brook corridor. These parks have some of the best cross country skiing in the area and both have established trails on pavement. These parks provide programs that groom their trails anywhere from three days a week, as in Bunker Hills Park, located in Coon rapids, to twice a day every day of the week for Elm Creek Park Reserve, located in Maple Grove. Individually, these facilities have top of the line maintenance equipment. They also possess the funding and labor to endorse quality programs. However, it was conveyed that grooming once a week or even after every snowfall, with a properly designed program, would be adequate for trail ways with less access to funds and labor (Cook, 1996): It was further acknowledge~ by these metro area parks that "the right lightweight equipment" would be sufficient in handling the grooming pressures of facilities with shorter trails that are designed only for traditional skiing. This applies to the type of trail plan the City of Ramsey may implement. Officials from Elm Creek Park Reserve of Hennepin County were contacted to investigate their use of lightweight equipment in grooming their trails. Although Elm Creek Park Reserve uses a snocat ($45,000) for some of their trail grooming, they also have developed and currently use some less expensive lightweight equipment that could effectively groom the cross country ski trails along Trott Brook (Cook, 1996). Lightweight grooming equipment can be defined as devices that are designed to be pulled behind a snowmobile in preparing the trail for use. They have three forms of lightweight equipment that they use for compacting the snow, with frequency of use depending on the conditions presented at the time of grooming. The first is a Tidd Tech, the second is a modified version of the Tidd Tech, specially designed by Elm Creek Park Reserve, and the third is a unit consisting of a single large roller. The Tidd Tech and its modified version are used for the actual trail grooming, while the roller unit is used solely for snow compaction. For large amounts of snowfall, the roller is initially used to compact the snow to a degree in which the two groomers can be effective. When snowfall is under eight 25