Maine
Use of antipsychotics in Maine nursing homes climbs
Sherri Parker, assistant director of nursing at Caribou Rehab and Nursing, recalled a woman who came to her facility and was so sedated by the prescribed antipsychotic medication she had been taking at home that they couldn’t keep her awake for therapy because “she’d fall asleep in front of you.”
Parker, who handles gradual dose reductions at the nursing home, said she worked with a doctor to wean the woman off the medication. By the time the resident transferred back home two months later, “she was a completely different woman,” Parker said — able to eat on her own and be home alone while her husband went to work.
“I’ve seen a stopped antipsychotic medication on many people and sometimes I’m like, ‘Wow, they’ve actually done really well.’ That just goes to show me that it really wasn’t necessary to keep them on that,” Parker said.
But in recent years, she has seen an increase in these medications. At the end of last year, while reading referrals from the hospital for new residents, Parker said nearly every one had a prescription for an antipsychotic medication. She said it’s likely they were prescribed the medication while living at home or when they went to the hospital before ending up at her nursing home.
Statewide data shows the percentage of Maine nursing home residents receiving antipsychotic medication is increasing.
While the rate for short-stay residents, like the one Parker recalled, is relatively low, Maine’s rate for long-stay residents is higher than the national average. Short-stay residents are in a nursing home for less than 100 days, often recovering from surgery or being discharged from a hospital, according to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In the years after federal regulators cracked down on rates of antipsychotic medication given to long-stay nursing home residents, Maine became a success story, dramatically reducing its rate between 2011 and 2017 from 27 to 17 percent.
But since then, Maine’s rate has crept back to 20 percent, higher than the national average of 14.7 percent and the sixth-highest across all states, according to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Among all American adults, the rate of antipsychotics was less than 2 percent.
Antipsychotics are a type of medication, including Risperdal and Seroquel, designed to manage psychosis and delusions. They’re often given to patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. The side effects can be severe, including tremors, heart and circulatory problems, high cholesterol and sedation. They can be particularly problematic for older adults, even potentially shortening the lives of nursing home residents by increasing the risk of drowsiness, confusion and falling, said several experts.
CMS data on nursing home rates of antipsychotics exclude people diagnosed with schizophrenia, Tourrette’s Syndrome and Huntington’s Disease.
“Antipsychotic medications are especially dangerous among the nursing home population because of their potentially devastating side effects, including death, and the use of antipsychotic medications among nursing home residents is an indicator of nursing home quality,” a CMS spokesperson told The Maine Monitor.
Treating an episode, not a behavior
Dr. Susan Wehry, associate clinical professor at the University of New England in Biddeford and a board-certified geriatric psychiatrist, said there are times when antipsychotic medications are necessary to prevent a resident from harming themselves or others, but those occasions are rare.
“I understand an acute need for using a chemical restraint, but call it what it is: This is not treating a behavior; this is treating an episode of agitation that you can’t figure out how to address another way,” Wehry said. “You’re basically sedating the person.”
Wehry said what is often depicted as challenging behaviors from residents with dementia is actually the resident trying to communicate an unmet need. They may not have the language to say what they want, so rather than sedating the resident, it’s important to find out the cause of their frustration, she said.
Parker, with Caribou Rehab and Nursing, said she’s seen residents come off these medications and become more alert, social and talkative. And sometimes there’s no change in behavior, which she said begs the question why the resident needed to be on the medication in the first place.
As of this month, roughly 19 percent of Caribou Rehab and Nursing residents were on antipsychotics, slightly below the statewide average. Parker recalled when their rates were 5 percent and how proud she was, but said the numbers can fluctuate as admissions come in with pre-existing prescriptions.
“I tried really hard with my antipsychotic numbers to be down, and then just slowly they crept up again as we took admissions,” Parker said. “I would love to see my numbers come down and I know those are some things we have to work on.”
Multiple experts and advocates point to a number of explanations for Maine’s rising statewide average, such as staffing shortages and reliance on temporary agency staffing, diminished attention to the problem, MaineCare underfunding for nursing homes, and the all-consuming nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, which demanded more attention on infection control.
Staff who are overwhelmed with duties or haven’t had time to build relationships with residents may turn to medication rather than spending time on de-escalation techniques when residents have challenging behaviors.
“It’s a disappointment to see the rates have increased because I know we can do better,” said Brenda Gallant, Maine’s long-term care ombudsman who advocates for nursing home residents and their families.
Gallant was part of the coalition in 2012 that led the effort to reduce Maine’s rates of antipsychotics, with Wehry and numerous other advocates, providers and organizations.
Multiple people involved in that effort said the success was due to the commitment of a broad coalition that involved statewide trainings, workshops, mentoring programs, grants for innovative programs like Music and Memory, and resources such as a handbook for providers.
The guidance urged providers to take a holistic approach to treating dementia patients, which included education for family members on the risks associated with the medication, staff training programs that identify specific areas of competency and a collaborative transition process with hospitals.
“Initially, we were leaders,” Gallant said, adding that at one point Maine was ranked the seventh-most improved state in 2016, according to federal data cited at the time by the Maine Partnership to Improve Dementia Care in Nursing Homes.
Nationally, the rates during that time decreased from about 24 percent in 2011 to 14.3 percent in 2019, while Maine’s crept back up. But this data also can lag slightly: the collection period for the current data on this quality measure was Oct. 1, 2022 to Sept. 20, 2023.
“The tip of the iceberg”
In recent years, some experts have become concerned about an overreliance on medication for older adults, including Dr. Jabbar Fazeli, who has served as medical director for multiple nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Maine. He said antipsychotics could be the “tip of the iceberg,” and that facilities also use mood stabilizers and sleeping pills as a way to sedate residents.
Fazeli served as co-chair of the Maine Partnership to Improve Dementia Care in Nursing Homes and has been outspoken about reducing overreliance on medication for older adults. Before the federal government decided to focus on the issue, it was difficult to push back against a “pervasive” culture of using antipsychotic medications, Fazeli said.
Durgin Pines in Kittery, where Fazeli served as medical director for more than a decade until last month, maintained a rate of antipsychotic medication that was always below 5 percent, he said. Currently the facility has a rate of 4.2 percent, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Fazeli said the success was dependent on a joint effort with the director of nursing, assistant director of nursing and the administrator to try all other options before resorting to an antipsychotic medication.
In recent years, lawmakers and the federal government have also become concerned about nursing homes “erroneously” claiming residents had schizophrenia as a way to “mask the facilities’ true rate of antipsychotic medication use,” the agency said in a release last year. CMS conducted onsite surveys to look at schizophrenia diagnoses and conducted audits of how nursing homes coded these residents.
An oversight organization said this does not appear to be a problem in Maine. The nonprofit that provides quality improvement organization services in New England, Healthcentric Advisors, said it has “thoroughly analyzed” Maine data and determined the state is not seeing an increase in schizophrenia diagnoses.
Fazeli added that in his 26 years in geriatric care, Maine is better than most other states, including those he worked in like Missouri, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire.
But after a lot of initial energy in Maine, attention on the issue slowed, especially during the pandemic, Gallant said.
Many said the pandemic was all-consuming for nursing home providers, making it difficult to keep the focus on reducing antipsychotics while keeping up with evolving regulations and caring for residents who were forced to be quarantined.
Wehry, the geriatric psychiatrist, said it was understandable for rates to climb back up in the first months of the pandemic, but “that’s no longer an adequate excuse.” She said a lot of nursing homes reverted back to institution-centric care that forces residents to conform to their environment rather than create an environment that works for them.
“I think it’s broader than just the individual person who’s getting the antipsychotic. I think the culture change, which people worked so hard to introduce, also backslid in the pandemic,” Wehry said.
Ruta Kadonoff, who worked for the national nursing home industry group during the 2012 effort to reduce antipsychotic medication, and traveled across the country providing education on the issue, said Maine’s biggest challenge is workforce shortage.
Staff need adequate training on how to “get inside the world of a person with dementia,” time to work with a resident who is upset or struggling to communicate a need, and support to provide person-centered care that allows them to build relationships with residents. None of that is possible in a facility that is understaffed, has high turnover or relies on temporary agency staffing.
“Until we address that, I don’t think it’s realistic to think we’re going to address other quality issues,” Kadonoff said. “It’s a bandaid to try to address other things without dealing with the underlying fact that we just don’t have the people to provide this care and to do it well.”
Healthcentric Advisors, the quality improvement organization, said it has been meeting with the long-term care ombudsman and the Maine Health Care Association, which represents the state’s nursing homes, about refocusing attention on this issue. They plan to update and reintroduce training modules that condense the most useful tools and resources, which will be rolled out in late fall.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services said it has identified the increasing use of antipsychotics in nursing facilities and encouraged the stakeholder group to reconvene along with nursing facilities administrators and medical directors. In January, DHHS published a stakeholder group report, Improving Quality in Maine’s Nursing and Residential Care Facilities, and noted that “this metric is likely to be among those tied to reimbursement as part of nursing home payment reform,” spokesperson Lindsay Hammes said.
Gallant, the ombudsman, said it’s important to return attention to this problem “if we want to make progress and get back to the place that we had initially in terms of really being leaders. I think that should always be our goal: to do the very best that we can for residents in our nursing homes.”
HOWLAND (WGME) — The Maine State Fire Marshal’s Office says a Howland woman has been charged with arson in connection with a 2022 fire at the Howland Corner Store.
The fire happened on November 2, 2022 around 9:08 p.m.
First responders reported the fire was developing rapidly just after the store closed for the night.
Officials say 39-year-old Samantha Randall of Howland was arrested Friday and charged with arson.
The Maine State Fire Marshal’s Office says a Howland woman has been charged with arson in connection with a 2022 fire at the Howland Corner Store. (State Fire Marshal’s Office)
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The investigation remains ongoing.
Almost the first thing Ryan asked when we met three years ago was if he could see my Slopes map. And it’s a pretty good map, stretching back to the 2018-19 ski season:
I didn’t suppose a Bozeman Bro would care about anything outside of the Bridger Bowl-Big Sky circuit, because the other first thing Ryan asked me was whether I had a transceiver, and I was like “No, I left it next to the scuba gear and car-waxing kit in my Box of Accessories I Don’t Own for Activities I Never Do on Purpose, like ski out of bounds or go underwater or pretend my minivan is anything other than a Chrysler Pacifica with a roofbox and a broken rear windshield wiper.” And he was like “Well that’s too bad you’d need one to ride Schlasman’s” and I was like “The chairlift at Bridger Bowl?” And he was like “Yeah” and I was like “Man that is so Bozeman.”
But Ryan did like the map because he’s the sort who keeps lists of, like, the names of everyone who’s ever given him a haircut and how many Oreos he ate each week in 1992 and how strange that our wives who were college roommates ended up marrying the same sort of List Bro. But I seized on his curiosity and love of novelty to insert a day of skiing into their annual family Christmas visit to New York, and after a 2024 day of blown-snowtrails over dirt at Windham and Hunter, I hoped to show him a better version of Northeast skiing.
Fortunately December 2025 shaped up better than December 2024. Storms had pounded in one after the next and the obligatory rain-thaw cyclone that would typically have pulverized millions of gallons of accumulated snowmaking back to gutter water never materialized. A fortuitous eight inches fell overnight leading into our pre-planned ski day, and we aimed for Plattekill, an 1,100-vertical-foot elevator shaft disguised as a ski hill about three hours north of the city. And this time there was no dirt to be seen:
Plattekill is the Catskills’ hidey-hole, a family-owned bunker that’s dug an atmospheric moat sufficient to fend off Vail-owned Hunter and state-owned Belleayre and whatever-the-hell-Windham-is. The bump only spins two chairlifts but there are never liftlines, even on Christmas week. The triple gets a little backed up but the double never does. And what a spectacular chair that is, one of my favorites anywhere:
Platty is all vibes. That baselodge. Beers upstairs with the live band jamming. And yeah it was nice to have snow to share with Bozeman Bro in a year where he ended up with very little.
As we rolled into 2026, I’d skied nearly every ski area with a chairlift in New England, but Maine had proven elusive. Sort of because it tried to dismember me but mostly because it’s far and because most of those faraway ski areas are Wisconsin-sized coastal bumpies that don’t grab a ton of snow and because some of those ski areas (Baker, Jefferson) operate infrequently, have little or no snowmaking, and communicate their opening hours via websites that make the Pony Express look like Starlink. So my Maine ski history was limited to Boyne’s three mountains (Sunday River, Sugarloaf, Pleasant), Saddleback, and Black Mountain of Maine. But with the snowpack unseasonably deep, I prioritized three days in early January to survey the state’s smaller offerings.
And the first thing I thought when I arrived at Lost Valley was “Damn it I should have come here years ago.” Because my first impression of Lost Valley was that it is one of the best-run small ski areas in the country.
That meta-fact helps explain the existence, in 2026, of a 240-vertical-foot, 45-acre anthill within an hour of mega-bigster Sunday River. That, and the bump’s proximity to Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city (population 37,121) and, so I hear, a hell of a fortunate place to land if your idea of a sickified ski trick is a tib-fib spiral fracture (I’m incapable of writing about skiing Maine without mentioning this incident a minimum of seven times).
About a decade ago, Lost Valley nearly joined the 79-plus ski areas that have dropped dead across Maine since the beginning of industrialized skiing. But then a fellow named Scott Shanaman showed up. With the help of crowd-sourced stopgap funding, he pulled Lost Valley out of debt. He cut new trails and glades and super-boosted snowmaking. In 2024, he relocated Mount Southington’s Northstar double chair to Lost Valley:
The chair is marvelously new looking for a machine that began life circa 1980 at the long-dead Craigmeur ski area in New Jersey and moved up to Connecticut in 2001 before migrating to Maine. Now called simply “Chair #3,” this is one of the few chairlifts to operate in three locations, and perhaps the only one to spin in three U.S. states.
The first sign of a well-run, skiers-first ski area: All three of Lost Valley’s chairlifts were spinning on a Wednesday night in January, even though they could have gotten away with running two. Everything about the place hummed. The grooming was outstanding, snowmaking had buried the trails. All that infrastructure helps, but what impressed me most about Lost Valley was the thing so often missing from night-skiing operations: order. Even in the froth and throng of teenage yee-haw flippy-screamy night. And everyone was nice. And yes that matters a lot, especially with the lift attendants.
Forty minutes up the road from Lost Valley is Spruce Mountain, a three-ropetow bump so obscure that most ski area inventories miss it. It’s a down-a-dirt-road, up-a-hill, where’s-the-parking-lot-oh-this-is-the-parking-lot, still-has-wordpress.com-in-its-url, is-trying-to-raise-$20,000-to-buy-a-“new”-groomer sort of place.
Which means it was me skiing among a bunch of 12-year-olds who seemed confused as to why I would be here. But isn’t it astonishing and wonderful that places like this still exist?
Spruce maintains a surprisingly varied and dense trail network, a little of which I explored. But the upper-mountain tow isn’t night-lit (or wasn’t that night), and I’m fighting off some shoulder soreness that I later discovered is a torn rotator cuff (to be repaired next month; yes I am the king of stupid injuries and nearly dying on a more or less annual basis).
One thing I’ve learned when planning these ski-10-ski-areas-in-three-days hypertrips is that it helps a lot to not change hotels, even if that means more daily driving. So I set up in Waterville, home of Colby College and a pass-through zone for I-95. From there I drove two hours on Thursday morning to Big Moose, which, depending upon your point of view, is either the most dysfunctional or the most resilient ski area in America. In brief, Big Moose once looked like this, with an 1,700-foot lift-served vertical drop:
In 2004, the summit chairlift (“N” on the map above), broke, and the owner never fixed it, shrinking what had been a remote-but-large 1,700-vertical-foot ski area into a still-remote-but-teensy-tiny 583-vertical-foot ski area. Around 2010 the owner, a Mr. James Canfalone of Florida, stopped pretending to operate it, and was subsequently sued by the state, which had sold him the ski area on the condition that he not let it turn into a decrepit pile of crap. Which he did, while also allegedly running a bootleg timber operation, a crime that sounds so ridiculously antiquated that I’m tempted to ask him which pirate he owed money to.
That’s the dysfunction part. The resilience part is this: after the ski area sat idle for two years, a nonprofit group called Friends of the Mountain restored the triple chair and, over time, added snowmaking, a conveyor lift, and Cat rides to the summit. They also, against Canfalone’s indignant protests, renamed the ski area from “Big Squaw” to “Big Moose,” reflecting a change the state had made to the actual mountain that the ski area sits on 26 years ago. Friends of the Mountain’s goal is to raise nearly $6 million to purchase the ski area.
I hope they succeed. A previous plan to restore summit access with a six-pack chair as an anchor to a $113 million resort died. But this doesn’t feel like a dead or dying ski area. The place is pulsing, vibrant, filled, on the weekday I visited, with kids lapping the conveyor or riding up the old T-bar line on this thing:
Oh and there’s this gigantic abandoned hotel/condo complex in the middle of the hill, which I totally did not explore to take these photos:
The skiing, as it stands, is fine, with a funky windy narrow trail network that delights and confuses in that New England, why-don’t-they-build-them-like-this-anymore kind of way. You can hike to the top but I did not hike to the top. Because that seemed like a lot of work for pretty mediocre snow, because I bought the kind of skis that only go down, and because I’d made the logical-sounding-at-the-time decision to chase my two-hour morning drive with a two-and-a-half-hour afternoon drive to the day’s second ski area.
Let’s start by addressing what you’re all thinking right now: there are too many “snowbowls” in America and no one can agree on how to spell it, probably because it’s not a word:
Or perhaps Camden Snow Bowl is the rebel, facing off against Arizona Snowbowl, Montana Snowbowl, and Middlebury Snowbowl – a legendary ski area trifecta most skiers refer to simply as “The Strike Lane.”* (Fun fact: all three were founded by John Snowbowl IV, a fortuitous name for the ski-loving industrialist who built his fortune selling doorhinges.**) But that doesn’t explain the matter of the intransigent Elko “Snobowl,” a semi-functional outfit in the Nevada desert, and the utterly confusing Mount Hood “Skibowl,” which, when tasked with distinguishing itself as a ski area on a mountain with a half dozen other ski areas, chose the most confusing name possible.
*No one calls it this, mostly because there are probably a maximum of five people on Earth who have skied at all three of these places, and maybe 15 people who are aware that they all exist.
**Sorry I try to stop myself but it’s impossible.
Anyway, even given all my righteous confusion, I found the Camden “Snow Bowl.” And the first thing anyone will tell you about Camden Snow Bowl when you mention Camden Snow Bowl is that from the summit of Camden Snow Bowl you can see the Atlantic Ocean.
I know that doesn’t actually sound that special. The Atlantic Ocean is not exactly hard to come by. Just go east from anywhere on the continent and eventually you’ll hit it. In fact, the Atlantic Ocean is a global brand, like McDonald’s or Wal-Mart. They have it in Europe and Africa and South America, too. It’s not like you ride the chairlift to the top of Camden Snow Bowl and they have, like, a triceratops up there. No, it’s an ocean that, incidentally, I live maybe 10 miles away from but almost never bother to visit. So why was it so goddamn cool to stand off Camden Snow Bowl’s summit unload and stare at an ocean that was difficult to even see, as water and sky had taken a similar hue on this midwinter Thursday?
I found a potential explanation in an unlikely place: Taylor Swift’s End of an Era documentary. “Taylor is my friend,” the also-very-famous Florence Welch says after a rehearsal scene of the clearly well-acquainted pair, “and I know her as this very cozy person, and I came out [on stage] and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s fucking Taylor Swift!”
And that’s what it’s like to get to the top of Camden Snow Bowl and see the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, there’s a reason why you can’t see the Atlantic Ocean from the top of very many ski areas. It’s because the Atlantic Coast is a lousy place to put a ski area. And Camden Snow Bowl does not get anywhere near the natural snow, at least on average, of Maine’s western monsters. Instead, Camden blows a lot of snow, and on my visit in January, mountain ops had blown a lot of snow. Unfortunately, that translated to just one top-to-bottom ski trail, which by the time I showed up at around 2 p.m. was pretty icy. So I took a few laps, snapped some photos, and bounced.
If you can help it, always try to arrive at a ski area during daylight hours, at least if it’s your first visit. And this is what I tried to do with Hermon Mountain – which joins “Snow Bowl” on the problematic-names list because it manages the trick of calling itself by two different names. Actually three:
Trying to jam Hermon Mountain/New Hermon Mountain/New Hermon Mountain, Inc. into a day that had already included two ski areas in opposite directions from my hotel was ill-advised, and under different circumstances, I may have stowed this 276-footer for a better day. But the longtime owners had declared that they would shutter the place after this season if they couldn’t find a new buyer, and while the bump is under contract, I thought it best to take a few just-in-case laps.
Me and the rest of Bangor, Maine’s third-largest city (population 31,753). From the parking lot, I could see a line backed up dozens-deep across the snow beach at the base of the mountain. And I thought to myself, “Wow, I hope that’s not a line for lift tickets because I would sure hate to have to wait in that line.”
The good news is this wasn’t a line for lift tickets. The bad news is it was the line for Herman Mountain’s only chairlift, which sits exactly parallel to a T-bar that was for some reason idle. Which meant that I didn’t have to wait in that line once, but every single lift ride.
Which ended up being two lift rides. And the line actually moved pretty fast and, for a teenage scene, with great efficiency and order (Maine really is the best). But there was a lot of teenage energy pulsing through the bump. And after driving two hours up to Big Moose, two and a half hours back down to Camden Snow Bowl and an hour and change up to Herman Mountain, my Teen-O-Meter was out of gas. But, hey, I hope I can return next year.
Mt. Abram is the ski area you see as you drive out of Sunday River toward the interstate and say, “did that used to be a ski area?” Its close-cut trails don’t pop like Boyne’s megastar, and unlike Sunday River’s assortment of high-tech six- and eight-packs, which can be seen from space, it’s hard to make out Abram’s two antique double chairs from the road.
The ski area seems to be trying hard not to take itself too seriously, starting with its Rocky and Bullwinkle theme. Rocky and Bullwinkle, for those of you born after World War II, is a cartoon show that was popular in like the 1800s or something. Which was approximately 200 years after Mount Abram installed its base-to-summit Wayback Machine, a Hall chairlift which still runs, at least as an auxiliary component, on a straight-six Ford engine.* Here’s an Instagram reel where several hundred people probably tell me I’m an idiot for not giving a more complete engineering breakdown of how the various components of this chairlift work in tandem to transport skiers uphill.
*JK Bro-hombries, Abram installed Wayback in 1970.
But Abram, as it turns out, is an awesome little ski area. Fantastic grooming, with no icy patches, top to bottom, and liberal terrain management, with vast sections of off-piste available even on refrozen garbage snow.
On my second off-piste run, I stumbled across this nifty multicolored, de-roped T-bar and skied down the line.
At the bottom, I ran into a patroller who told me that Abram had run that T-bar until around Covid, then abandoned it because the west side chair was working just fine as a beginner pod. I dug up some old trail maps and here’s the terrain he was talking about – the T-bar line I skied is the short red line labelled “Mini T-bar” on the far left:
That section marked “Hillside Condo” is actually an old trailpod that was served by yet another T-bar:
I’m not sure if Abram ever plans to bring back that beginner terrain. The mountain skis plenty big enough. This was, in fact, the only stop on the Storm Skiing Maine World Tour 2026 during which I recorded more than 10,000 vertical feet on Slopes.
There’s a feeling that I get at small ski areas that I’ve always failed to recreate at larger ski areas. Short shots down the narrow trails, skiing solo, fast, no fear of ice, weeds poking up, a down-bound time machine.
And T-bars. Two of them. Titcomb actually has one of the newest T-bars in America. Doppelmayr built it last offseason, a quick-turnaround replacement for a Constam T-bar that had arrived used in 1973, after a 20-year run as Cannon’s Lower T-bar.
If you want a contrast between what you think T-bars are and what modern T-bars actually are, find $30 and a day to visit Titcomb. The old T-bar, a Franken-lift that was maybe at one point a Poma and has been swinging up the hill since 1956, sounds like the inside of an atom bomb. The lift attendant wears earplugs and stands away from the lift when no one is actively loading.
The new T-bar? Its motor wouldn’t be audible over a running microwave. The Ts tug you uphill like a 3-year-old pulling you into ankle-deep lake water. It’s clean, smooth, and fast. The lift attendant can talk to you:
And of course the skiers were great. At the top of the old T, one kid asked me if I’d ever jumped off the cliffs over in the woods. I told him that, no, I’ve actually never skied here before, and besides, I think those trails are closed. “Closed is just another level of difficulty,” he said as he skied off into the forest.
Quarry Road is a ropetow bump that opened in 1937 as “Mountain Farm,” morphed into school-run “Colby College Ski Area” in 1964, went into mothballs around 1979, and sat dormant until the Waterville Parks and Recreation department purchased the bump and, with the help of an outfit called Friends of Quarry Road, re-opened the ski hill in 2021.
It’s a neat little outfit: one tow, a QR code to pay for your $15 resident lift ticket, a nice pitch, and a Slopes-measured vertical drop of 157 feet – about three times taller than most sources list the ski area’s vert. I took exactly one lap, which reminded me that ropetows and sore shoulders are a poor match. My next stop was scheduled to be Pinnacle Ski Club, a typical New England ski “club” where anyone appears to be able to ski if they show up with $20. The single-ropetow outfit was just half an hour straight up I-95. Which means I would have had to drive 30 minutes up 95. Reboot. Ski. Then drive half an hour back down 95, then six more hours home. Or I could just do the six hours right then. So I made a rare adult decision and turned the car back toward Brooklyn and was home by midnight.
So that was my Maine off Main Street Ski Safari. Not a lot of vert, but a lot of road, captured, as always, by Slopes, which buckets your stats together by trip:
I’m documenting my 2025-26 ski season with Slopes. Here’s a recap of days one through four:
BANGOR (BDN) — Maine’s Medicaid program lacks the proper controls to manage the billions of dollars going to health providers across the state, according to an audit released Thursday.
The findings from State Auditor Matt Dunlap’s office come amid a torrent of calls for increased scrutiny of how the state spends its MaineCare dollars and allegations of fraud, which has prompted another battle between President Donald Trump’s administration and Gov. Janet Mills.
Front and center in the growing debate is the embattled Portland health care provider Gateway Community Services, which is currently under investigation for potentially defrauding MaineCare largely through overinflated and underdocumented claims for interpreter services.
Dunlap’s report doesn’t mention either Gateway or interpreter services, but it does warn the state that inadequate monitoring of MaineCare could lead to federal regulators finding Maine out of compliance with its regulations. The state disputed that, but the watchdog’s words could add heat to a tense dispute between the Mills and Trump administrations.
Republicans stretching from top Medicaid regulator and former TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz to the Maine Legislature are pressuring Mills on the issue during her heated U.S. Senate primary. Dunlap himself is running in a Democratic primary for Maine’s open 2nd Congressional District.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services paused MaineCare payments to Gateway in December while it investigated “credible allegations of fraud.” The pause came as a result of an audit by DHHS that included a review of 15,000 claims made by Gateway between March 2021 and December 2022.
Dunlap’s report said the Program Integrity Unit, MaineCare’s internal auditing arm, “may not provide adequate monitoring of all Medicaid services. Medicaid programs are jointly funded by states and the federal government, but administration of the programs are mostly left to states.
In recent months, Oz has taken an increasing interest in how Maine is overseeing its program. He sent a letter demanding detailed information regarding the state’s oversight of Medicaid spending, outlining concerns and mentioning a federal criminal case against two interpreters who are charged with defrauding the federal government by filing false tax returns.
The case alleges that two interpreters filed false tax documents with the federal government showing their companies were paid for interpreter services that didn’t happen. The third defendant in the case was an employee of the Lewiston-based Bright Future Healthier You, who died after she was charged.
Bright Future Healthier You was the largest biller of MaineCare for interpreting services in the last 10 years. The company itself has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The case is the first case the federal government has brought in Maine since a 2021 report by a federal investigator that outlined a suspicious billing pattern for interpreter services. The report highlighted that the billing patterns seemed especially prominent among providers working with Maine’s Somali community and indicated widespread fraud within the MaineCare system.
Gateway was the second-highest biller of interpreter services in the last 10 years and has been the subject of numerous fraud allegations dating back to May 2025, when The Maine Wire, the media arm of the conservative Maine Policy Institute, first reported on claims from a former employee that Gateway falsified records.
Oz’s letter followed an audit performed by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services that found that Maine had made at least $45.6 million in improper Medicaid payments for support services for children with autism in 2023.
In November, widespread federal fraud prosecutions began in Minnesota, and with them, the employee, Chris Bernardini’s claims resurfaced in national conservative news outlets. Then, in December, U.S. Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the top Republican on the House oversight committee, sent a letter to the U.S. Treasury that identified Gateway, along with its founder Abdullahi Ali, as targets in a broader welfare fraud investigation.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services disagreed with Dunlap’s finding, saying it resulted from a “misunderstanding” of the federal regulations and how the department is structured. The department also said Dunlap’s findings discounted the regular ongoing checks the Program Integrity Unit undertakes on a more regular basis.
Dunlap said his office wasn’t persuaded by the department’s criticism and that the department “did not provide evidence of utilization control review procedures.”
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