As it has with city streets and country roads around New Hampshire, the Department of Safety's Emergency Services has mapped more than 1,500 miles of snowmobile trails and logging roads in Coos County, plotting 600 addresses and 75 landing zones for medical helicopters.
"This is very significant," said Harry Brown, chief of the 45th Parallel EMS, which serves the 10 most northern towns in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Two nearly simultaneous snowmobile fatalities in 2002 prompted then-Pittsburg fire Chief Sandy Young to work on a way to make it easier for people, often from out of the area, to report emergency situations along the trail, which in turn, helped medical responders save precious time in trying to find them.
"Pittsburg was the pilot and we finished that first," said Sean Goodwin, special projects supervisor with Emergency Services. "We finished that first and moved south."
Coos County, from Pittsburg to Twin Mountain and the borders of Maine to Vermont, have now been completely mapped and work has started in mapping trails in northern Grafton County, Goodwin said. Eventually, the entire network of trails to the Massachusetts border will be mapped and assigned addresses.
Technicians armed with GPS devices have traveled in some remote areas, via snowmobile groomers and ATVs arranged by local snowmobile clubs and Bureau of Trails employees, Goodwin said.
"The club relationships have been a great success in doing this," he said.
But in some of the most remote areas of the state, being able to dispatch emergency personnel to a precise location has been a matter of life and death, Brown said. Although cellular telephone signals are spotty, those who ride out to pay phones can now use trail signs with the addresses to direct rescue teams.
"In the past, people reporting from different locations don't know where they are -- they could be anywhere -- and defining where they were by trail intersections was not concise," Brown said.
He recalled a situation where three people reported the same accident describing different locations, which forced three different teams of responders to go in search of the accident victim.
The ability to now provide precise locations in an emergencies has led to a new protocol in responding to them, Brown said.
"We have arranged for an air ambulance to be dispatched at the same time when an accident meets certain criteria -- an ATV, a snowmobile, a farm or logging accident," Brown said.
There are situations and locations in the vast, uninhabited top of the state where responders on the ground can take almost as much time to get to a scene as medflights from the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, or Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine.
Bureau of Trails Chief Chris Gamache, left, talks about the E-911 mapping efforts of snowmobile trails with New Hampshire Snowmobile Association president Terry Callum and Executive Councilor Ray Burton. (LORNA COLQUHOUN)
"It can take us up to 45 minutes or an hour by the time we get there," Brown said.
His organization has gone a step further to aid people in reporting accidents. At each address sign in some areas, cards printed with the address can be taken, which saves people from trying to memorize their location.
That's been a volunteer effort by the 45th Parallel group, he said.
Along with the mapping, procedures have been put in place, such as training dispatchers and how to deal with cell phone reports that could come in from signals in Maine, Vermont and Quebec.
But overall, Brown said, the emergency measures will make a difference.
"We've saved lives with this," he said. "When somebody is out in the middle of nowhere and hurt bad enough that they can't get themselves out on their own, they're significantly hurt."