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While people in cities to the south are searching for crocuses, folks on northeast Minnesota's Gunflint Trail are enjoying some of the best skiing of the year.
It's not that the Gunflint is so much colder. It's that there's so much snow it keeps itself refrigerated, like glaciers.
"We have a really good base,'' says Heather Telchow of Golden Eagle Lodge. "Even after these warm days, the snow is like brand new. I grew up in Faribault, and I'm used to it disappearing in a few days. But we don't lose snow like that up here. We keep it forever.''
Skiers have a hard time figuring out Mother Nature.
It's supposed to snow in central and northern Minnesota, but in the last two seasons, many storms have veered to the south instead. It's odd, but what can you do? You have to go with the snow.
At the end of last February, disgusted with the lack of snow, my friend Becky and I were just about to make the long drive to the snowy Upper Peninsula of Michigan when Winona got blanketed with 30 inches.
In winter, only the most dedicated pilgrims make the trip to Itasca, Minnesota's most revered state park.
It was an early January day in western Minnesota. A biting wind was blowing off the prairie, and the mercury was sinking faster than the Titanic.
But it didn’t matter. I was at Maplelag, where the world is my iceberg . . . um, oyster.
At Maplelag, no matter how inhospitable the outside world is, the lodge’s stained-glass windows turn the wan rays of winter into gleaming golds and apricots. The steam billowing from the giant hot tub creates a dome of warmth amid the tundra. Bottomless cookie jars and baskets of hot fry bread keep guests fat and happy.
One March, I went up to Duluth but woke up in Siberia.
Twenty inches of snow had fallen overnight. A savage 70 mph wind was howling around the glass-walled lobby of the Willard Munger Inn. Swirling snow had turned the air white.
But then my niece and I noticed cars crawling along Grand Avenue. Then more cars. So we bundled up and got in our car, and to our surprise, made it all the way across town to Lester Park. Dozens of other skiers already had been on its Lester-Amity Ski Trail, creating tracks that we gratefully followed into the sheltering forest.
On the North Shore, it’s a happy day when snow is as abundant as scenery.
Despite its miles of cross-country ski trails, the western shore of Lake Superior gets only modest amounts of lake-effect snow, because the storms that do blow in from the east tend to dump it inland, where the land mass is colder.
In the 1920s, when the first resorts appeared along this remote, 57-mile highway that dead-ends near the Canadian border, guests had to have a certain sense of adventure.
The Gunflint Trail first was blazed by the Ojibwe, then used by fur traders, trappers and loggers. It was still a zigzagging roller-coaster through the woods when vacationers began to come. The first visitors in spring often had to patch the single phone line, which moose tended to snag and drag. Gasoline lanterns in their cabins often became plugged, and bears sometimes made appearances near cabins.
Still, they had it easy. After the guests left, resort owners faced a long winter of splitting wood for fuel, getting around by dog sled, harvesting ice and trapping for food and clothing.
To the uninitiated, the vast expanses of forest around Eagle River, Wis., look like a lot of nothing.
It's rocky, useless land, forfeited to the government during the Depression, and hardly anyone lives there — Eagle River, pop. 1,400, is Vilas County's only city.
This empty forest, however, draws thousands, and on winter weekends, it's not so empty. Snowmobilers, skiers and snowshoers
come to these woods — to the east and north lie the 657,000 square acres of Nicolet National Forest, and to
the west, the 220,00 acres of Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest.
Every week, a few dozen people join an exclusive club high above Minnesota's North Shore.
To get there, they lug all their food and gear 1¾ miles up and down a steep hill. They draw their own water and make their own fires. They clean and then lug their garbage over the same hill.
And they consider themselves lucky.
For cross-country skiers, Giants Ridge has it all: Plentiful snow. Scenery. Sixty kilometers of groomed trails.
Best of all, it has chairlifts.
Alpine skiers aren’t the only ones who think downhills are more fun than uphills. Nordic skiers also like to put gravity on their side, especially those who are trying to learn how to skate.
Around Ely, beauty is stripped down to essentials.
There's little but water, stone, spruce and sky in the northern Minnesota wilderness, what conservationist Sigurd Olson called "the naked grandeur." Still, it enthralls visitors from all over the world.
In winter, snow, ice and silence settle over the forests and lakes, and stars plaster the inky night sky. For many, Ely's pull is even stronger then.
In the wilds of northeast Wisconsin, winter always looks like winter.
It's the kind with snow — snow that comes early, stays late and blankets the forest in heaps, supplying reliable skiing and snowshoeing to people from less-blessed locales.
But in 2003, the heaps of snow didn't come there or virtually anywhere, and skiers were desperate. So was Pete Moline, who runs Afterglow Resort on a lake near the Michigan border. With no snow, he had no skiers and no livelihood. Then, he decided if snow wouldn't cover his trails, he'd bring it there himself.
It's funny how a simple stretch of frozen water can trigger so much anticipation.
The Bayfield Peninsula, on the northern tip of Wisconsin, is in summer a playground of sand, water and woods, beloved by tourists.
In winter, the playground expands.