![[bicyclist near Chippewa Falls, WI]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/biker_chippewa.jpg)
![[The Mississippi Queen in La Crosse, WI]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/mississippi_queen.jpg)
![[web site logo]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/title_and_tag.jpg)
On the western tip of the Upper Peninsula, snow comes as regularly as mail.
Gusts of wind make the deliveries, picking up moisture and warmth over Lake Superior and then dumping it as snow when they hit the cold inland air around Ironwood and Bessemer.
The two ski towns are only four hours from the Twin Cities, but they look more like the North Pole in comparison. They've had 132 inches of snow so far this year, actually a disappointment considering that 150 inches had fallen by this time last year.
For people who love nature, winter is a time of opportunity.
When it's cold enough, you can walk onto the Mississippi River. You can see bald eagles up close. You can explore sloughs and backwaters without being eaten alive by insects.
"Most of these places, you'd almost die in a few minutes in summer," says Scott Mehus, education specialist at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. "So now is a good time to get out there and see things."
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.
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.