Well, Ali and I may not have done the American Birkebeiner this year (54k classic/50k skate nordic ski race), but we certainly used the weekend to get some high mileage skiing up north!
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| Snow started mid-afternoon and lasted through the evening |
Just into the UP, nestled against Lake Superior, is my favorite (state) park in the Midwest - Michigan's Porcupine Mountains (aka the Porkies). Complete with 42k of "groomed" Nordic ski trails and 12 well-groomed alpine runs, the park has some beautiful woods, plentiful wildlife, and surprisingly few visitors. We've been up to the Porkies for backpacking in the spring (and will hopefully get up there again this year), and I'm not sure why we always run into so few people. The park is huge (for the Midwest), and the region (up nort') is sparsely populated, but this park is well worth the 5.5hr drive from Madison.
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| A bit of pre-broken trail |
We followed a winter storm up from southern Wisconsin, and the roads were still in rough shape. As such, our 5.5 hour drive turned into a 7 hour trek. Thankfully, we never ended up in giant snow banks off the side of the road (in part due to all those other poor cars that gave us warning and in part due to the brilliantly excessive use of rumble strips). We made it in extra late to our hotel since the UP is on eastern time; our wonderful hosts left our door open and the lights on.
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| One of the few open meadows we ran into |
Early Saturday, we got up, checked in, and ate (grocery store muffins + yogurt + bananas = breakfast of champions). A half hour later, we found ourselves at the ski chalet in the Porkies. As Nordic skiers, we didn't have to pay for a car tag or a trail pass (though we could have paid $5 for a lift ticket instead of skiing up the big hill). Luckily, they do have a donation box at the trailhead, so our guilt was assuaged. We planned our route and waxed our skis in no time, so we were on the trail just before some light snow began. Have I mentioned that the forest in the Porkies is glorious? Because snow-laden, the different types of terrain are possibly even more stunning. We skied through some giant hemlocks (with branches covered in fresh, sparkly, dry powder), open birch forests, and some really cool mixed, young woods where thin trees weighed down from all the lake-effect precipitation arched over the trail.
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| Stunning, eh? |
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| My favorite spots looked like this |
We warmed up pretty quickly; I was shedding layers and asking for water before we even hit the first trail intersection (2k in). There was a fair amount of climbing during the beginning of our day, but the scenery and the unfortunately sticky snow helped. Though the trails had been "groomed" recently, it didn't feel like the paths had seen any of the packing-and-tracking that I'm used to. The fresh snow and paucity of visitors exacerbated the lack of grooming. There were some points that it felt like I was walking on those "toning" shoes with the rounded bottoms because I had upwards of 2" of snow caked to the bottom of my skis. For those of you less familiar with xc skiing, the idea is to be able to glide along instead of going step-by-step. Having snow caked on your skis makes it feel like you're trying to walk with giant planks covered in bubblegum strapped to your feet.
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| Some of the mixed woods |
By lunchtime, our legs were a bit fatigued by the snow-sticking problem and by the way we had been cutting tracks instead of coasting inside preexisting ones. Alas, there was no fire in the warming hut, and we didn't dedicate enough time to get one going. We had some stellar ham-cheese-bagel sandwiches, brownies, tomatoes, and lukewarm tea, but by the end of our quick break, we were chilly. We came out of the hut and ran into a ranger-guided snowshoe group. They paused to let us get a head start, but we had some wax experimenting to do. Though the air temps really weren't bad this weekend (20s up to freezing), we put on the coldest-rated kick wax, and it solved many of our sticky-snow woes. We caught the snowshoe pack in no time and beat them up to the east vista. Further down the giant white tunnel of trail, we ran into some UW Hoofers out on a trip. They were aiming for the Big Hemlock Trail, but I'm rather certain that they didn't make it that far. After a brief chat, we headed back down to the chalet for big cups of lemonade/poweraid (we had been working hard!) and a warming fire.
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| East Vista View |
For the end of the afternoon we headed to the Deer Yard trail and found Ali's favorite (birch) forest and my favorite (dark, well-spaced, evergreen) woods. We grabbed some dinner back in Ontanogon and returned for the evening lantern ski. Though we were too weary to stop by the halfway bonfire and hot cocoa station, the lanterns + fresh snow + trail combination was pretty magical. After a half-marathon of skiing, we took our rental car (heated seats!!!!!) and headed back to the hotel.
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| Lanterns out before the official Night Ski |
Happy Adventurers!
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