Realistic assessment of snow conditions:  our trails held up OK during the warm, sunny days, but yesterday’s rain and strong winds were very hard on the snow.

We’re opening a few of the trails on this side of the system for snowshoeing.  You’ll still need a trail pass.  Bear Cub, Poplar Creek, and Oxcart can be experienced right now on snow shoes, a fun and different way to get back into a Superior National Forest area that you can normally only traverse on skis in the winter.

This is the Gunflint Trail in far northern Minnesota, so we’ll be fairly surprised if we don’t get another big dump of fresh snow to groom. We’ll turn these trails back into great ski trails again if we get the snow. But the current forecast looks like several more days of discouraging melting. 

Very, very strange weather. We’re lucky–when the rest of MN has been dealing with erratic weather this winter, we’ve consistently had nice snow on the Gunflint. We’re in the sweet spot for snow.  Figuring out what to do in these conditions is not fun, so we’re grateful that we didn’t have an entire winter of solving a snow problem.