It snowed again overnight, adding an additional 1.5 inches to our already substantial snow base. Everything was groomed this morning, including the BWCA section. It’s been quite windy, so you can anticipate that the lake trail tracks disappeared soon after they were groomed. They will get groomed again this week.

At this point we’ve had around 60 inches of snow this season, considerably more than we had during the entire winter last ski season.

The forecast for the upcoming week looks like a classic January — pretty darn cold, but getting better. Sunny days are forecast and we should get a break from the almost daily snow. The Pisten Bully can have a break this week!

If you will be skiing this week, don’t forget to sign up for the Bearskin Virtual Nordic Races here: https://bearskinnordicseries.com/ Winners for December/January will be announced soon and then a new race course will be posted. It’s strictly for fun, so give it a try. (Note that Quinn is listed — that’s just so you have a time to beat. Go get him!)

We are in the cycle where we get tons of snow, we groom the trails, there are a few great days of skiing, and then we get another big snowstorm. Repeat, repeat. Call to find out where we are in the grooming cycle on any given day, but generally you can trust that the groomers will be out the next morning after every snowfall. It generally takes all day to complete all the trails on both sides. For planning purposes, you can predict that Poplar Creek will usually be the last trail groomed. Bob and Quinn on our side and Ruth and Zach across Flour Lake try to get all thee central sections done first. Then usually we do Bear Cub and eventually Poplar Creek, when everything else is done.

If you love to race, the Bearskin Virtual Nordic Ski Series is back again for 2022. After all, if we are stuck indefinitely in a pandemic then we might as well keep doing the few fun things that came out of the Covid-era. Sign up on the website. You’ll need a GPS device and a Strava account to track your race time. Call Quinn or talk to him at the front desk if you need help figuring this out. https://bearskinnordicseries.com/

So it snowed, and snowed, and snowed. The groomers have been going out almost daily to redo the trails. Last year we had a winter where we received a lot of snow early in the season–and then it rarely ever snowed again. We had enough snow to have a good ski base, but without fresh snowfalls the base became harder and icier. Maintaining the trails became quite challenging. 2022 is shaping up to be a much different winter. All trails are in great shape.

We’ve had an extremely cold first week of January. Conventional weather wisdom has always been that early January is brutally cold, but during the last 10 years that has not usually been true. This past week, however, was wickedly cold, as well as windy. Newly groomed trails were often blowing over soon after the groomers went through. In better news, we have a warm-up coming next week that will make it easier to appreciate the good ski conditions. Not dramatically warm, but definitely an improvement.

We will continue to groom whenever there is a new snowfall.

The Main Lodge building is still open to the public 7:30 AM to 6 PM to buy trail passes and to warm up. We are requiring masks in order to be inside the Main Lodge building, and people have been fabulous about doing this. We worried that we would need to close the building because people wouldn’t follow directions, but we haven’t seen any of that. We do have simple masks at the front desk if you forget yours, so just ask. We want to make it easy for you to help us stay open.