January has been good to us. We’ve had warmish temperatures, a little new snow but not a deluge, and winds have been calm enough that our trees have remained nicely coated with snow. The temperatures are forecast to go down later this week, but we’ve had a good run of weather so far.

The down side of our consistently warm temperatures is that the ice on all our local lakes froze weirdly. We had a skim of ice, then two feet of snow, then warm days and more snow, then a few cold days — and the resulting ice is peculiar. This seems to be true all over Minnesota this year.

As some of you may have heard, the Pisten Bully belonging to our partners on the trail system, Golden Eagle, did go through a weak spot on the ice. Don’t worry, nobody was hurt. This was not on a section of the ski trail system, so it didn’t happen in a place you routinely ski. We have decided to only groom our lake trails with snowmobile groomers for now. Our Tidd-Tech snowmobile groomer actually grooms a pretty nice trail on the lake, so you may not even notice that the Pisten Bully hasn’t been out on the lake. The lakes are perfectly safe for you to ski across, as long as you don’t weigh 15,000+ pounds.

Until GEL figures out what happens next with their PB, we are sharing our new Pisten Bully with them. So far that’s working fine, but if we get a big snow then it may take us a little longer to groom the entire system.

Coming up: Colder temperatures! (But not terrible.)