Quinn went out on the TiddTech groomer this morning  and was able to groom a few more trails in the system.  Campground, Summer Home, and the Lit Loop were regroomed today. Quite a few skiers are out there this afternoon, so we’ll be interested to hear what they have to say about trail conditions. 

Upper  Beaver Dam and Bear Cub Trail were groomed and tracked for the first time today. We also groomed a 4K  loop on East Bearskin Lake. 

Bit by bit we’re accumulating snow, although it will take a 4-6″ snowfall in order to open some of the other trails.

If you drive up to Bearskin, you are not going to see any snow until you are quite a distance up the Gunflint Trail. Grand Marais looks especially discouraging, with remnant piles of dirty gray plowed snow on every corner, but no snow covering the grass.  Don’t let it worry you.  Once you start to go up the Gunflint Trail hill, you’ll begin to see white snow-covered areas again and as you get nearer to the Mid-Trail area you’ll notean increasing number of  picturesque pine trees with snow-covered boughs.  We wish we had more snow, but we’re very grateful (again!) for our snowy location.

Our new employee Dave has been working all afternoon to clear an ice rink.  If previous history is any indicator, that means we’ll be surprised by a huge snowfall tonight. 🙂

We haven’t posted anything new in awhile because…well, because nothing much has changed.  We didn’t lose our snow like most of NE Minnesota did during the rain last Saturday, but we haven’t gained a great deal of snow either.  It seems to snow a bit almost every day, so our trees are coated in white and our snow looks fresh.  We are still waiting, though, for the big snowstorm that will give us 4-6 inches of additional snow to top off the trails enough to groom more of them.

Summer Home, Campground, and the Lit Loop are groomed and tracked.  We’ve groomed a path on East Bearskin Lake and we will  groom some additional lake trails on Friday.  The rest of the system has been packed in various ways.  Based on the many ski tracks we saw on the packed trails, numerous  skiers have been out there giving the packed trails a try.  But realistically, we would like the trails to have much more snow than this.  The Central Gunflint Trail Ski Trail System is fortunate to once again have snow when the rest of the area doesn’t have any, but we would certainly be grateful to get more snow soon.

We didn’t get much snow overnight but it’s snowing pretty hard now.  This snowstorm is coming from the south, which is pretty typical for this time of year.  Those storms often wane before they get all the way to NE Minnesota, but it looks like we’ll get a few inches out of this one, at least.

We’re getting a call almost every hour asking about the ski conditions.  Snow melted throughout the state and we’re hearing that high school ski camps everywhere have been cancelled. Lots of people are looking for somewhere else to take their team skiers.   We drove up from the Twin Cities two days ago and there’s no doubt about it–the Gunflint Trail has the only measurable snow left between Minneapolis and Bearskin.   It looks like we still have pretty good snow, at least when compared to everywhere else. Unfortunately, it’s not quite enough anymore for the ski trails.

The ski season got off to a great start, but now after our most recent warm-up we have a thin icy base.  We wouldn’t recommend going out there to ski at this point.  The last guest to head out skiing on the trails said conditions were hard on his rock skis. So we need more snow. There’s snow in the forecast for the next few days.  We just need a few more inches of snow over this base in order to have enough snow to groom the trails again.

Meanwhile, the ice is finally freezing firmly.  Erik, our musher, went out on the ice yesterday to sink in the poles he uses to tie up his dogsled team.  And it is snowing now in a way that looks just like being on the inside of a snow globe , with glittery flakes swirling in many directions.  We’re making progress towards real winter.

The Gunflint Trail Volunteer Fire Department, the group of well-trained area volunteers who would rescue you if you were ever lost or injured up here, conducted a training session on our trails last night. The good news is that they “found” Jen, so she didn’t have to sit endlessly by the lake in campsite 5, pretending to be lost. The bad news is that all the trails will need to be regroomed after all the “searching.” Current conditions give new meaning to the trails being “tracked.”   We suggest that you don’t come skiing this morning, so you don’t have to ski through the footprints of a dozen searchers.    Trails should be good again later this afternoon.

In general, skiers have been quite happy with the trails over the past few days.  “Surprisingly good” is what we’ve heard repeatedly.  We will still need more snow to open most of the trails, but Summer Home, Campground and even the Lit Loop all offer a good “first ski of the year” experience.

Winter arrived on Thanksgiving night. A light rain gradually turned to steady snow in the late afternoon.  We expected a couple of inches, so we were surprised to find 8 – 10 inches or more on the ground by morning.  This is a great start to the ski season.

Friday was spent plowing, shoveling, and generally digging out.  The first snowfall of every season is always a challenge.  The ground is not especially frozen underneath this snow, which makes plowing and shoveling much tougher.

If all goes well, Bob may go out on Saturday and try to roll the Summer Home Road Campground Loop Trail.  Meanwhile, it is back-country skiing at this point.  We had guests who skied out there today and reported having “first snow of the year” fun on the trails — not fast, not groomed, just fun to be out in the fresh powder.

Season passes as well as daily ski tickets for the 2012-2013 ski season are available at both Bearskin Lodge and Golden Eagle Lodge.  We share the proceeds equally between both lodges, so it doesn’t matter where you purchase your pass.  The funds from your ski pass go to pay a portion of the maintenance and grooming on the ski trails; passes don’t cover all of our costs, but they make it possible.  The US Forest Service/Superior National Forest takes a fee , as does the Minnesota DNR for the small portion of the trail on state land.  You are supporting excellent skiing on the Central Gunflint Trail System when you buy your pass.

Waiting.

At this point in the season we watch and wait and wonder when the snow will fall.  We have perhaps an inch of snow cover at the moment, but that could last for the rest of the winter, or be gone tomorrow.  It’s an unpredictable time of year.

We had a great turn-out for trail trimming weekend on November 2nd & 3rd.  We’ve learned the hard way that small trees and branches which appear to be well off the ski trail often turn into trail nuisances after a heavy coating of ice or snow bends them over the trail.  The trail trimming crew did a great job of trying to spot those potential problem branches and trees beforehand, then cutting them off.

Because our trails go through the rocky, hilly woods instead of over mowed grass paths, we need more snow than some other ski resorts do in order to make a nice base.  We’re fortunate to be in a “sweet spot” that almost always gets snow even when the rest of the North Shore area ends up with rain or sleet, but it’s still difficult to predict when we’ll have enough snow for a base.  We are lucky to have the G2 snowmobile groomer in addition to our pisten bully groomer, so we can get out on some of our trails with fairly minimal snow. 

Last year skiing was good at Bearskin beginning in late December, and it stayed fairly decent even when the Twin Cities news channels were claiming there was no skiable snow in all of Minnesota.  No, we did not have as much snow as we normally do, but in many years the amount of snow we get is far in excess of what we need to provide awesome skiing.  The Central Gunflint Trail had decent snow until the big melt in March.  By our standards, that was short ski season–many years some of the best skiing occurs in the month of March.  But we were happy to be able to provide good skiing for that long in 2012 and because there was almost no snow again on the North Shore, many new skiers were introduced to our great trail system.

We’ll keep you posted on this site as the snow begins to accumulate.  For more frequent updates, you can also check out our Facebook page for info; updates to that page are also sent to @BearskinLodge on Twitter, if  Tweets are your thing.    Those updates involve almost no time commitment for us, so they happen more frequently than the blog updates do.  As always, if you are wondering about snow conditions, just call us directly at 800.338.4170 during business hours.

The 2012 Trail Crew at dinner, after a good day of trimming the ski trails.

 We made our last attempt at grooming some trails on Wednesday. Grooming was semi-successful but the snow has continued to rapidly melt. Now we have a significant number of bare sections on many trails. It’s time to declare this winter ski season on the Central Gunflint Trail System officially over.