We lost it all on Friday. The heavy rains came down, the snow that made it possible to groom trails on the lakes turned to standing water, and the snow on our other trails mostly melted. Talk about discouraging, because we’ve worked so hard to make good trails out of mediocre conditions.

BUT, hurray! We are working our way back to skiing! Quinn has groomed trails on Summer Home Road and Campground. Quinn skied on it this evening and wasn’t thrilled about Summer Home. You will have to remove your skis to cross the culvert area in the big dip on Summer Home, and there are some “stop your skis” rocks, he said. Needs continuing snow — we will get there. Campground, on the other hand, is fairly good because of all the snow we hauled to it.

We haven’t been able to redo the lovely, long lake trail we had on East Bearskin because of snow/water slush. We’ll be keeping an eye on that every day until it hardens up again. However, they were able to groom some fairly nice ski trails on the south shore of Aspen Lake.

On the Golden Eagle side, they’ve groomed the Flour Lake Campground trail and added some ski trails back on Flour Lake.

Is it as good as our usual outstanding ski trails? Nope. Is it probably the best skiing on natural snow still available in Minnesota? Yes, it likely is. And we’re happy to say, people seem to be having a pretty good time. We have snow, we have winter conditions, and the temperatures are pleasant enough to get out and enjoy the world. 

The weather reports indicate that we are returning to more typical winter conditions, with small snowfalls every day. The forecast looks promising for snow in the future. We’ll never catch up now to the massive amounts of snow we had in 2022 and 2023, but getting adequate snow would be a wonderful surprise. We will continue to do everything we can dream-up to create a good winter experience for our guests.