We still have fantastic skiing at Bearskin! Everything was groomed over the last two days, and some skate lanes were touched up this morning. We’ve had fresh snow while other areas had rain, so our trails are looking good.
We had a couple warm days this week, and it looks like we will have a couple warm days next week too — but we have ample snow, so the trails will be fine. Our new track pan tillers work miracles on icy snow.
As is often the case by March, we’ve reached the point where you’ll start to wonder on the drive up to the Gunflint if we really do have snow. The snow along the North Shore and in Grand Marais has been decimated by warmer temps and rain, while we just had more snow. Don’t worry, when you drive up the hill you’ll start to see better snow and by the time you get to the mid-Trail area, you’re in true winter again. We are lucky to be in this magical winter location.
If you’ll be here in the next week, come prepared to watch for Northern Lights. The forecast is fabulous. We are nearing the spring equinox, so due to the earth’s tilt at this time we often have the best light shows of the year in mid-March. In fact, it’s fairly common to have amazing green lights in the sky on St. Patrick’s Day. Here’s our link to the info on how to watch for the aurora at Bearskin. Bring your camera and tripod.
As usual, we will have soup, chili, cheesecake, and hot chocolate in the Main Lodge for you to enjoy while you’re up here skiing. See you soon!
After several weeks of the consistent “snow, groom, snow, groom again” pattern that we know so well at Bearskin we have a bit of a weather change for early this week. We are warming into the 30°+ temp range for a few days. We won’t be seeing any super-warm temps like the Twin Cities is forecast to have and we have plentiful snow, so we are not too worried about snow loss. It gets cold again by the weekend.
Bearskin has the right equipment to overcome any trail iciness, including some specialized track-pan tillers for our Pisten Bully that only a few machines in the US have. It actually will be fun for the groomers to use these tillers. We purchased them last year with our newest Pisten Bully, but then never experienced the right conditions to try the tillers out. We will report back on how well they work to keep the trails perfect.
Bearskin has been almost 100% full since late December, but now that we are getting into March there are cabin openings again. We always fill up for the year ahead because everyone who is here has a great time so they rebook for next year. In the low-snow winter of 2024 we kept our skiing going until March 6 with incredible efforts by Quinn, Bob and our staff — we were proud to have the last skiing anywhere in Minnesota. They raided the lake to move snow to the ski trails, and also created long ski trails around the snowy lake to keep skiing alive. But after the first week of March even those efforts couldn’t save the trails and skiing was over. Consequently, there weren’t as many guests here to rebook for 2025 and now there are lots of great options available. (It’s funny to look at the reservation calendar because you can clearly see where the season ended.) A sequence of events that’s not likely to happen again!
“Value season” at Bearskin, the lowest rates of the season, starts on March 9th. Normally that first week after the rates go down is booked solid by the folks who were here last year on those dates. We expect skiing will still be good , and the longer days and slightly warmer temperatures usually make this some of the most fun skiing of the year. Give us a call at (218) 388-2292 or email stay@bearskin.com and we will help you make a plan.
What else is happening? We have a good northern lights forecast coming up next weekend, if we have clear skies.
And of course, on March 20 we have the vernal/spring Equinox, when day and night hours are exactly equal. The reason we especially like the equinox up here in the northern latitudes is that we often experience the best northern lights shows of the year around the equinox. The explanation is complicated, but the short version is that the earth’s tilt aligns directly with solar wind, allowing more of the charged particles that create the aurora into the atmosphere. The brightest most amazing aurora shows we’ve ever seen have been on dates shortly before and after the spring equinox. We can’t ever promise great northern lights, but your chances of a sighting are very good as you get into mid-March.
Ski season 2024-2025 is underway. Looking back at the ski posts from last year, it’s pretty funny to see how the posts just trailed off — just like the skiing did. We actually kept the skiing alive until early March, by moving snow from the lake to the trails and by creating a maze of trails on the lake. People had a surprising amount of fun last winter in spite of the low snow conditions. We’ll all remember winter 2023-2024 as uniquely enjoyable because of the different activities everyone could do–hiking into the BWCA, exploring summer trips like Rose Falls, playing with the kick sleds on the lake ice, ice skating far into the wilderness on the lakes. But we didn’t want to do it again this year.
Fortunately, it is looking like winter 2024-2025 might be a snowy one. After an extended autumn, we started getting snow after Thanksgiving and it has been snowing constantly ever since. Bearskin tends to get its snow in big dumps, followed by addtional little snowfalls almost daily. That’s the pattern we are seeing so far this year. We hope it continues.
Summer Home and Campground ski trails have been pisten bully groomed several times now, the latest grooming being Saturday morning. We have the Cook County High School ski team and the Team Birkie skiers out on those trails today and tomorrow, so there has been a lot of ski action on that grooming. Our forecast is for a possible 8″ more of snow Sunday and Monday, with more snow forecast for later in the week. That’s probably just the right amount snow we need to start grooming the rockier, hillier sections of our trail system. We’ve done preparatory packing work on many of the trails on both the north and south sides of the system, so now we just need the snow. We’re ready!
Both Bearskin and Golden Eagle are selling ski passes now, including day passes and season passes. Stop in and get yourself set up for a winter of great skiing!
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.
Aspen ski trail with tracks and corduroy 2.11.2024
Bearskin Lodge Ski Trail Reports 