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Ticket to Glide
Minnesota Monthly, December 2004
© 2004 by Greg Breining
This quirky little tune wanders through my head as I begin planning a cross-country skiing trip, in early February, lodge to lodge in northeastern Minnesota. The brief winter getaway promises natural beauty, invigorating exercise, and the freedom of being a vagabond, I tell my wife, Susan—with none of the detriments of winter camping. No heavy packs, no sitting around a campfire for hours after the sun has set, no midnight forays to drop trou' in the snowy woods.
Instead of sleeping in a cold camp and hassling with the car, we'll ski up to a convivial and snug little Terry Redlin-inspired lodge, fire crackling, suffused with the preternatural glow in the winter gloaming.
It doesn't take much of a sales job. Susan is game.
I call Boundary Country Trekking in Grand Marais, which offers "civilized adventure" on the North Shore and Gunflint Trail.
There are plenty of options, says Barb Young, who runs the booking service with her husband, Ted. Two nights, three nights, four nights, or more. But first, do I want to ski the Gunflint, with 176 kilometers of trail, including the Banadad through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness? Or the North Shore Mountain Trails, a 196-kilometer system stretching almost uninterrupted along Lake Superior's shore from Temperance River northeast past Cascade River State Park?
Recent heavy snow has made the North Shore possible, so we go with that. After a couple days of working the phone, Young sends an itinerary: two days and three nights on the North Shore with a day at the end to ski wherever we want.
STRUGGLING TO ESCAPE work and the cities, we arrive terribly late at Cascade Lodge, a rustic two-story landmark on the shore of Superior. Everyone has gone to bed, but at the desk we find a key and directions to our room. Inside, we discover a stripped mattress and cleaning supplies in the middle of the room. We call the night number.
"Oh my gosh," the woman says. And then I hear her whisper, "She forgot to finish the cleaning."
As we wait for the hastily assembled crew to make up our room, we admire the lobby. It is high-end north woods traditional, with French doors facing the highway and the lake, old wolf pelts hanging on the wall, a caribou head mounted over the stairway, and a stuffed otter sitting under the baby grand in the corner. By the time our room is ready, we pass on the hot tub and flop into bed, exhausted.
The next morning we walk next door to the restaurant. Over pancakes and biscuits and gravy, we contemplate the beauty of Lake Superior's winter vista through the big picture window.
Returning to the lodge to begin our travels, I'm surprised and a little disappointed when owner Gene Glader says we'll have to shuttle our car down the road to the next lodge. I had hoped to be rid of the thing for three days—except to grab clean clothes out of the trunk.
So Glader and I drop the car at Solbakken Resort, seven miles down the road. On the return trip, he explains that Cascade Lodge (established in 1927; the present building was constructed in 1939) caters to travelers throughout the year. Most visit in August. They're a varied lot: cyclists, hikers, sightseers, honeymooners, Superior circumnavigators, and folks headed to Thunder Bay (gullible enough to believe a billboard we spotted touting it as the "cultural capital" of Canada). "We get a little bit of everything here," Glader says.
Cascade played an integral part in the North Shore cross-country ski boom back in the mid-1970s, when it began cooperating with adjacent Cascade River State Park to maintain a large and challenging system of ski trails. Today, more than 27 kilometers of groomed trail circle through the park and immediate area.
Shuttle complete, Susan and I grab our skis and shoulder backpacks loaded with water, spare jackets, and sack lunches we picked up at the restaurant. Climbing the trail behind the lodge, we soon reach the ski trail and strap on our boards. We continue to climb until we reach the main stem of the North Shore Mountain Trail, which generally follows the contours of the lakeshore. The trail is wide and perfectly groomed, with parallel tracks and room enough for skate skiing. We have only about 10 kilometers to travel, and our biggest challenge will be not reaching Solbakken too soon.
AS WE SKI ALONG, the sun emerges. The birches turn brilliant white. The shadows beneath the dark fir, spruce, and cedar deepen. The snow lies in a silent blanket, as though in some Nordic fairy tale. It makes me feel nostalgic for old Norway, and they're not even my people.
I like this. I'm drawn by the sense of mission: we have a distance to traverse (though by no means a great one) and a destination. I feel the anticipation of discovery—that we will arrive by trail, almost as though sneaking in the backdoor.
And there is the darker romance as well, known to anyone acquainted with the bleak adventure "To Build a Fire." For those who never read this Jack London story: "The man" (we know him by no other name) was hiking across the unbroken gloom of the Yukon in the dead of winter, in a temperature of 75 degrees below zero. He knew it was that cold because when he spat, there was a "sharp, explosive crackle" as his spittle froze in midair. He was hiking to an old mining camp on Henderson Creek.
Sorry to ruin it for you, but he never made it. The man plunged halfway to his knees in a snow-covered spring hole. In his haste to dry out, he built his fire beneath a spruce, which dumped its load of snow, extinguishing the fire. Now too cold to handle the matches (he dumped them all in the snow) he tried in desperation to grab his dog, to slice it open and plunge his hands in the warm innards to regain use of his fingers. But his hands were so cold as to be useless, and he could do nothing but hold the dog in a bear hug until he relented to a slow but painless death.
Such are the dark fantasies of cross-country travel, however unlikely it is that we will suffer a similar fate. By mid-afternoon, light snow has begun to fall. We stop for lunch—ham and Swiss on rye, juice, potato chips, carrot sticks, oranges, and raisin cookies. Then we split off from the main trail and follow a series of curves that descend through thickets of conifers toward the lake. Soon we reach the highway, shoulder our skis, and cross to Solbakken's stately log lodge.
We find our accommodations, a tiny cabin by the lake. It is so small that half the interior is taken up by the bedroom, which is entirely filled by the double bed. It is like a padded room. It is charming for its diminutive size, but its selling point is the real estate: just 30 feet away sits the great, rocky, frozen immensity of Lake Superior.
The tiny kitchenette makes me wish we had brought something to cook. But since we didn't, it's time to hunt for a meal. Solbakken, for all its charm, has no restaurant, so we fetch our car. By now the snow is swirling like the flurries in a snow globe. Negotiating the slick drive to the highway, I manage to sink a front tire into a drift. I back up to get a run at the slope and plow the entire rear end into a much bigger drift. Rocking and pushing for 15 minutes makes us at one with the snowbank.
Now if it were 75 below and this were the Yukon, we'd be in real trouble. Instead, I hike to the lodge for a snow shovel. After I exercise my back for 15 minutes, Susan walks to the lodge, which sends a handyman down the road with his four-wheel-drive to yank us free.
"WE LIVED IN THE TWIN CITIES, and this was our favorite vacation," says Solbakken owner Bill Blank, who would come to the North Shore with his wife, Beth. "We'd always hope the big waves would roll in." They bought the property in 1979. Looking to replace the tiny, dilapidated office, they put in a bid for a large log building, auctioned off as part of the government buyout of Sawbill Lodge. The logs were disassembled, numbered, and trucked down to this site, where they were reassembled. "We wanted a central lodge where people could congregate," Blank says. "Since I was a kid I wanted a log cabin."
As is true for Cascade, Solbakken's high season is summer. Nonetheless, the Blanks were instrumental in opening the trail system along the North Shore. They have a long-term agreement with the U.S. Forest Service to maintain the trails. They tackle the job with a snow machine they share with Cascade Lodge.
After a resort employee helps us shuttle our car down to the Mountain Inn at Lutsen, Susan and I hit the trail again, climbing back up through the Deertrack and Whiteside trails and past the big opening known as the Jonvick deer yard. Reaching the main trail, we turn west toward Lutsen.
It is sunny and cold, but not unpleasant. We climb through the morning, but it's a gentle grade. Our skiing has been overwhelmingly easy—too easy, really, for hard core skiers, who would prefer the countless loops—ranging from easy to black diamond—that spin off this main trail.
As we ski, we scare up deer and check out tracks made by hare, fox, and coyote. Vole prints across the snow disappear into a tiny hole. Intertwined are the slightly larger tracks of ermine following the vole.
About halfway to our destination, we cross Alfred Creek and enter the Lutsen Scientific and Natural Area, where the trail passes beneath old-growth cedar, spruce, and birch. We eat lunch near Trapper Pass, the high point of the trail. After a few delightful downhill runs and a long climb to regain our altitude, we reach a road, carry our skis, and hike a couple hundred yards to the Mountain Inn.
In retrospect, I might have planned the trip to lodges with restaurants nearby so that I could have shuttled the car three-days' worth down the road, packed my backpack with everything I'd need (only a few extra pounds), and then traveled blissfully auto-free to the end.
Or I might have spent a couple days at each lodge, exploring the more challenging loops in the vicinity.
Next trip, perhaps. Now, time for the hot tub in the cheerful solarium of the Mountain Inn, soaking away minor aches as I contemplate dinner and a cigar.