By Joe Crain
As I look around outside it definitely looks like the middle of winter, with about 27 inches of snow covering the ground and most of the trees sagging a bit with a generous coating of white. But with the temperatures hovering right around the freezing mark of 32 degrees for the past two weeks, it sure hasn’t felt much like the last week in January. Our historic average temperature for this week is 19 degrees for highs and one degree for the overnight lows, so it has been hard to match the visual with the tactile for the last couple weeks. And with the forecast calling for temps at or near 40 degrees for the first couple days of February I guess the sensory contradictions will continue.
The ample early snow fall, you may recall we had an epic 20-inch storm at the beginning of December that was quickly followed by a couple 10-inch storms, has maintained a very good skiable base in the area despite the bouts of warm temperatures and even a few days of rain fall. As I mentioned at the end of December’s article, all of that too-deep-to-groom snow was actually the perfect situation for me as I prepared for this winter’s back country skiing vacation in the Sylvania Wilderness, just a couple hours’ drive to camps east on US Highway 2 in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The Sylvania Wilderness is an 18,000 acre patch of old growth forest at the southern edge of the nearly 1,000,000 acre Ottawa National forest that stretches from the shores of Lake Superior south to the border of Wisconsin near the town of Land-O-Lakes. The Wilderness is one of the two remaining patches of pristine never cut old growth forest remaining in this part of the country. The other nev
er cut patch of forest is an area many of you campers and alumni may have visited with camps tripping program, the Porcupine Mountains State Park. The Porkies area is located at the north western edge of the Ottawa National Forest’s superior shore border. This year’s back country ski adventure was a big departure from my last two winter’s trips in that I was going solo this year. My trips of the past two winters were with small groups with guides that did all of the tracking and trail cutting as we went — this year I was on my own and had to stomp trail and track the trail by myself in an area I had never been before. Needless to say, I was a bit apprehensive while planning my trip and my planed routes for each of the days I was to be in the wilderness. As a matter of fact, I had started planning for the trip just after returning from last year’s Yellowstone National Park adventure, I figured if I was going to be on my own in the middle of 18,000 acres of uninhabited wilderness, I could not be too prepared. I had learned from my two Yellowstone trips what I would need to carry in my pack, what distances I could reasonably expect to cover in a day, the techniques needed to climb steep inclines and survive steep descents, and, though my Yellowstone guides seemed to disagree with this, how important it was to stick to the established trails in order to avoid having to go over and under downed trees and other under growth obstacles. The National Forest Service does a superb job at keeping the trails in the Wilderness cleared but maintains no markers along the trails so my only uncertainty left by the day of my first outing was weather I was going to be able to find and keep to the trail, which isn’t so easy when the worn track was deep under snow.
Our intrepid caretaker braves the cold!
My planned strategy to overcome the fact that I was soloing and had to pack trail on my own was to plan all of my routes as in/outs, ski half of the day into the Wilderness and then ski my own track out again, rather than doing loops in which I would have to stomp trail the whole day. With this method I had the added advantage of not having to focus on tracking the whole way and could just enjoy the scenery and skiing as I followed my tracks on the way out. I was also able to push my distances a bit farther because I knew the trip out was going to be much easier than the trip in. Keeping this in mind also helped me through some of the physically more challenging sections of trail, big climbs up on the way in meant easy descents on the way out. Tracking through complicated routs on the way in would be a piece of cake when I merely had to follow my tracks on the way out! My solo back country strategy worked out perfectly and I was able to average about ten miles a day, which left me tired but not exhausted at the end of each outing. With each day’s trek my navigational skills improved as my ability to see the slight dent in the snow cover were the heavily used summer trail track was etched into the ground deep below the snow cover. I started to get excited by the sight of cut dead fall that helped mark the narrow trail, and indicated that I was definitely on the right track.
The old growth forest I trekked through was amazing! Huge groves of Birch, Maple, Hemlock and Ash trees that all averaged the girth of the large white pines we have around camp! It was mind boggling to think that this was once the norm from the Porcupine Mountains and the shore of Lake Superior inland to the south for hundreds of square miles! The other much more troubling thought that kept creeping through my head as I worked my way through this beautiful Wilderness is that it only took the logging companies a few decades to cut it all down, except for these two relatively small patches that were thankfully preserved, one hopes for ever.
Starting to plan for next winter’s Back Country Skiing Adventure its Caretaker Joe At Camp.