By Joe Crain
After a rather exceptionally nice stretch of warm weather the first half of the month, things have started to turn rather autumnal here at camp. The leaves have started to make their annual change in color and a few trees have even started to shed some of their chlorophyll depleted sun catchers. The daytime temperatures have turned rather chilly, struggling to get to the mid 50s, which has been a bit hard to get used to with most of the month having been much 
above average (with even a few days reaching into the mid 80s!). On the 28th we had our first frost, a sure sign that summer has definitely come to an end. Although most of you probably didn’t realize it, because warm dry weather is what we all hope for while at camp, we were experiencing a mild drought in our region for most of the summer. With about three inches of rain fall this month, things have turned rather lush once again and, to the chagrin of many a homeowner in the area, we have had to start mowing our lawns again! Unfortunately the rain came in only two big storms causing some erosion in the usual spots around camp; the road to the upper diamond and the road down to the bike shack. I had the camp tractor out with the back blade attachment and got the roads back into shape. The rain also had a rather detrimental effect on some fresh landscaping work along the sidewalk down to the Rec-Hall where some fresh fill and grass seed washed out. With fingers crossed, we refilled area near Logger One and spread some more grass seed in hopes that there will be enough warm weather left this fall to get the grass established. We secured the side of the hill with a couple of railroad ties in hopes that if another deluge comes, the area will be spared another blast of run-off.
Camps morning cook Cody Keys has taken off his chef’s cap and traded it for a tool belt again this off season in his second year as our seasonal caretaker. We have been dropping not so subtle hints to him and the main office that perhaps this could be the year that he takes on the job through the season as well. Cody’s been busy replacing rotted fence and sign poles, and he tore out the old rotted ramp into the sailing shack and replaced it with fresh green treated wood this week.
On top of all these end-of-season odds and ends, we’ve all took some vacation time since the camp season has ended. At the beginning of the month, I spent a few weeks in Ashland Wisconsin swimming in and enjoying the shores of Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay. As I said above the weather was exceptionally warm the first half of the month, and the cool waters of the big lake were a perfect counter point to the heat. I was able to get the roller skies out and tune up my cross country ski form for the upcoming season on the 12 mile paved loop trail that circumnavigates Ashland. The trail is a “Rails to Trails” loop that passes along the lake shore for about 5 miles. It was especially nice this year because the trail just had fresh asphalt put down this summer on a large portion and was as smooth as a freshly groomed ski trail!
Caretaker Andy is currently on a road trip to Bozeman, Montana to visit his son Leo. Once there he and Leo plan to take some motor cycle rides through the gorgeous mountain passes in the area. One of my favorites would be the stretch along the Gallatin River known as the Gallatin Gateway. Andy said he was going to stop along the way there at the Little Bighorn battle field in Montana.
Enjoying natures display of color in the trees, it’s caretaker Joe At Camp.
At long last the month of May brought some much-desired Spring weather to the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Though the lake was still mostly iced-over for the first five days of the month and temperatures struggled to get out of the 50s, things really turned around for the second week as temps reached above normal. The opening day of the fishing season here in Wisconsin was Saturday May 7th and on the morning of May 6th the lake was still 75% covered in ice! The local anglers didn’t let that hamper their plans as we watched several boats launch into the 200-foot band of open water between the shore and the ice at the public landing and along the shore past camp to the west. The temperature had bumped up near 70 degrees both the 4th and 5th, and the ice cover was looking very candled and slushy, so the boat launchers’ gamble that the ice would be off by Saturday morning was a pretty safe one. Sure enough, they were right, and by early afternoon on Friday the 6th we were watching waves out on the lake, and for the fishing opener the next morning the sky was sunny. Although the water temperature was still very cold, the air temperature reached up into the lower 70s and a delightful day on the boat was had by those who participated in the annual Spring rite!
It’s been a tough spring for us here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, due to the fact that we can’t quite seem to shake off Old Man Winter! We started April with about 14 inches of snow still on the ground steadily melting off for the first week of the month. It’s not good to be starting April with that much snow, but it seemed to be on its way out despite our lower-than-average daily temps. Our temperatures early in April should be in the lower 40s, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers, and the mid-to-upper-30ss were doing the job. Soon though, an unpleasant cycle set in and for the next three weeks in a row we were beset by a mid-week temperature plummet and a mid-week snow storm. Storm one deposited six inches on the 7th through the 8th, and our nine remaining inches of snow turned to 15”. Fortunately, things swung warm that weekend and we lost all of those fresh six inches by the end of the weekend. But before we could get the snow shovels back into the garage the weather man told us we had better keep them out; April snow round two was on the way and could be bigger than round one! Sure enough, all of our snow-loss gains were wiped out yet again as eight inches fell for the second storm of the month. Thankfully, it turned to rain mid-week and most of that snow was beat down to a meager six inches when storm number two passed. Well round three was looming in the forecast before round two let up and the next week we saw another four inches of the dreaded heavy wet spring snow fall from the sky! Just over 19 inches of snow fell the first 19 days of April.
I started to tell every one of the few people that listen to me that this wasn’t April but rather Decempril! (We live in the age of the mash-up after all.) I also made a big push to remind folks we had it a lot worse back in the spring of 2013 when that Decempril brought us the still-record snow fall of 54 inches! Well, thankfully, as was pointed out the other day by a local meteorologist, the silver lining is that although we may be 10-15 degrees below our average temps each morning, as the month progresses those averages ARE going up each day. So, the below average this week is warmer than below average last week. Hmmm, not much consolation… but I guess one has to take what one can. So here we sit on Decempril 28th and the snow has gradually receded to just the big piles in the shady spots. Yes, some of those piles are four feet tall and 10 feet around but I’m seeing a lot of brown grass in my yard and the daffodils have started to show their green tips. And the best part is that in the last week of April, we only had a half inch that melted as soon as this week’s sunshine hit, so reason for optimism, right? Unfortunately, any of you who had dates before May in the C/N Lake Nebagamon Ice Breaker contest are out of luck! 99% of the lake is still covered in ice. With the past three twenty-degree mornings and highs only reaching into the lower 40s, I am starting to think there’s a possibility that May 7th’s Wisconsin fishing opener may have to be an ice fishing event this year!
temperatures dipping into the sub-zero range several times through the first couple weeks of the month. We woke the 12th of March and the mercury was staring back at us with a reading of -20 degrees, and a high that day predicted to only reach 18 degrees! With the first day of calendar spring only eight days away, it was feeling a lot like mid-January here at camp. And then, almost six weeks to the day as that weather prognosticating rodent Punxsutawney Phil had predicted, the weather suddenly switched into hard spring mode. We went from highs in the upper-20s and lower-30s to the mid-40s and low-50s overnight. The snow pack suddenly started to shrink at a rate of 1-2 inches a day (and I know because I had my aluminum yard stick in the snow and checked every morning as I passed by it on my walk to work). Could it truly be happening? Could this odd winter of radical overnight swings from above average temps to below average ones and vice versa just as radically switch to spring warmth? Could this odd winter that brought snow in either tiny drabs or in huge dumps actually melt away without a struggle? Could oversized rodents actually predict the start time of spring? Well, as I sat on March 30th, staring out my office window at snow pounding down at a rate of about an inch and hour on top of the ¼ inch of ice glaze that accumulated overnight, I could see that yard stick that I had been keeping an eye on all month. The yardstick had stopped emerging from the melting snow when it reached the 10-inch mark about six days ago, and was slowly counting inches in the wrong direction. It seems the yardstick had answers to my questions… and the answer was no! No, this odd winter isn’t coming to an end yet, no, we aren’t quite done with the radical temperature swings, no, we aren’t done with the large snow dumps, no, the northland is not going to have a radical switch to spring in the March of 2022, no, rodents can’t forecast when spring will arrive, and no, last month’s article laughing at the audacity of a weather predicting groundhog was not a mistake!
Around the shop we are working on the last of the winter work projects we collected last fall. I have been fixing up several screen doors that were in need of repairs. I’ve been working at camp for such a long time now that almost all of the screen doors around the place are ones I have built. One of the advantages of staying at the same job for so many years is being able to see how well my early designs have lasted through the years, and how well later design modifications worked to solve discovered flaws in earlier generations. This year was especially interesting because several different door design generations came in for repairs at the same time allowing me to do some head-to-head comparison research. And, all things considered, I seem to be making progress! The newest generations of doors are in need much less invasive repair work than the oldest, and the newer doors are surviving the seasonal wear and tear of a camp full of rambunctious young men quite well. The majority of repairs are needed due to environmental degradation, and not so much from youthful exuberance. It’s always rewarding when you look back through time and see that you have indeed been making fruitful decisions and are moving forward.
I always have to laugh when Groundhog Day comes around every February 2nd, and not just because the idea that the behavior of a rather large, odd-looking rodent could predict future weather events is so absurd! No, I laugh because when your address is this far north in Wisconsin, no matter what a particular groundhog says, be it Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania, Buckeye Chuck in Ohio, Shubenacadie Sam out of Nova Scotia, or even Wisconsin’s own Jimmy, who dose his weather predicting from a burrow in the town of Sun Prairie, no matter the name of the short fury prognosticator, we will be having six more weeks of winter here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin!! It would be more appropriate here to have Groundhog Day on March 2nd, and the question the too beloved rodent should be answering for us is whether the weather will keep snow on the ground until late March or early April?
As I mentioned above there was the 45-degree downward swing from Feb. 1st to Feb. 2nd.
After sputtering through December, Old Man Winter definitely has us in his grip here in the North Woods of Wisconsin. This month, we went from above average temperatures with occasional dips in December to below average temperatures with occasional reaches above average in January. The transition happened abruptly on the first of January when the temperature, starting from a “high” of 0 degrees, fell through the day bottoming out at -22! On the 2nd we made it back up above zero with a high of 3 degrees and again fell to a low of -29 degrees! Thankfully, that -29 was the lowest of the lows for the month, but we did reach well into the -20’s seven more times throughout January and woke to temperatures in the below-zero range 18 times this January. Our days have been a bit milder than the nights with only two occasions when the mercury stayed below zero for the whole day, with a high of negative three on the 10th and negative 4 on the 25th. The occasional above average days have been relatively warm, reaching near 30 degrees on a couple occasions. The month only saw 1 significant snow storm on the 5th. We woke to a fresh 13 inches on the ground. All and all, it has been a very dry month with no other major snowfall, although many micro-snows occurred with less than an inch of accumulation. Although we have had about 30 inches of snowfall since just before Christmas, we currently have about 14 inches of snow on the ground due to settling and several very windy days.
All of this colder weather has kept Caretaker Andy and I focused on indoor work this month. Caretaker Andy has spent a good portion of the month sprucing up the Basement of the Little House (the summer home of camp’s Directors and owners Adam and Stephanie). One bedroom, the hallway, and the stairwell all got a much-needed fresh coat of paint. The old carpet was pulled and replaced with some new and easier to maintain carpeting and the hallway ceiling that had some water damage caused by a drain mishap from the upstairs bathtub was replaced with new ceiling tile. I have been in the shop building a new set of cookout boxes for all of camps four villages. I had planned on sprucing them up with a fresh coat of paint, but after close inspection found that only 3 of the 27 cabin cookout boxes and none of the larger Village barbecue boxes were worth sprucing up. Wood rot and many years of patching had taken their toll, and I decided it was better in the long run to build new ones. Though the boxes are intended for hauling foodstuffs to the cabin cookout, sites they serve many duties from hauling firewood to serving as temporary step stools. I also remember seeing them often at Chef’s Cap competitions as make shift food prep tables. The boxes are all bright, fresh and solid once again ready for many decades of food service… or whatever extraneous uses future campers find for them!
right, we had a high temperature of 55 degrees here in the far north woods of Wisconsin on December 15th 2021!! Well as you can imagine the snow situation was dismal with all these ups and downs in temperature. Although we had been treated to a six-inch snow fall with the ice forming cold burst of the 6th the subsequent heatwave melted that off in a flash. Though there were a couple of overnight dusters through the month that left the ground white here and there, it wasn’t until 21st that we really had a plowable snow again but another winter sputter and a high temperature of 43 degrees on December 24th made a quick melt of that. Comfortingly, as we stared down the clock and the final hours of 2021 it actually looked like winter outside again. Now there is a solid eight inches of snow in my backyard thanks to two back-to-back post-Christmas storms! The temperatures again have turned cold since the 25th of December with readings hovering in the mid to upper twenties for highs and falling into the sub zeros overnight. With a high of -3 degrees on New Year’s Day and a delightfully frigid forecast reaching out for the first week of the New Year, maybe winter has ceased its sputtering and will finally give us northlanders the weather we all expect and love this time of year.
On a more personal level this November brought the opportunity to reach the end of a big goal I set for myself and started hiking toward back in January. I completed the “Hike 100 Challenge” on the North Country National Scenic Trail, which consists of hiking 100 miles on the NCNST in one calendar year. The North Country National Scenic Trail is a 4600-mile-long trail that stretches from Middlebury in central Vermont to Lake Sakakawea State Park in central North Dakota and is part of the National Park Service administered National Scenic Trail system. The trail passes through the eight states of Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota. We are very lucky that about 100 miles of the 200 miles of trail that pass through Wisconsin are right here in Douglas County (the home county of Camp Nebagamon). The “Hike 100 Challenge” is a program sponsored by the North Country Trail Association. Besides bragging rights hikers that complete 100 miles on the NCNST also receive a certificate and patch upon completion. This was my second try at the “Hike 100 Challenge,” because I under estimated the commitment need in 2020 and was only able to make it 47 miles that year. So, in January I reset my sights on the goal and hit the trail hard in 2021 and with my 5-pound hiking buddy (my pet Yorkshire terrier, Zigs) at myside crossed the 100-mile goal on November 7th! My next NCNST goal is to complete every trail mile in the state of Wisconsin, because what fun is a life without goals!
All of this nice weather has been good for us caretakers working outside around camp! With the help of evening cook and now semi-seasonal caretaker Cody Keys, some extra painting was completed around the grounds. Painting time is one of the hardest things for us to find at camp because all of the prime painting season is off-limits due to the overlap with camp season. With Caretaker Jack retiring at the end of the summer of 2020, the short painting season dilemma has only been exacerbated. But Cody’s willingness to stay on for a couple extra months past his usual season end date and the nice fall weather really helped take the pressure off Andy and me, allowing us to take some vacation time before the full force of winter struck. Cody was able to prep and paint peeling areas of the Doll House and the Swamper Jop, and with the help of Andy (after a well-deserved two-week break!) did a complete paint job on Range Cabin Dogwood. After I returned from my own vacation, I spent most of October’s ridiculously pleasant weather splitting the equally ridiculously large pile of cut wood that we had accumulated over the Camp-Season-That-Wasn’t. The wood splitting chore is one that we usually do in early November after leaf blowing to fill the CNOC wood pile and the friendship fire stores. But the pile seemed awfully large and I thought it would be a good idea to get a head start on it so we weren’t working on it into heavy snow season (although we have been snowed on plenty of times while splitting in November!). I’m really glad I did the splitting early. Sure, I was at it for nearly three weeks, and I did have to work through the occasional bit of rain, but my hands and feet stayed warm the whole time, something that is never true while splitting wood in November!
As the 2019-2020 off season got under way and we began work on the Have-to-Do list, a couple of my Wan-a-Dos started to nag at me and force themselves to the top of my list. One of these projects was a whirly gig that I had envisioned for years of a large fish chasing a school of smaller fish. Another of these fantasy projects that really started to nag at me was of a trail that I had planned in my head that would snake through the woods from the Range to Lorber point. The goal was to have the trail wind its way through the original Weyerhaeuser mill foundations that are still sitting out in that part of the camp’s grounds. That fantasy project was a big one and would take some major time, and so I had only gotten as far as naming it and making the entry signs. The name I had come up with for the trail was “Mill Ruins” and a few years back when I was routing other signs for the trails I had completed, I made and painted these signs as well. I put them on a shop windowsill, waiting for the off season that I would be able to scratch out enough time to get the trail flagged and cut through the woods.
As for my sweet fish whirly gig, I had a small reveal for the skeleton crew that was at camp for the season of 2020. Well as you can imagine the work list quickly went from have-to-dos to Wan-a-Dos, most of which I wrote about in the summer 2020 Arrowheads At Camp. These “silver lining” projects, as I came to call them, included the new mountain biking skills track down by the bike shack, tons of rail road tie replacement throughout camp, as well as a few deferred maintenance projects throughout the grounds. Well, with so much time spent on so many projects through the “summer season that wasn’t,” I decided there was time to flag and cut the “Mill Ruins” trail. Though I had to work through a few much-too-early snows last fall, I was able to rough in the trail. The snow kept me from doing the stumping that’s needed to smooth the track, it is a sweet windy trail through the old mill sites foundations and remaining wall chunks. It is a great addition to the Camp Nebagamon Bike Trail (CNBT), and brings us to a nice, round number: a total of four miles of trails all through camp.
