For skiers used to groomed trails, Mount Bohemia will seem wild and under-maintained. Exposed boulders on trails, trees to weave around, drops, knolls, and banked turns — all are common terrain features on the peak. Some trails swoop and bank like bobsled tracks.
Glieberman had trails groomed in seasons past, providing two or three manicured cruisers from the top of the peak to the base. But now everything is left as is, wind, snow, sun and the slice of ski edges shaping Bohemia’s runs and backcountry trails. “You groom and people have expectations of perfection,” Glieberman said. “That wasn’t the kind of skier we wanted.”
The sound of ski edges scraping on stone was common during my visit. Branches whipped my face on tree runs. On the backside of the mountain, in an off-trail area called the “Haunted Valley,” I twice had to take off my skis and hike through thick brush where forward progress was no longer possible on a pair of planks.
Before Mount Bohemia had lifts, in the 1990s and earlier, local skiers would plod to the top of the undeveloped hill under their own power, striding and poling uphill for an hour or more. The downhill run might then last five or 10 minutes, and three or five runs would comprise a good day. This tradition of backcountry skiing, common in the mountains of the West but essentially absent from the Midwest, continues on hills surrounding Bohemia and on bluffs and ridgelines throughout the Keweenaw.
With the lifts, skiers and snowboarders at Bohemia now mix cut trails with snippets of backcountry, riding a chairlift to the top and then gliding into terrain like the “Haunted Valley” area. Underbrush is cut out each summer on some runs. Other terrain is left untouched and just as nature made it.
On the front side of the mountain, a wide rocky face called the “Extreme Backcountry” is highlighted on the trail map and is in the jurisdiction of Bohemia’s ski patrol. But the steep face drops into a forest without trails or a chairlift. It ends at a road a half-mile from the parking lot. From there, you hike or wait for a roving minibus that the resort runs to pluck skiers and snowboarders up.
A typical run down the “Extreme Backcountry” includes turns on a trail at the top of the mountain, then a dip into the woods for a quarter-mile of tree skiing to approach chutes with names like “Flying Squirrel,” “Shivering Timbers,” “Apex Chute,” and, my cliff-topped favorite, “Slide Path.” The meat of the mountain — a rocky face that tilts to 50-degrees or steeper — is short. It provides just twenty or so solid turns. But linking those steep turns on good snow is akin to skiing something high and wild in the Rocky Mountains, if only for a moment.
Late in the day on my visit, as the sun sinks into far hills, Murphy and I join a local group scouting a ridge on the backside of Bohemia. Jeff Wolford, a ski patroller from Oconto Falls, Wis., leads on Telemark skis, striding for forward momentum on a flat approach. “We’ll be the first ones back here this year,” he says, pointing into a woods of birch and pine. “Hope there’s enough snow.”
Wolford’s tracks cut a half-foot into the fluff, weaving, knee dropped in a turn. He carves giant squiggles through tree trunks, sweeping downhill and away. “It’s good!” he yells.
Murphy is next, skis pointed straight for 40 feet before starting his slalom.
I push off. Snow hisses underfoot, a deep untracked white ahead. The hill is gentle, gravity’s tug just enough to keep my skis floating. I drift away from the group, skirting stumps, my shoulders brushing branches. I let the skis run, dropping away downhill, quietly into the woods, alone and out of sight.
—Stephen Regenold is founder and editor of www.gearjunkie.com.
