The question at the beginning of the year every season is always: When will there be enough snow to groom and open the trails? The answer this year is “soon.”
The Gunflint Trail received more than 20 inches of light, powdery snow last week, a great start to the season. Good preparatory snow — this snow compacts after grooming to a much smaller amount, but it’s a great start. Summer Home and Campground Trails have had two rounds of grooming, and the trails have pretty good early-season skiing conditions. In the next few days our temps are going to get above freezing so things will probably get icy, but we have so much snow yet to come.
The primary groomers for both resorts are on vacation until around 12/1, and then we anticipate we will be out grooming on the trails every day.
At Bearskin we have a BIG surprise that is (hopefully) arriving during the first week of December from Kassbohrer — our brand new, state-of-the-art Pisten Bully groomer. We replaced our ancient, 30+ year-old Pisten Bully groomer about 7 years ago and loved the extraordinary quality of our newly groomed trails. A lot had changed in three decades! We made a decision then to continue to upgrade and stay on top of the newest technology. We’ll tell you all about it when the new machine arrives, but the trails are going to be even better than before. High excitement here.
Meanwhile, we’ll post as soon as Quinn and Ruth are back from their vacations and start working full-time on the trail system. It’s going to be a fantastic year for skiing on the Central Gunflint Trail System.