Ski season at Bearskin is just around the corner! If you’ve skied with us on the Central Gunflint Trail system before, you probably know that we have 80+K of excellent ski trails. What you may not know is how much work Bearskin and Golden Eagle put into maintaining those trails before we see a single snowflake.
Trail trimming at Bearskin starts in early September. The first step is to travel the entire trail system removing fallen trees. At this point, we’re able to access the wet or rocky sections of trail that we won’t be able to mow, and clean them up with a brush cutter.
Next, we mow. We mow most of our trails with a Tiger Mower which is shared between Golden Eagle and Bearskin. The Tiger Mower has rear and side mowers which are each 6 feet wide, allowing us to create a 14-foot mowed swath with two passes at 1 mph. A mower on our new compact track loader works well on our more gnarly sections.
Here’s a video of Bob mowing a trail with the Tiger Mower.
Mowing takes us to late fall when it’s time to cut back the many branches that have grown over the trails. They have to be trimmed higher than you might think – skiers will eventually be skiing on a few feet of snow, so it’s not just the lowest branches that will get in their way. Plus, the heavy snow will bend them down lower.
Luckily, we had some help from some of you this year! Guests at our trail work weekend went out and trimmed hanging branches.
We also had members of the Cook County High School Nordic Ski Team come up for a day and help out.
Trail maintenance is a lot of work, but it will all be worth it soon when we’re grooming instead of mowing and you’re enjoying our wide, clear trails.