Against all odds

The 50th Birkie takes place despite lack of ‘winter’

By Mitch Mode

Special to the Star Journal

It is the week of the American Birkebeiner.  We drive on bare blacktop past rolling hills and open fields, over small streams that flow in open air, having shed their hard carapace of ice in the thaw.  Lakes glisten under snowmelt.  Blue skies; unrelenting sun; temperatures unnatural for winter and ominous in what they portend.  In normal times none of this would happen but in this winter of despair, nothing is normal.

There is no snow.  The woods are dark with decay of fallen leaf, underlain with dirt and mud. Trees stand stark and cast funereal shadows in the afternoon sun.  It is 45 degrees.  It is the last week in February but there is no sign of winter in northern Wisconsin.  We had more snow cover on Halloween. 

We near Cable where the race was scheduled to start. Start there and follow a north to south ski trail along ridgetops and through northern forests, run for 50 kilometers or 55 kilometers (depending on technique) and finish on snow covered Main Street in Hayward.  This year, the fiftieth time the race has been held, every year in a spirit of celebration of a sport and an event that defines winter for so many.

It was obvious weeks ago that the race would not happen on that trail, could not happen, no way in the world could take place.  There was thin snow at best, bare ground at worst.  The race was doomed.  No way it could happen.

Until it did.  Until, against all odds, they pulled it off.  Until they moved not heaven and earth but damn near, moved snow, piles of it and made a ski trail where none had existed and said, “Come one, come all, we’re having us a race!”

Snow?  None came from the skies, none fell from the heavens.  There was, instead, manmade snow.  There was manmade snow because over the past years as snowfall and temperatures became uneven and unreliable, the Birkebeiner organization invested in snow making equipment and built an infrastructure to make snow.

What for decades had been the salvation of downhill areas, snow making, is now becoming a staple in the world of cross country skiing with snowmaking at several urban centers across the Midwest as well as the stand alone marvel of the Ariens Nordic Center which built a Nordic ski trail system in small town Brillion, Wisconsin and made it work with manmade snow.  And now, at the trailhead of the American Birkebeiner, snowmaking would save the day. But not without effort.

They started to make snow weeks ago, made it and stacked it in enormous piles and then made more snow. Then waited.  If they got natural snow, the original course would be good to go, start to finish.  If not, they had a fallback. 

The Nordic ski community waited, waited for a winter that we had always taken for granted, waited for the predictable snows of February and the cool temperatures that would hold it.  Waited as skis leaned in the corner and gathered dust, waited for winter because it is Wisconsin and you can count on winter.  Always have, always will.  Bank on it.

No more.  Winter as we know it did not come.  We waited in vain, in growing despair.  Ten days before the race the Birkie leadership called it: They would use manmade snow and make a race course and the Fiftieth American Birkebeiner would go on.

They took those piles of manmade snow and used end loaders to fill dump trucks full, then drove them out on hard frozen turf and dumped the snow. Again.  And again.  They packed it and rolled it and groomed it.  When they were done they had a race course where one had never existed.   It was perhaps 30 feet wide and maybe 18 inches deep and it ran out and back, a loop six miles (10 kilometers) long. 

They completely revamped the structure of the race.  The 50km race was shorted to 30km; the 29km event to a two lap, 20km race.  They added two more days to a three-day event to better spread the number of skiers out.  Then they waited. Nobody really knew what would happen.

We drove to the start line under a warming sun, temperatures on the rise.  We drove past fallow woods of dark umber and gray, turned a corner and ahead was a former golf course, the old fairway gone now to dried grass and dirt.  But not all of it.  For under the late February sun gleamed a pathway of white, a ski trail where one had never been, a snaky, sinuous ski trail that ran in a crazy pattern twisting and turning, rising and falling over undulating terrain where golfers once strode.  A ski trail.  The Birkebeiner trail of 2024.

And the skiers came. They came as the faithful on a pilgrimage, came as true believers, came in an unexpected celebration of a mortally wounded winter now given life in the waning days. Thousands skied the various events over the five days.

I thought of baseball, thought of the old movie about the ball field in a cornfield in Iowa and the “If you build it they will come” line and here it was, not baseball but skiing, alive where it should have been dead and gone, flickering with life against all odds, a retired golf course now a field of dreams.

I skied on Thursday, number 46 for me, not my finest time on skis but so it goes.  This time simply having hours on skis was worthwhile.  It hadn’t happened much this year. 

It was near 50 degrees when I stepped off the course, one foot on snow, the other on dirt; in a single stride went from winter to not-winter.  There was music and a PA announcer and the smell of brats and smiles all around. It was race day at the American Birkebeiner.  It was, against all odds, as it should be.

An assortment of outdoor products is available at Mel’s Trading Post, downtown Rhinelander. Call 715-362-5800.