Northwoods 2

February 17, 2007

It's unusual for us to go anywhere twice, but Lakewoods Resort is hard to beat for a winter snowmobiling getaway. 

En route, Quinn watches DVDs, I watch the landscape.  This afternoon, I was thinking about musing.

My dear Swedish 3rd cousin, Judy Olsen, met us for lunch at India Palace.  Here we are trying to hide the fennel seeds we have in our mouths.  Oh, Judy's not trying.

We got a sweet ride with a backrest.  I loved the Raider snowmobiles my dad had when I was a kid:  twin track, engine in the back and you sat with your feet in the nose cowling.  Much easier to stay warm.  I haven't seen them since then, the 1970s.  My dad always made his purchases carefully.  I remember he told me that his wristwatch was the model the astronauts wore.  And his snowmobile mittens were the ones that went up Mt Everest.  I still wear them every time I go snowmobiling.  

This is the view from our balcony.  At 3 am the night before, I saw 8 snowmobiles coming in, probably from cruising from bar to bar along the lakefront.  No thanks.  I was glad to be up at that hour, though, because I got to see the thick carpet of stars through the dense, frigid air.  Ursa Major had moved like a clock's hand around Polaris since I went to bed.  (On second thought, all the stars did.)  Nature proceeds, at once indifferent and nurturing. 

Here I am blabbing during a stop for some quiet in the forest:  video

Screaming down a remote trail.  Nature moment?  Power sport?  I don't think of Nature as just a playground, so I have very mixed feelings about being so loud and invasive, relying on cleared trails, etc.  We might try cross-country skiing next year....  video

The North Woods/Snowmobile Trip

January 24, 2005

Quinn and I seized the weekend and headed up to Lakewoods Resort near Cable, Wisconsin.  He missed a day of school and we lucked out finding a great place, not crazy expensive and you could snowmobile right up to your room.  The other door opened to the pool and hot tub.  Perfect winter getaway.  This was the first vacation shot entirely on my SonyEricsson P900 camera phone.  It shoots little MP4 videos which are kind of fun.  You need to download Quicktime viewer to watch them.  If they don't play, right-click and Save Target As... or Open in New Window....

I'm always aware that I spend most of my life within 50 feet of a road.  I call it living on my ant trail. Whenever I'm traveling and I see a lane or a side road, I always want to explore it and see what's off the beaten path.  I suppose hunters and fisherman know all about that.  Snowmobiles are a great way to get way out away from civilization where there is real quiet, which is odd because snowmobiles are so loud.  That's one of the reasons I'm not particularly into the snowmobile itself.  I don't like the danger or noise or expense, I just like the ease with which it takes me off-road.  I guess snowshoeing would accomplish the same thing, but why should I burn my own calories?  What I'm really after is finding the secret places.  And as much as I hate what oil has done to geopolitics, it sure is fun to wantonly consume gasoline in pursuit of nature's remote beauty.  Before we fought over oil, we fought over spices, land, gold and slaves.  Heck, oil-powered machines replaced slaves.  Perhaps we'd still own each other if the industrial revolution hadn't come along.  Anyway, power sports are full of ironies and contradictions.  This is what I think about while I'm screaming down a trail with my son.  But the really golden moments occur when you stop and shut the engine off.  It's also very easy to sense geologic time in Wisconsin.  The land is still recovering from the last glaciation, so you end up zipping right over kettles, eskers, moraines and drumlins, pondering the great, slow forces which formed them.  

Here we're on Lake Namakagon.  Tracey had made me promise we'd stay off the ice, but there's no way.  Once you see 200 snowmobiles on a lake, you feel safe.  I called her and she relented.  It was a good place to let Quinn sit in front and drive the machine for a while.  He loved that.  This wasn't our favorite run, though.  It was a lot more fun to explore the vast pine and birch forests. 

Our first stop for the morning was at Spider Lake.  I'd guess it was 10 acres or so, tiny, really, but pristine and gleaming.  It lay there demurely, like a woman who knows she is beautiful, but wants to pretend she doesn't.  This is one of the beguiling facets of Nature.  She is completely un-self-conscious, the way a child is when they are playing alone. 

Quicktime movie at Spider Lake (760k).

Quinn likes pretty stuff, but always wanted to just keep going.  Kids.

We crossed the Birkebeiner ski trail at one point.  There, we turned around and retraced our tracks.  We stopped at Spider Lake again.  As soon as we left, it clouded over and a snow shower ensued.  We pressed on and it was fun for awhile to ride in the snow.  Soon, though, we gave up and went back to the lodge for a hot tub and a swim.  After a lunch of leftover shrimp and pie in the van, we went back out.  The snow had stopped.  The trail groomer was out, so it was fun to see how they did that.

I love this one because Quinn and I both spotted it at the same time.  I pulled the snowmobile over, shut it down, and he said, "You have got to take a picture of that".  It was the way the snow had fallen on the pine trees.  He and I share an appreciation of certain esthetic qualities.

This is the door to our room.  So fun to pull right up after a long ride and walk right in and head for the hot tub.  The 2nd one is the view from our room looking out at Lake Namakagon.

We rode past dark.  Along this trail there were several old cars acting as snow gauges on private land.  You can see that at least 1' of snow had fallen.