Bohemian Ski City

Some time last Monday, I realized that this was the weekend I’d set aside to take a train to Milwaukee, where my friend Ben would pick me up to drive several hours north to Michigan to go skiing at Mt. Bohemia.

Mt. Bohemia is a self-styled “legendary” ski hill in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that boasts enormous quantities of lake-effect snow and gladed skiing typically unavailable outside the West. The website offers extremely little information about amenities and lodging, and even less about the actual skiing, beyond tallies of the number of sections (7), skiable acres (625), and number of lifts (2). The sophistication of the website’s design rivals that of the likely defunct pets.com, and the paucity of content rivals that of a stealth stage VC fund intending to invest in stealth-stage startups.

Mt. Bohemia is not the farthest point north in Michigan, that’s actually Copper Harbor, an unincorporated community of 108 people just across the sub-peninsula from Mt. Bohemia. The mountain itself sits along the frozen shores of Lac La Belle, an inlet from Lake Superior on the southern side a finger that sticks out from the UP. I’m not sure what is or isn't in Copper Harbor, but some people in one of the yurts did mention going to a bar there Saturday evening.

In terms of amenities, Bohemians enjoy lodging in either the hostel rooms underneath the one building on the mountain’s premises that’s an actual building, a private yurt with up to a dozen beds, or an inn and cabins five minutes down the road. Guests wishing to walk from the inn up to the base, where the only food and drink within 30 minutes seems to be, must climb a rare form of hill that looks even steeper on the way down. On the way up, guests must tread carefully lest they slip down and avoid all progress.

That one building houses a few comfortable couches and chairs, the more expensive of the two bars, where they sell scotches that have names and ages, as well as three doors. One for the men’s room, one for the women’s room, and one for the sauna, which revelers mistake for one of the restrooms an estimated once per season. That happened before we showed up on Friday night.

Through a sequence of marginally inconvenient circumstances, we arrived just about 1:53AM on Saturday morning, or Friday night, depending who you ask. This arose because we ate a little too leisurely at a Culver’s outside of Green Bay. Green Bay, for the record, is a city (town?) I thought would show some nice quirks due to its whimsical name and fan-owned football team, but from I-43, it really seems like a vast factoryscape à la Gary, Indiana. Indeed, the abruptness with which Lambeau Field rises out of what seems to be a huge collection of oil drums and pipes informs just how important this team must be to everybody around there.

Later, we twice missed turns on roads with little enough traffic and few enough turnoffs to both allow and require us to back up and try again. With a bit over three hours to go, we discovered that they lacked either the will or the infrastructure to properly salt and plow the roads, so we drove more or less on packed snow from then on. With about 145 miles to go, we stopped to fuel up at a lonely, seemingly shuttered BP station where the only light emanated from the grade selectors on the pumps, and we learned that there’s really no way to steal gas from a pump. It was fortuitous that we stopped, however, because every other station between Green Bay and there and then from then on really did look closed, and no-loopholes closed.

Finally, some 30 miles over the border from Wisconsin into Michigan, we discovered that, as longitudinal lines converge at the North Pole, we had driven due north and entered the eastern timezone, where we lost an hour. Nevertheless, when we called to warn some guy at the mountain, he said no worries, the bar is open until 2. I had a hunch that he would appreciate our hardiness and buy us a beer.

Upon our arrival, we walked into the bar in the only actual wooden building, right next to the hot tub into which persons wearing diapers may not enter. We saw a gentleman asleep on the couch with a ski jacket, no shirt, and his unbuttoned trousers still on, but ready, willing, and able to slip off. The four people standing with beers informed us that it was closed, and we’d better go to the other bar, in one of the yurts.

We checked several of the fourteen yurts, and found Buffy the Bartender in the last place we looked. She had our keys, but she told us that the room was probably unlocked anyway. Some guys from outside Kalamazoo indeed bought us a beer. Their talk focused on how the cops had come by a couple times that evening, much to everybody’s shock.

Their shock, however, seemed more about the fact that the cops bothered simple skiers than my shock, which was about the fact that they had cops around here. I envisioned a world where the bartender had a policeman’s hat, a firefighter helmet, and an old-fashioned doctor head mirror underneath the bar to put on alternatively as she switched roles.

We made it to bed, and Ben threatened to set an 8:45 alarm so that we could make it to breakfast when it opened and to the lifts when they opened at 9:30 in hopes of getting our money’s worth on the $99 season passes we bought on the first Saturday of December, the only day they’re on sale. Fortuitously, he forgot to set an alarm, so we managed to sleep late enough to be the last two people to receive their free breakfasts of two pancakes and two sausage links in one of the yurts at 11:00.

We hit the lift, and we found that the snow and glades did deliver as promised. The only trouble was a couple runs required hike-outs, and a great many runs end abruptly with a sign that says “Danger! Do Not Ski Into Road!” At the end of the latter, skiers sit and wait on the side of the road until a bus comes to pick them up and deposit them back at the main lift. Bohemia had by that point so thoroughly managed our expectations that I mistook something far cheaper than operating a third lift for good service.

A quick break for lunch revealed an inconveniently long line for beer. As I ate my brat in the same yurt from breakfast, it occurred to me how brilliant their use of yurts was. There was simply no reason they ever needed to pay for an actual building in this world where real paying customers expected nothing at all. Constructing and maintaining a building is expensive, but, at yurts.com, the 16-foot Thoreau model sells for $7,280, and the 39.4-foot Darwin model, with galvanized steel supports, sells for $15,015. What a steal!

One of the Kalamazoo fellows Friday evening claimed that they operate the lifts until they turn them off, and they only open them once the line gets long enough. This didn’t seem to be true, as the lift shut off at 5:30 sharply, by which time we had already purchased two coffees with Mozart Liquer and sat outside by the sublimating hot tub. Guests receive a red wristband that they must wear for dinner and for access to the hot tub. Any non-guest caught in the hot tub is subject to either a $25 fine or a civil court proceeding, and a disagreement on this ground evidently was part of the reason for the prior evening’s police visit.

Legend has it that they use extra chemicals for the hot tub, which we opted against entering. The genesis of the “no diapers” rule, or rather the need to explicitly state the rule, remained opaque. Mozart Liquer, for its part, is a 15% abv concoction that’s never seen Austria. It comes in chocolate, white chocolate, and caramel. I have never seen it before, and may never see it gain, but I’m confident the mountain’s proprietors received a great deal when they bought an incomprehensible quantity of the stuff.

The people who own and operate the mountain seem to do so with an eye towards the bargains, potentially out of a desire to pass the savings on to the cult of customers, and potentially out of a genuine desire to offer fantastic skiing in uncomfortable circumstances. Please do look up where this place is on the map.

An example of this behavior is the towels. Not one of the rooms, even the private ones in the inn, comes with a towel. Guests do have the opportunity to buy one of the “spa” towels in between the bumper stickers, the shot glasses, and the cliff bars in the yurt that serves as store, rental center, and canteen line. None of these towels match, but they all cost $5 and come with stickers identifying them as from Kohl’s. When asked for comment, the cashier said “Oh, we go and buy all them at Kohl’s on—what’s that day again?—the Friday after Thanksgiving. They’re 75% off then, that way we can make them cheap for you guys.”

We drove back to our room to recuperate for a bit before returning for dinner and the bar. Dinner turned out to be a genuinely delicious and fairly large pulled pork sandwich, surprisingly solid roast potatoes, and, because nobody is safe from health consciousness, steamed broccoli. For dessert, diners have their choice of flavors of unprofessionally packaged pudding cups produced in another state.

At the bar, we met a snowboarder named Chris who was spending his evenings in the parking lot in a -30º rated sleeping bag. He grew up in Northern Michigan and worked at Vail for one season. This year, he was planning a road trip out to one of the mountains in Montana or Oregon or Washington where Bohemia season passes have reciprocity. We chatted for a while, and then he made paper snowflakes with Lee, the woman who served us dinner and also seems to live in the parking lot. Lee had only given us food after we performed a snow dance for her. They seemed to have a nice time with their crafts project.

Lee mentioned that two people had broken their femurs today. In her experience, the mountain seemed to encounter a disproportionate number of broken femurs, at least as compared to other bones. Clavicles came in second, as Chris attested to three times over. It probably has something to do with the lack of snowcats and grooming, perpetually flat light, and plethora of small jumps.

We spent the rest of our evening with a boisterous group of heavily accented Wiscansin boys. They were living all over but all originally hailed from the Eau Claire area, which made them Minnesota Wild fans. The Wild played the Blackhawks on Saturday evening, and they exchanged several choice words with me about their distaste for Chicago sports. Towards the third period, a guy came in wearing a Chicago flag beanie, asking how many of us were huge Blackhawks fans like him. My new pals responded “Oh boy, you sure are in the wrong bar there buddy. Why don’t you watch out what you’re saying next time, huh?”

By the end of the game, though, they seemed to have lost interest in its outcome and focused instead on asking Buffy to sing “Zombie” by the Cranberries. Buffy did belt out impressive renditions of “Kiss with a Fist” by Florence and the Machine as well as something I’d never heard before. Our goodwill and progress towards musical heaven evaporated, however, when one of the guys wandered a bit too far behind the bar. The irate Buffy cut him off for the rest of the evening and held to it.

After the game, the local news came on. The UP network is an NBC-Fox joint broadcast in a heartening show of collaboration. There was a high school wrestling tournament that weekend, as well as some sort of competitive cheerleading event. The anchors seemed like lovely people, and the weatherman seemed optimistic. The bar never got too crowded, and a fair number of cardboard 30-rack boxes on Sunday morning implied that most people had, in the cost cutting spirit of the place, drank in their yurts.

We arose marginally earlier to get some turns in Sunday, and the place remained fairly empty the whole morning, because I suppose the mountain is extraordinarily far from where anybody lives. Just five and a half hours after leaving, we pulled up to the Milwaukee train station, where I packed up my skis on a rainy street corner like a madman impossibly far from any mountain.

Most people try to keep the secret of Mt. Bohemia under wraps, hoping that this geologically improbable, isolated mountain, impossibly far north, at the end of an anonymous peninsula will remain a hidden treasure. I’m pretty sure you won’t go, but I might be back in March if we can rent an RV.