Yesterday I got fed up with the lack of snow around here so I drove an hour or so west and got into the recent snowbelt dump action at Yankee Springs near Hastings.
Now today it’s just dumping snow here in Lansing! Oh well…
I’d never skied at YS. In fact, I haven’t really been there since I was a kid. I think I first learned about XC skiing and animal tracks and even trapping there in 5th Grade when our Okemos class all went for several days of winter camping there in the cabins. I guess they’ve done that ever since. The 5th graders fundraise by selling popcorn. The sad thing is that I hear that 2 years ago the sales stopping being able to raise enough and now this program, which changed my life personally, is dead. Sorry kids!
We need some more background here. I’d personally been kind of a misfit kid, uninterested in school, bad grades, til that winter outing back then. It was a big part of saving me. The instructor was Ron Bacon.
He had taken the initiative to make sure that traditional outdoor skills were taught as part of the fledgling Okemos outdoor rec scene. He did it himself. I think Ron might’ve been the first supervisor of the whole rec program, including the ball/team sports summer stuff. I recall that he took quite a bit of grief about including outdoor sports on equal footing with the ball sports. But the outdoor programs grew and more teachers were recruited to teach other aspects over the years—hunter safety, fly-tying, archery, bb-guns—they did it all. I signed up for quite a bit of it, too. It’s all gone now. (Sorry kids!)
Anyway, I actually did even worse starting out in Middle School, 6th Grade—until one day a couple teachers remembered that I had enjoyed Ron’s winter camp lessons. So I got permission for a few days, during school no less, to skip classes and go out and check traps with Ron. For some reason my schooling greatly improved after that. It’s also when I started running my own traplines.
Thanks, Ron!
So yesterday I finally went back to old Yankee Springs.
I skied their lovely trails for about 3 hours. There wasn’t all that much of a snow base. I hit a lot of rocks on the downhills, but what can ya go. I had brand new skis and boots and I had to try em out! They did great. I had a blast.
I am especially interested in the part of the skiing around the 3-hour mark where I start to fall apart. I’d like to try keeping on going. I did for another half hour. It was interesting. It didn’t help that I’d lost the wax that worked (blue). It didn’t help that I’d been taking sips of white wine with my snacks. I suspect. Oh well, I suppose that when one wants to go long that wine maybe should be skipped. I think I should eat more and drink more water. I’ll test these theories next time…
Another point that just came up in the news: a local skier died out on some nearby trails while skiing on his own. It’s a common thing to ski on your own, but the buddy system has to be safer. Even if you’re off doing your own thing and aren’t together the whole time, going on outings with someone else is safer. Of course safety isn’t the biggest thing and buddies and CPR aren’t always enough and we’re all going sometime and soloness is part of reality, but this is several times now that I’ve heard about fit’n’healthy 50-somethings being taken by surprise. One friend, thankfully, found out about an impending disaster before it happened, in the nick of time—but he’d been feeling fine. I should find out what test he took…
Anyway, I met the entertaining manager of the whole YS facility while he was out making his wilderness rounds of some cabins. You can rent rustic cabins, some with fireplaces, for $10/person/night. It looked like all the cabins were available, however, I’d just recently heard from a relative that they book up a year in advance. The caretaker said I should just email him and he’d set me up, so it doesn’t sound booked up. … Doc@yankeesprings.biz, if you’re interested. Let me put it this way, he’s a fan of skiing, deer jerky, and Jim Harrison. And he has a nifty little vehicle jammed full of stuff—everything you might need to run a huge facility with just one other person while out in the boonies.
