Recap: A Wintry Weekend in the Woods

Outdoor Book Club at Wilderness State Park, discussing winter-related reads.

“Girl!!! No!!! Why would you do that on purpose?!”--a response from one of my girlfriends when I described what I had planned for the weekend.

Luckily, there were other girlfriends who thought it was a fine idea to pull sleds for two miles through a snowy forest to arrive at a log cabin in the woods with nothing but a wood stove, bunk beds, and an outhouse as creature comforts. As it turned out, it was a perfect weekend.

We arrived at Wilderness State Park and picked up the cabin key from the rangers’ station around 4:00, making the most of the remaining daylight to hike to the cabin. There was just enough snow to help our sleds pull gently down the Nebo trail, and within the hour, we arrived. Upon unlocking the door, we were thrilled to discover the rangers had already fired up the wood stove, so the cabin was not quite toasty, but much more comfortable than the 20-degree temperature outside (which hadn’t seemed bad when we were pulling the sleds–that’s quite a workout!)

After stoking the fire and hanging up a rechargeable lantern, we began to unpack our gear, fluffing up sleeping bags on our bunks, finding our stoves for dinner, and caching our water bladders on the countertop. We changed out of our sweaty hiking gear into warm dry sleeping attire, and cooked our dinners. All of us had by coincidence brought dehydrated lasagna. As this was an Outdoor Book Club meeting, we shared our latest good reads, in addition to catching up on life in general, and planning Saturday’s hiking route. Before we knew it, it was hiker midnight and time for bed. We all read in bed for a while before powering down Kindles or turning off headlamps, and braving the cold and wind for one more run to the privy before going to sleep.

The downside of a wood stove is that it eventually burns all the wood in it. Every couple of hours my nose would start to get cold, which was a signal that all the wood had burned down, and it was time to throw on a few logs and get it going again. As I counted the number of times this happened during the night, and how many logs were piled inside the cabin, I began to dream in arithmetic, dividing the number of logs we had by the number of hours we were likely to spend in the cabin over the next three days. Luckily, in the morning we discovered the woodshed in the back was unlocked, so we could replenish the supply.

As the sun began to rise, we lazily lay in bed, reading, until the call of coffee (and the privy) was too much. After coffee and oatmeal, and a little daypack prep, we were ready to explore the park. We continued along the Nebo trail, turning off to visit O’Neill Lake, where Jane and I had camped on our first backpacking trip together years ago. It looked a bit different in icy January than it had in June! As we continued along the trail, we noticed the beavers had been busy, taking out some formidably large trees.

While the wind howled in the tree tops, we were generally protected by the surrounding forest, and hiked a little over 11 miles for the day. Upon returning to the cabin, we loaded up the woodstove, made hot cocoa, and chowed down on the lunch provisions that we had opted not to eat on trail because it had been too cold to stop moving for long. While we sipped our cocoa, Jane read to us, first a section from George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia, in which he describes an amazing display of the aurora borealis, and second from Henry David Thoreau’s A Winter Walk and Other Essays on Walking. I enjoyed the Thoreau excerpt so much that I read the rest of the collection over the course of the weekend, as Jane had brought that in paperback, and I plan to read the Kennan book as well. We discussed the literature of arctic exploration, and I felt a tiny bit of kinship with those mad explorers as I ventured back out into the cold to look for stars. After an evening of playing rummy, and more reading, we once again took to our slumber, planning on another lazy morning.

The following day, we braved the wind for a little beach time, which lasted maybe 10 minutes before we opted to head for the woods. It was just so cold! We were much more comfortable in the forest, as we made our way down the Red Pine trail, to the Nebo trail, and then headed further east, hoping that a trail labeled “closed due to flooding” might be passable in the winter. Along the way, we encountered two other hikers, the first we had seen all weekend. When I asked them about the closed trail, the wife commented that it was closed, even the sign had been taken down, and her husband jokingly corrected her, explaining it was actually porcupines who had taken the sign down. We decided to continue on, but when we arrived, the trail looked long-neglected, and we decided that risking wet feet and an unmaintained trail in the waning afternoon light was probably not smart. We hiked back to the cabin, where we again stoked the fire, brewed up cocoa, and read aloud. This time, I was the reader, choosing a section from Amy Klco’s It Takes a Forest, in which a sapling learns about the joys and hardships of winter. Afterward, I taught Nikki and Jane to play Golf, which is a card game my family loves, and Jane soundly defeated us.

The following morning, we mused about future adventures as we gathered our gear up, and I made a few adjustments to my pulk to keep it from running into me on the down hills. We’d received a little more snow, so the gliding would be smoother for our sleds, and our loads were lighter with less water and food. The trip back to the car always seems to fly by on the last day of a trip, and before long, we were loading up our cars and dropping off our cabin key. After a lunch of pasties in Mackinaw City (in true Michigan fashion) we went our separate ways, looking forward to our next adventures together.