49 FALL 2020 ISSUE 01 / VOL . 02 SNOWGOER . COM
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“ Dude , let ’ s pull together a meeting and build something cool for future sledders : It ’ ll be me , you , your daughter Chione ( goddess of snow ) and that new guy from the landscaping department . Bring donuts .”
The end result is a rugged canvas with more than 16,000 square miles of land carved by 12,000 miles of streams , decorated with 4,300 inland lands and more than 85 percent covered by forests . The ruggedness of the terrain is reflected in its more than 300 waterfalls . In that land , the hard-working grassroots snowmobile workers , their partners at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and a few felons ( more on that in a bit ) painted in more than 3,000 miles of snowmobile trails using their own hard work and , in some cases , some logging and mining paths left by earlier settlers .
To tell this story of snowmobiling in the U . P ., we turned to three longtime U . P . snowmobilers who have helped put in , groom and maintain the trail network , accumulated tens of thousands of miles riding in their areas and have led hundreds of riders on snowmobiling adventures .
The men – Richard Krupp in the west , Don Reed in the center and John Griffin in the east – were chosen due to their history and knowledge of specific geographic regions . In each case , we asked them to plan two specific day trips on which they would lead snowmobiling newcomers to the U . P .
During school , when the subject turned to Greek mythology , we could usually be found in the back of the room doodling pictures of snowmobiles on the back of a notebook . When it came to the Greeks , we learned the names of a couple key players because they were all-powerful ( like Zeus ) or because their names had appeared in pop culture ( like Poseidon from “ The Poseidon Adventure ”) but we generally never bought into that crap . It just seemed so dumb and frivolous .
Looking at Michigan ’ s Upper Peninsula , however , it almost seems like some forwardthinking , mythical group of gods planned for our sport ’ s arrival when it was laid out .
How else could one explain an area that is so absolutely perfect for snowmobiling ? Deep snow is virtually guaranteed every year , thanks to surrounding Great Lakes . Fascinating riding is created by that snow and the rugged terrain . And , quite frankly , the U . P .’ s out-of-the-way nature and harsh climate have kept it relatively unpopulated , leaving huge swaths of publicly owned national and state forests , plus timberland owned by big companies generous enough to share their property with us .
That combination of features can ’ t just happen , right ? It ’ s as if Zeus ( god of the sky , thunder and lightning ) got together with Boreas ( god of the north wind ) and said ,