Late Winter: Traverse City's Silly Season

Traverse City, MI - All winter long, the ski hills at Shanty Creek Resort are crowded with earnest, serious skiers trying to get as much use as possible out of their lift tickets.

Then March rolls around, and suddenly you start seeing people skiing in halter tops and cutoffs. Ski-jumping over slushy ponds. Racing monster trucks up the hill and racing cardboard pirate ships down. According to Shanty Creek's Lindsey Southwell, it's just the way Michiganders cope with this season that isn't really winter but isn't really spring, either.

"Spring skiing can get a little weird," she says. "We'll be sitting on top of six feet of base, and it's not going to all melt away just because we get some warm sunshiny days, so people just relax and decide to have some fun."

That's true throughout the Traverse City area, an outdoorsy Lake Michigan coastal town where every season features its own menu of outdoor pursuits, each with its passionate army of adherents. At the first decent thaw, the ski racks start coming off the cars and the parkas are replaced by tank tops and Parrothead shirts - even though everybody knows the temperature is going to plummet again.

Located about a half-hour east of Traverse City, Shanty Creek has been capitalizing on this what-the-heck attitude for over 40 years. Its winter/spring calendar is stuffed with outlandish events designed to keep people coming back even after the good powder has disappeared.

The first, on March 5, is the celebrated Slush Cup - the resort's most popular winter event --where skiers compete to see if they can get up enough speed to make it across a 40-foot pond filled with icy waist-deep water. This bit of insanity draws 50 to 70 contestants and hundreds of spectators -- even in years when there isn't much else going on.

"It's amazing to see what people come up with," says Southwell. ""We've had several pirate ships. One year somebody made an entire beer-pong table out of cardboard and rode down on that."

By April, the resort has abandoned all hope of prolonging its ski season, so the hill at Schuss Mountain is given over to truckers instead. The Schuss Mountain Snow Challenge, on April 2-3, is a series of 400-yard off-road truck and ATV races up the snowy hill. It's a classic side-by-side hill climb race, where anywhere from 80 to 90 vehicles roar their way up the hill for two days.

Nor is this tomfoolery confined to a single resort. Similar shenanigans seem to break out spontaneously across the region as Northern Michigan's inhabitants devise their own rites of not-quite-spring to celebrate the coming end of winter.

For the past 10 years, for instance, snowshoers have gathered in early March at Traverse City's Timber Ridge Resort for a combined snowshoe hike and craft beer appreciation event called Suds & Snow. Over the years, the event - held this year on March 5 -- has accumulated food trucks, live bands and more than a dozen local microbreweries, wineries and cider houses, and is now heralded as "Northern Michigan's premier Party in the Woods." Purists point out that there's still a half-mile snowshoe hike to be had, although it's optional.

Not all the zaniness takes place outdoors, either. The Traverse City Winter Comedy Arts Festival, which used to be held in February, has been moved to early April - but it's still calling itself the Winter Comedy Festival because... well, it's comedy, right? Set for April 8-9, it'll include stand-up comedians, comic films and other fun all clustered around the theatres, shops and restaurants of downtown Traverse City.

To learn about other late winter/early spring adventures, activities and attractions in the Traverse City area, contact Traverse City Tourism at www.TraverseCity.com.