The Birkie Dedicates New Mt. Telemark, George Hovland Trail

For the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation (the Birkie) it’s been a long time coming.

The dedication ceremony held Saturday for the new projects that encompass the Mt. Telemark Village, the former site of the legendary Telemark Lodge, have been in the works for five years. All together, Mt. Telemark Village is “the biggest thing the American Birkebeiner has ever done.” Its $10.2 million dollar capital campaign, though, doesn’t capture what, for skiing, might just might be priceless. Up in the woods outside of Cable, Wisconsin, the Birkie has been busy figuring out how to commemorate a little glacial knoll that’s played an outsized role in the history of skiing while making it a vital place for more of that history to happen.

The dedication ceremony on Saturday featured two main draws that illustrate that delicate balance at the heart of Mt. Telemark Village. The first was the official dedication of the paved rollerski loop to George Hovland, a name linked to the deep past of skiing in North America. The second was the opening of a new mountain bike trail system sponsored by Wisconsin-based bicycle manufacturer, Trek, building on another of Telemark’s legacies as a key site in the development of the sport of mountain biking. In addition, the on-going, glass-plated construction of a new base lodge promised the realization of a vision that’s been in the works for the Birkie and Telemark the past five years.

Telemark and Tony Wise

Mt. Telemark Village, itself, is a re-birth of a long-lived Midwestern legend. Telemark was set up in 1947 by local entrepreneur Tony Wise. The downhill ski area made all it could of its ~300 ft of vertical descent set upon a glacial erratic. Wise, an ebullient character, seemed to derive inspiration from that terrain, making Telemark a cultural erratic, a place for Governors, Musicians, and Packers (the biggest celebrities on offer in Wisconsin) set in rural northern Wisconsin. He did so unrelentingly, building the giant 200-room Telemark Lodge that was too big for its own good. In the glory days, Telemark was a flame whose influence burned over thousands of miles of Northland. After bankruptcy in the 1980s, the embers of Telemark continued to glow primarily in the American Birkebeiner, Wise’s cross-country ski race from Telemark to Hayward that became the largest in North America.

The Birkie was Telemark’s first foray into cross-country skiing, but the race’s momentum in the 1970s led to the resort playing an outsized role in the development of modern cross-country skiing in the United States, and beyond. The first World Cup race ever was held on a trail system laid out in 1978 by American skiing pioneers John Caldwell, coach Marty Hall, and Olympic medalist Bill Koch.

The legacy of Telemark limped along on its own legend for years following Tony Wise’s bankruptcy and surrender of the property in the 1980s. Numerous owners passed through. Central Cross Country Skiing (CXC) briefly made it a home for its Elite Team in the early 2010s, before Telemark closed for good in 2014. The Lodge sat abandoned for years.

In 2020, the Birkie started to piece together a new vision for the property: Mt. Telemark Village. The Lodge was demolished in 2021, the vision that has played out since is the Birkie’s community-oriented project to honor the whirlwind of history that emanated from the little patch of Wisconsin woods, and make it a site to take a central role, again.

George Hovland Trail

Saturday’s dedication ceremony celebrated the success of the new Birkie venue linked by a number of trails to Telemark.  It also linked the new venue to a giant of Midwestern skiing: George Hovland.

George Hovland’s name looms large in his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, where the 1952 Olympian had a hand in founding nearly all present-day fixtures of Zenith City’s ski scene including Spirit Mountain, Snowflake Nordic Center, and the North Shore In-line marathon.

Hovland’s legacy as a ski pioneer in the wider-Midwest is being celebrated by the Birkie in dedicating its 5 k training loop. A friend of Tony Wise, Hovland competed in every Birkie from 1974 to 2012. In the years prior to his passing in 2021, Hovland was the vital link to a deep, essential past of Midwestern skiing. Hovland took to the sport of skiing as a boy in the 1940s when jumping was nordic’s premier discipline and Chester Bowl in Duluth was still populated by the Scandinavian immigrants who brought the sport to America. He skied his last kilometers after Minnesotan Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall combined to earn the first Olympic gold in US skiing history. The George Hovland Trail will play an active role in developing Midwestern ski racers this summer, with CXC hosting its Developmental Camps, and Team Birkie looking to utilize the resource.

“George was such an amazing man and an influence on our sport,” said Ben Popp, American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation Executive Director. “George loved training and this will forever be a medium to get people training and faster!”

Trek Trails Lay New Lines Down Mt. Telemark

Before snow fills the George Hovland Trail next winter, there will be plenty of treads on trails of another type: biking.

Telemark was the site of some early movement in the sport of mountain biking. As the sport first advanced beyond riding klunkers in the West in the early 1980s, one of the first flat-land homes it found was the Birkie trail at Telemark. The Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival, one of the oldest extant mountain bike races in the country, was dreamed up in 1983 with the proposition, “What if we did a bike race on the American Birkebeiner trail?”

While the Chequamegon was based out of the nearby Lakewoods Resort for most of its formative years, a trail system was quickly developed on the Telemark property, and eventually linked via the CAMBA trail system. For years, the Telemark portion of the CAMBA system stood out as a kind of staid testament to those early days of mountain biking as a sport. The trails cut through the woods between logging roads. In the days before slack frame geometry, 29 inch wheels, and full suspension made riding downhill more joy than hazard, the singletrack was laid out to get from point A to B more so than to get from feature to feature.

In more recent years, Mt. Telemark itself started to look ripe for the new-look crop of mountain bike trails that were being built around the Midwest at places like Spirit Mountain Duluth, MN, or Copper Harbor, MI.

When the Birkie took over the property in 2020, those in the Wisconsin biking community took notice. That included Trek, based in southern Wisconsin, which was willing to provide funding for the development of a trail system that utilized the whole of Mt. Telemark’s terrain and set it up to be a central host for mountain biking in the same way that Telemark had long served for skiing.

An additional grant from nonprofit group One Track Mind set the Trek Trails at Telemark in motion. Now in development, 16 additional miles of trail will eventually play host to training and racing for cross-country, enduro, and downhill racers alike.

Mt. Telemark Village Gets a Base Camp

What’s next? A successor for the old Telemark Lodge. While the Birkie gathered its community together on Saturday, the site of a new building under construction where the legendary lodge once stood seemed an apt harbinger.

The “Base Camp” Community Center still looks erratic against the fields and forests that surround it. But in terms of decadence, Telemark seems to have a matured sense of stature. The three-floor fireplace that once greeted visitors in the lobby of the old Lodge isn’t making a comeback. Emeril Legassi is unlikely to be in this version of Telemark’s kitchen (he was, in fact, in the old one).

This new community center doesn’t include the giant concrete walls that are still visible on site from the old Lodge, but it seems to impart that this version of Telemark, after a half-decade of dreaming, is starting to be set.