Boyne Mountain — When people tell you they love to spend time “Up North” they mean they like to come up in the summer. They like to take a drive up into the vast northern woods when the sun is high. They like to hit the beach, get a sunburn, relax on a hammock in the late afternoon, get away from the stinking concrete of Metro Detroit (sorry guys), and drink too many White Claws on a pontoon boat while a light breeze rolls over the waves.
That’s okay, we love our summer tourists, kind of. Well, actually, not really, but we understand them. Who wouldn’t want to come Up North when it’s so obviously heaven on earth from June 1 to September 1? Only a fool!
Going Up North on the Fourth of the July is the obvious choice, but what about the Fourth of February?
Why, you may ask, would you come Up North when the roads are terrible, the temperatures are bone-chilling, the world is white with ice, the visibility is non-existent due to perpetual whiteouts, the sky is eternally cobalt, and the sun hides for weeks at a time?
Well, first of all, it’s quiet. It’s not like the summer when every Airbnb on Little Traverse Bay is booked solid with tourists. There isn’t really that much traffic, or any traffic at all in the middle of the week. You never have a hard time getting a table at a restaurant. You’re never jammed up in the grocery store. You never really have to wait for anything. It feels like the world is operating at minimum capacity.
You also get to feel more powerful than the fair-weather weaklings who only venture up here when it’s warm. One of the benefits of being an Up North resident is a light feeling of superiority based on the fact that you stay all year. When someone says they have a cottage but leave in the winter we are unimpressed. When someone says they have lived up north year-round for the past five years, we give them respect. If you visit the deep north in the middle of winter you won’t get the full respect, but you get a little slice of it, and you get to lord it over your weakling friends who only come to Torch Lake so they can fry up like a lobster in August.
But most important, it’s beautiful. Yes, the winter here is harsh, but there is a beauty in the desolation. In the sky that’s full of steel clouds. In the silence of the falling snow that never seems to stop. In the burning sun setting over a frozen Lake Michigan. In the warm house surrounded by dark pines, 2 feet of snow, and not a single bar of cell phone service. In the feeling that you are far away and alone, and that the world that surrounds your little cocoon of coziness wants to kill you with wind and ice. It’s oddly beautiful.
Beauty is found in friction. Take the idea of tension and release in music. The chord that makes you wince which then resolves to the one which makes you sigh. This same beauty is hidden in the deep north in the deep winter. In that sun on the ice, the fire inside, and the feeling of the -3 degree windchill on the 2 inches of exposed skin around your nose as you sail down the icy ramp of a sledding hill or a ski slope.
There might be no better, or no more luxurious, example of this kind of juxtaposition of extremes, than the heated pools at Boyne Mountain. To swim outside like it is July, surrounded by mounds of snow, gazing up toward skiers careening down the slopes, and feel the freezing air hovering above your exposed skin under the warm aquamarine water is an ice cold glass of lemonade after mowing the yard in August, but in reverse.
Being in these heated pools is peculiar and sublime. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the exact sensation anywhere else. It’s so pleasant and luxurious under the water, but the moment you emerge it feels as if you are about to turn into an ice cube. Diving under the water, floating around under the black night sky, my wet hair exposed in the freezing temperatures, the follicles slowly began to feel as if they were about to crack in the cold. Every few minutes I would dip my head under the warm water, soaking my hair, beginning the process again. The heated pools at Boyne are a pure manifestation of the frictions and beauties of up north in the winter.
And there is also a beauty, or something thought-provoking, in the juxtaposition of the natural world and the modern technological one. The central heating of the warm home in the cold, the ability to plow forward through the snow at 80 miles an hour in an SUV, the aquamarine pools of warm water in the deep winter made possible by incredible modern processes.
Up North in the summer is about joy. Everything is as it should be. When the living is easy, as the old tune goes. Up North in the winter is a philosophical time. Beauty in the friction. Whether you are skiing, ice fishing, hiking, or sitting by the window with a cup of coffee watching the snow fall: It’s a time of thought-provoking reflection.
We live here in a harsh world that wants to kill us, while retaining and maintaining our own warm inner worlds. On the edge of a knife, or the edge of a pool. This is the meaning of Up North in the winter, and it’s a lesson you can only learn if you come.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X @NecktieSalvage.
