Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their 2nd century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Scott Knudson.

In this 2nd episode, we conclude our look at the Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club.

The ski club supports Finlandia, in that it grooms the trails.

That's kind of the primary support.

Snowjourn, Finlandia, Candlelight ski tour, Black Lake Lopet.

Then in terms of its own sponsorship, the ski club sponsors and runs the Barnalopet Ski Race, which is the last event with the Sunday Ski School, and also have Beginning of the Season Kickoff Ski, also sponsors a Tuesday and Thursday evening Social Ski, again at the Movil Maze.

Just come out and and ski, get warmed in the warming house there, and then kind of the final event that the ski club sponsors is called the Tour de Bemidji, kind of patterned after the big Tour de Ski in Europe, where you ski these different trails, and they ski on all seven (7) of our Bemidji ski trails.

It was the late 70's when the ski club members put in a bid to have the National Ski Championships in Bemidji, and that failed, it didn't go through, but that led to the beginnings, I think, of the Minnesota Finlandia Organization.

Then, a few years into the MN-FIN, they wanted to promote it as a really big event and they got Bill Koch, who had won an Olympic medal, and they got him to come and ski so that was like a big drawing card, he was a hot skier at that time, and that was a way to get people to come and enjoy MN-FIN and meet Bill Koch.

The people who were instrumental in bringing us the MN-FIN Race contacted Governor Rudy Perpich at the time, and then I think he was the one perhaps who contacted the Finnish consulate, and we brought in a Finnish sponsor for our event and it was called MN-FIN and they declared the Minnesota Finlandia as the sister race to the Finlandia Ski Marathon in Finland.

The MN-FIN, Minnesota Finlandia, was a big race, a much bigger race than it is now.

Now, it's maybe at 200 people, but at that time it was maybe 600 to 800 skiers in a year.

It brought people from all over to town, and part of that was because we were part of the Great American Ski Chase, and that brought the elite skiers from around the country.

They had to do a certain number of races in the series, and so they would come to Bemidji and ski our course and ski our race and that attracted other good skiers and gave us a name.

The Minnesota Finlandia started in 1979 and it actually started out as a tourism Economic Development endeavor, and so the charter founders of Finlandia put together the plan for Finlandia, it was unique and that was for the race to be the longest marathon in North America, over 2 days.

Originally, it was a 50 kilometer race, started on the lake in front of Paul and Babe and then it made its way all the way up to Buena Vista, 50 kilometers on Saturday.

Then the next day folks got right back on their skis, started at Buena Vista, and made their way all the way back to BSU.

So it was a HUGE effort back in the original days, hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, including the National Guard, First Responders, lots of feed stations, and the event drew hundreds and hundreds of participants from all over the nation.

Moving from that point on, then there was different distances that Finlandia had and then, most recently in the last number of years, Finlandia has stabilized to having a 50k marathon race and then it has two 25 kilometer events, one is Classic, one is Skate and the other is called Pursuit, which involves skiing half the distance on your classical skis, and the other half on your skate skis.

Skiers there the rave about the beautiful trails and the northern Minnesota charm with the Logging Hall of Fame and that great warm atmosphere there.

Mike Huerbin is the Director of the Minnesota Finlandia.

He's got a really small group of other volunteers who help him with things like registration, but he is the go-to guy for MN-FIN, and he's put in years and years and hours and hours on MN-FIN, so Mike Huerbin is Mr Finlandia.

I was a race director for Finlandia in the mid to later 90's, and when I retired I passed the torch to Mike Huerbin for Race Director and he's been the race director ever since.

So from the late 1990's all the way to President, Mike has been the President of the Finlandia Ski Board and the race director for Finlandia.

My name is Mike Huerbin, and I'm a member of the Bemidji Area Cross Country Ski Club,and the current Executive Director of the Minnesota Finlandia.

I got into cross country skiing in probably 1996.

I was, at the time, working out of Buena Vista ski area as a Ski School instructor and Special Olympics came through, and I ended up helping out with some of their events there and word got out that I was available and somehow got tied in with the Minnesota Finlandia, first as a volunteer, and then a few years later became Executive Director.

My job is basically to make sure everybody's where they need to be and all the supplies are there when they need to be.

We start real early in the morning that Saturday, getting water and food and stuff out to the feed stations and snowmobiling kids out to the various points of entry that they need to be at, and so my job is basically just to make sure that everything runs smoothly; all the way up until the end, where we hand out the awards and we can take a breath.

When the Finlandia first started out, it required hundreds of volunteers because it was a point-to-point race.

It started down in Bemidji at Paul and Babe and went all the way out to Buena Vista one day, and then the second day they skied from Buena Vista all the way back to the BSU campus, into the stadium area there, and it required hundreds of volunteers and medical people and course directors, but over the years it became basically a circular race out at Buena Vista.

Right now, I think we can get by with about 30 to 40 different volunteers.

That includes course stewards, we have three different feed stations, our timing personnel, people that handle the hall of fame food, and starters and other various people around.

The Bemidji ski community is very blessed to have the commitment and the perseverance that Mike has, to keep Finlandia going year after year, so "big hats to to Mike," who wears many many of these Finlandia caps in the different aspects of Finlandia so he's just great, he's just awesome.

The favorite part of directing the Finlandia, probably seeing racers coming through the finish line, because at that point my job is done, I can't do any more, and seeing the smiles on people's faces when they come across the line.

There's a lot of fun parts to it, I mean when we fire the guns and everybody goes out, but I think coming across the finish line is probably my favorite part.

"and we have the start of the Minnesota Finlandia, Home Place Bemidjithon, these are 50k and 25k ski races."

All of our ski events are on trails and they need to be groomed and the ski club does its best, speaking of groomers, to give the best possible trail for the events.

Mark Walters is the trail administrator for the Bemidji Area Cross Country Ski Club.

He is responsible, and takes responsibility, for applying for the grant made funds, he maintains all of our equipment, he doesn't do all the maintenance, but he takes charge of making sure everything's in good working order.

I think in many regards, he is one of the backbone people in the ski club.

He's the trail administrator, he inherited that job from Bob Montebello when Bob retired as trail administrator.

He's also the head high school ski coach, and he's worked at, and currently manages, The Home Place, so in terms of fitting skis, he's very talented at that.

My name is Mark Walters, I've been involved in nordic skiing for the better part of 35 years.

I started a little later, I first came across cross-country skiing as a means to cross terrain.

I was living in southeastern Minnesota, working for a company, and that's kind of what they did in the off season.

The whole aspect of the sport just intrigued me.

I liked the challenge of it, I liked the idea of being outdoors, and carried that enthusiasm with me through many many different ski events.

I was sponsored by a couple different companies, which made life a little easier.

I did your American Birkebeiner, your Mora Vasalopets, and of course, the Bemidji Finlandia event.

When I moved to Bemidji, I came across a core of people that were skiing and some of them were definitely involved in the Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club and that kind of led to some of my basic volunteerism with the ski club.

I'm involved with the DNR and their program called The Great American Ski Pass, which we call the Grant-in-Aid Trail Pass, which is solely the way nordic skiing is funded in the Bemidji area.

Our volunteer hours are recorded, it's something that I do, it's given to our local DNR, it's passed on to the state, and then those funds find their way back to the Bemidji ski club, which allows us to promote, maintain, and and build projects, like the project behind us.

I mean, a huge huge project by the Bemidji Area Ski Club, the Snowmobile Club, volunteers, and donors alike, and the county.

The Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club, through a variety of grants and donations over the years, has developed quite a large fleet of equipment to try to groom.

We keep some equipment off site here, at the movile maze, we keep equipment up at Buena Vista, we keep equipment up at Three Island and then there's a handful of us that actually trailer around to some of the different sites and do grooming on the spot.

Basically, I'm like the trail director for the Buena Vista ski area, which is a 25k trail system out there.

Basically my job is to make sure that the the Buena Vista trail system is accessible for the whole season.

The average number of people that work on any given trail is probably two(2), because most of our sites have a couple sets of equipment at them.

We try to encourage and we work with a couple different people a year to kind of bring them up to speed, when if I can't get to a spot, I can call in someone else to go there and groom.

That in itself is a process, you just can't turn someone loose with $100,000 worth of equipment and go groom.

I didn't know two hoots about it to begin with i learned by the seat of my pants, I suppose, as much as anything.

Having one snowmobile and a wooden drag that we pulled behind to level out the snow, borrowing equipment, Buena Vista - they loaned us rollers, and we put in more grant requests to the Nielsen Foundation and they helped us out a great deal.

We had our problems with grooming, especially on hills, and the snowmobile club had the same problem, going up some of our hills in the cross country trails is a real problem.

Unless you got equipment that pulls easily and can pull heavy equipment it doesn't work very well in some cases.

Our equipment has evolved over the years, I mean, grooming back in the day might have been pulling a bed spring along to smooth out a trail.

We now use a variety of very sophisticated pieces of equipment and the whole preparation process is - first, it has to snow and snow will let you know what you can do to it.

It's not just go out there and smack it down and put a track in.

It's a process, it has to be rolled and packed, it has to set up, kind of like icing on a cake, and then you can actually manipulate it.

You can smooth it out nicely to skate on, or you can set tracks in at the classical ski.

We have rollers, we have compactors, we have a machine that actually puts down the track to skate, or classical ski.

We use fairly large style snowmobiles, they're just bigger, heavier, they don't go very fast, they just pull a lot of weight.

It takes experience, it takes a lot of experience to be a good groomer.

You got to get stuck, you got to get in trouble, you learn from your experiences, and you learn by working with snow.

One of the most important activities that the Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club does is keep the trails open all year round.

Now they're doing summer work; where they're mowing, because if they mow the grass then it'll get a bit a little bit thicker than if they let it get tall and thin, and then in the fall is when we really get after it.

The trail cleanup in the fall is probably the most important part of getting a trail ready for grooming in the winter and after the snow falls.

Trees die, trees get wind blown, and so they drop on the trail.

Sometimes brush and things kind of come in, so the fall time is when the ski club comes out, again on a volunteer basis, to each trail system and does what we call trail clearing.

That involves equipment such as chainsaws, atvs, and mowers that the club employs to make sure they're clear of debris, clear of trees, and so it's ready for the snow.

If a tree has already fallen on the trail, that's not a problem cutting it up and getting it off the trail, but it's this dead tree that's right on the edge of the trail that it's going to blow over in a wind.

The snowfall is going to add to the weight of it and after you're out there grooming and that tree is coming down, then you've got a, no saw along usually, and you can't go forward and you can't turn around very easily so what do you do with that tree?

That's a real headache.

How to set up and work on these trails during the season and during the off season all comes from, right now, just amazing technology.

I mean we are utilizing as much social media as you can imagine to get the word out.

We even have a statewide program that we're involved with called "Ski-wise" and Ski-wise allows you to target certain trails and get a reminder about it on your phone that it was recently groomed.

We rely heavily on the volunteers in the Bemidji area to come out in the off season, especially in the fall.

The better the trails are maintained in the off season, the easier they are for us to groom them during this season.

It's just another branch of the Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club.

Starting on December 1st, that's when the grooming season officially kicks in and us groomers refer to it as an Art and a Science.

The Science part is the steps using the equipment.

The Art is kind of knowing what to do, when to do that, given the different temperature and snow conditions, and kind of one of the mottos of groomers is "Do No Harm," because you can do the wrong thing at the wrong time and totally mess up a ski trail, and we don't want that to happen.

We want to build a base of a trail first.

We want to pack it down, get a good base going, and then as the snow comes, we try to groom that down.

We usually make two passes on the trail system, kind of one-third, one-third, and so what that does is gets us a base.

Then the next step after that, we need to let the trail set up, kind of like concrete, right, when you pour it, it needs to set up and eventually get hard.

We do the same thing with snow, it takes a number of hours for the snow to set up and get hard.

Once that's occurred, then there's two other steps that can occur, one would be dragging the trail.

What that does is, it levels and packs the trail so it'll take the snow from say a higher point and move it to a lower point and end up leveling the trail so it's nice and flat.

We try to make a good track and keep the track out of the woods so that people don't have brush coming in their face all the time.

Getting up early in the morning, going out and grooming, I mean, it's nice to go out early in the morning where it's really quiet and there's not many people out there, but we've been known to groom at 11 - 12 o'clock at night, too.

It's really quiet, but very dark and very scary.

Let's just say we get out and groom as soon as we feasibly can.

I've groomed at 4:00 in the morning, I've groomed at midnight.

A lot of times it's when we can get there, because it's a volunteer-based group.

First they got to dig themselves out of the snow, maybe they have to go to work, then they'll groom.

We try to groom it at least once a week.

We got a lot of open fields and things like that, that things drift in, depends on snowfall too; if we don't get a lot of snowfall and everything is hard packed, we might have to just scratch the surface and go through it one time and it's ski-able again.

My camaraderie with all my helpers, we had such great times going out and working on trails, especially in the fall.

We were stuck in mud many times but my friends had helped over the years, as members of the ski club were so good about it, that's the joy I can recall.

I think a lot of people want to do it, so they know that it's done and it's done well.

There's something to be said about going out and grooming the night before and then being the first one on the course the next day, so a lot of these guys and gals like to groom just for their own personal interest.

The other is just, you know, seeing people, being out there when we're grooming in the daytime, passing people, and talking about upcoming events, or how well the trails are, so there's a lot of personal pride, I think, in grooming.

I think a lot of it too is just the physical recreation of it.

You know, the exercise that you get out of it.

The Ski Pass is unique to Minnesota, it's a system that provides funding for all public ski trails in Minnesota.

It's similar to a fishing or a hunting license, so anybody who's 16 years or older is required to purchase that pass and have that pass on them when they ski on the grant-in-aid trails, so all of the trails in Bemidji are grant-in-aid trails.

When you purchase a ski pass, then that money goes into a dedicated account.

It's managed by the Minnesota DNR, that provides the money for grants, and so each grooming entity, including the Bemidji Ski Club, has a grant amount, and it's from that grant amount that provides the money for the grooming.

That's the primary and the only funding source that the ski club has for the grooming of the trails here in Bemidji.

The ski club is always advocating and educating folks/skiers to purchase the pass.

I can't speak enough for the value of the Minnesota grant-in-aid reimbursement system.

It's a program that was started by skiers and the legislature went along and passed that necessary legislation to allow the Department of Natural Resources to work and develop trails and reimburse different clubs all over the state that wanted to groom and have cross-country ski trails.

It's a wonderful system, it's far better than anything I've seen anywhere else.

With all the development that we've done with ski trails and grooming equipment and now we have two different shelters that the community can use, the ski club has been able to provide the community with another avenue that makes it a very attractive community.

We're one of the top ski trail systems in Minnesota right now, so a lot of people travel to Bemidji specifically for skiing in the winter time, and it's nice that each trail system that we have has dedicated people.

I'm involved with the Buena Vista ski area and Bob Montebello does the city trails and Mark does the high school trail, so it's not like we're being spread all out and we're going here and there, we got dedicated people to each trail system.

The number of trails in the Bemidji area, I think, has almost a statewide impact.

For sure, Bemidji has become almost a destination area, so its impact on the community is financial.

It brings folks up here, not just for events, I mean, people come up here, stay overnight, enjoy cross-country skiing.

I know a lot of people that have moved into this area because they're interested in the trail systems, the biking, the hiking, and the skiing, so I think it's a super draw.

It's promoted as well as we can and we are actually one of the larger kind of grant-in-aid systems in the state of Minnesota.

Well, I think my hope ,and most of the board members hope, is that it continues to be viable and having energy and to provide that opportunity for newer generations to learn the sport, get involved in it.

It's just a matter of reaching out, going online, seeking something to do with the Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club.

I think, once you connect yourself, you're going to find a lot of like-minded people.

If you know a skier, ask them how to get involved.

If you are a skier, go to your local ski shop, get some resources and you can get involved with the club.

Being involved with the club doesn't mean that you're going to have to work every weekend on something, it's just a matter of knowing that the club provides a lot of amenities for you.

You help the club and the club will help you.

I gotta say, that the Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club is an awesome story.

We've been able to maintain all of this for 30 years, and people passing the torch from one to another, and other people picking it up and running even further or faster with it.

It's really been a neat organization to be involved with.

I can't say enough in terms of trying to summarize what I feel about cross-country skiing and my work as a trail administrator.

It's been a joy of my life to really do all this.

I've been retired now almost 30 years and I can't imagine what I would have done in those 30 years that would have been better than what I've done in cross-country skiing.

It's meant a great deal to me personally, physically, emotionally.

I can't think of anything that I would have preferred to do.

I hope that we've got young people around this area that will keep things going, I think we have.

It's been just a wonderful experience, I wouldn't have traded it for anything.

Thank you for watching.

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