The American Birkebeiner at 50

 

“You’re skiing along, and you look up at the green of the pines and look down and see golden tamarack needles peeking out of the Wisconsin snow, and you find yourself gliding along thinking, ‘my gosh, how lucky can one guy get…and Go Packers too!” – Grandpa Theyerl, Wisconsinite, Birchlegger.

The American Birkebeiner turns 50 years old this weekend. And although it didn’t ask for it, I’m doing some reflection on its behalf.

At 26 years old, I’ve only been around for half of the history of the “Birkie.” I was born and raised in Wisconsin. Never knew it without the Birkie. I was also born into a family whose name has appeared in the Birch Scroll for 45 of the Birkie’s 50 years. Somewhere out there amongst those forested knolls, the Birkie became intwined in my family tree. The quintessential American ski race, and my quintessential family experience.

And why not? The yearly ritual spending a day skiing 50 kilometers from Cable to Hayward has thrown muskie-sized ripples into our lives every other day of the year. Slowly, year-over-year, it’s plotted the course of my family’s collective life over generations. And though the magnitude may vary, the experience is typical. The Birkie is all about the ties that bind: a physical exercise with ontological overtones.

There are two kinds of dreams: aspirational and retrospective—the Birkie has been both. The aspirational dream is when you look into the future and decide what you want to see there. That was Birkie dream of Tony Wise, the ebullient Northwoods businessman who planned to give his hometown an economic engine, and a way to spin a mythology out of snow, pines, and skinny skis.

The other type of the dream is the one you find in retrospect; the momentary circumstances and connections that point towards something that feels like home. That’s been my Birkie dream. I’ve had a lot of great skis in my life, but the best great skis have all been on the Birkie trail. I’ve had a lot of good fortune in my life—making a living in this sport, growing up among the Northwoods of Wisconsin, my parents meeting and starting a family—but so much of that luck began with my Grandpa signing up for the American Birkebeiner 45 years ago.

Tony Wise, Telemark, and the Birkie Idea

The Wisconsin Northwoods are a vast region. Endless pines, countless lakes, and the frigid omnipresence of Lake Superior. They beckon every human soul to dream outstretched dreams. The lucky few that are comfortable dancing in their low, endless expanses earn a typically understated moniker, a character.

Tony Wise was a character. “The brains, brawn, inspiration, energy source, and grand imagination behind [Telemark], a bulky excitable fellow who talks with the chattering speed of a machine gun and apparently thinks the same way,” as a profile on Wise in Ski Magazine put it in 1977.

Wise built his Telemark Resort while living in the same Hayward tar-paper shack in which he’d lived his entire life. His 1995 obituary in the Star Trib (The Minneapolis Star Tribune) concluded that Wise “built Telemark from a dream, and it did what he said it would do. It brought life and vibrancy and entertainment stars and international athletes and development to what had been a depressed area of Wisconsin.” At the same time, the lede on the same article also declared “Wise’s bank account showed $0.00 when he died Thursday.” Tony Wise, in life, emptied the tank.

He was a born during the lean years after the Wisconsin timber boom went bust. Went off to war as young man, a tank commander during World War II. During the waning days of the War, he was introduced to Alpine skiing in the Bavarian Alps, and decided he’d bring it all back home.

Wise founded Telemark Ski Resort in Cable, Wisconsin on a 300-foot vertical run with a nothing more than a surplus Jeep engine. The resort rounded out the fishing-summer-hunting tourism economy underfoot in the Northwoods after the War, providing year-round tourism dollars and jobs to an entire community.

Things hummed along for some thirty years, before Wise could see the writing on the wall. He had just built his Telemark Lodge in 1973, but could also see the limitations of what he was working with in Wisconsin for Downhill skiing. Airfare to the American West—where old mining towns had took on second lives as ski resorts by simply putting up a lift on the nearest mountain with a 3,000 foot run—was beginning to become feasible for the middle-class. Wise started to look to other options.

The dense thickets of the Northwoods mask an endlessly undulating set of kettles and moraines, left from the last retreat of the Wisconsin glaciation 10,000 years ago. A cross-country ski race would help bring people in on the secret; in 1973, Wise stitched together a path of snowmobile trails, old logging cuts, and hunting footpaths from the Lumberjack Bowl in Hayward to the base area of the Telemark Lodge in Hayward: 55 kilometers. For a name, he leaned into the Norwegian heritage present in the area—and his own myth making at “Telemark”—taking the legendary story of the Birkebeiners from the Norwegians, and dubbing his event the American Birkebeiner.

The first running of the American Birkebeiner took place on February 24, 1973. 57 racers competing across two events. Thirty-four men and one woman, Jacque Lindskoog, completed the entire 50 kilometer course. Eric Ersson, a Swedish skier Wise had enlisted to add to the Scandinavian heritage aspect (he was doing this a lot in the early years), beat out the legendary Swedish-American ski coach Sven Wiik. Another nineteen competitors completed a half-distance course that was won by Hayward local Carol Duffy. Starting in the mid-way outpost of Seeley, this proto-event would become the Korteloppet, the Birkie’s half-distance cousin.

Humble beginnings, but the architecture for what the Birkie is today was all there in its inaugural year. The point-to-point course through the county forests of both Sawyer County and Bayfield County. The name. The perfectly perched late February date making the Birkie the last true gasp of winter before hopes of spring could start to bubble forth.

The People’s Race

The most important aspect of Wise’s first Birkie was that it cut a wide swatch through cross-country skiing. In 1973, it didn’t take many people to represent the whole of the American ski community. In truth, the sport was probably in its lowest moment of the last century in the United States. The grand wooden ski jumps (the more popular form of nordic skiing at the time) which had been the preferred form of Midwestern after-church Sunday entertainment before the Minnesota Vikings started playing football were starting to rot and be torn down. From Chester Bowl in Duluth to Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis. Numbers in the Minnesota High School Ski League, long the greatest holder of young ski talent in the country, were diminishing. American skiing was three years away from its competitive high-water mark for the next 50 years with Bill Koch’s 1976 Olympic medal at the Innsbruck games. But Koch came from a separate, more-focused, tradition of cross-country skiing that had taken shape in the prep schools and liberal art colleges of New England. The more populist tradition of nordic skiing in America—having started out among the Scandinavian diaspora with miners, farmers, and lumberjacks—was already fading out.

The group that started that first Birkie—the now-famous red-bib-wearing “Founders”—turned around the popular participation in cross-country skiing. The ski community which exists today is the ski community they kindled back in the Lumberjack Bowl. The Birkie revolution was a quiet one, and one inspired by even more humble actors. Most were local Wisconsinites and Minnesotans who had found their way to cross-country skiing by accident or by heritage.

There was Ernie St. Germaine, a local Wisconsin schoolteacher and tribal chief for the Lac du Flambeau band of the Ojibwe, that as of writing is the only person to have completed every edition of the American Birkebeiner. St. Germaine ought to—and I believe would prefer to—always have his childhood Dave Langraff accompany him in his telling of how they did the first event on a whim, and then saw it change their lives for good. For his part, Dave Langraff was as radiant a skier as you’d ever find out on a trail. He was another teacher, operating out of the “Jump Rope Capital of the World,” of Bloomer, Wisconsin. My few memories of him are all exuded joy, and all on skis. There’s an unadulterated patch of Birkie fever found on the Hickory Ridge trails Langraff helped cut outside Bloomer, where there’s “more lakes than kilometers to ski!” Every sharp jutting corner and fast-running downhill re-asserts a love that resonates down the years.

Other founders include John Kotar, who hung up the skis a decade ago and since has helped shepherd the Birkie into a new era of growth as a member of its Board of Directors. There was also Karl Andresen, a Geography Professor in my hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin who founded the Eau Claire Ski Striders. In my youth, he played a kind of Midwestern Falstaff for all that was good about the sport of nordic skiing, regaling us with tales of this Birkie race and the little features of it that had taken on their own mythos: the Power Lines, the Fire Tower, “Double-OO.”

These “Founders” glowed with a quiet, unassuming fire through the Midwestern ski community. Close in their tracks would be others who got in on the action as quick as they could. Through Minnesota Youth Ski League clubs and high school teams they’d coach and give back to sport which had sent them out into the great Wisconsin woods. Most of us who learned to ski in the Midwest in the last 50 years have someone who did the Birkie to thank for setting us down on tracks. Through a child’s eye, the accolade of “Birkie” skier was everything. In my mind’s eye now, I recognize the little gleam in our local ski coaches eyes when they’d talk about the race that had sparked their own love for the sport. With the Birkie spirit coursing through the community, we were all operating from a level plane.

A Family Tale

The Birkie has remained true to its intention: adventure, first and foremost. Growing from 57 racers, the legions number in the hundreds of thousands on participants who have discovered qualities within themselves by venturing out there on skis. Things caught on quick. By the fourth Birkie in 1977—the one my Grandfather first hopped in—the Birkie field had grown from 57 to 2,000 racers.

Twenty years in, the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation (ABSF), noticed that there was a unique staying power to the Birkie. Through the massive changes in a human life that come about over decades, A growing group was had been back year-after-year. The observation resulted in the establishment of the Birchleggers club. Membership requirement: twenty Birkie’s completed. Reward: a famous Purple bib (then gold, after 30 Birkies, then red, after 35).

The Birchleggers now number in the hundreds. Within their ranks, there are just as many Birkie stories, and many of them key in on one particular metaphysical quality. Though the Birkie race course has remained a relative constant for them, the lived experiences they bring to the race each year, and the experiences lived during the race each year, continue to offer something close to constant discovery.

My father—Ted Theyerl—who is 34 Birkies in at the time of this writing, signed up for his first Birkie as soon as he turned 18 in 1986. He earned an elite wave placement based off placing second in the Korteloppet the previous year. He completed the race that year skating, but still had kick wax underfoot because “no one could believe you could climb without it!” From there, through college, and well into his days as the fittest coach on my little league baseball roster, he’d consistently place in the top two-hundred, earning a bid in the Birkie’s elite wave the next year.

One year in the early 1990s, he was out early-season training near his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, fell, and fractured his leg. In need of rehabilitation to keep his Birkie total on track, he turned to a Physical Therapist name Denise. They hit it off, got married, and here I am, their son, recounting the story.

When Dad finally left the elite wave, it was in another crash. In 2010, my mother and I were mingling in the crowd at Angler’s Pub after my first Korteloppet, when the wave of Birchlegger elite wave finishers that my Dad usually finished with started to filter into the scene telling us he had taken a hard fall. Dad had separated his shoulder near the unofficial half-way point at County “OO” in Seeley.” He stopped off at the aid station, discarded a broken pole, took up a sling, and proceeded to skate towards Hayward. “I remember thinking, well, this will be different,” he recounted. “I don’t have to sprint across the Lake now!”

Eventually, we found him wandering on Main St. in Hayward among the thousands of people he’d smiled, greeted, and had conversations with throughout his long, slow, one-pole skate to Hayward. He remembers that as one of his most enjoyable Cable-Hayward treks, where the kilometers lay long and thick with connections to other skiers behind him. Dad eventually slipped out of the elite wave permanently, and then took up skiing with my brother, or sister, as they started to forge their own Birkie journeys.

Admittedly, I haven’t pulled my weight in the family Birkie legacy, having spent most of my adult life far-flung from the Northwoods of Wisconsin and with only two American Birkebeiner finishers to my name. There’s irony in that: because of the Birkie, I’m now in a spot where I can’t do the Birkie, and will be spending this year’s Birkie Saturday at a wax bench in Colorado coaching the Crested Butte Nordic Team. It’s a circumstance I count as a blessing, not unlike the example of my aunt, Tracey Cote (nee Theyerl), who left the Birkie twenty-six years ago to take up the helm of the Colby College Ski Team. She’s been spending the last weekend in February on the collegiate carnival circuit ever since. Time and distance haven’t diminished my love of a race that has directed where I’ve gone and who I’ve known in life.

Gathering Around for Winter Vespers

I can still evoke the feeling I had during my first Korteloppet when I turned the corner three kilometers into the race. I saw the Power Lines stretching out before me, laden with zig-zagging masses of skiers and supporters. I felt like I’d arrived at a familiar haunt. I’d spent the first 13 years of my life envisioning what that moment would be like. In reaching it, I reached that rare state where you truly can appreciate the miracle of every lived moment. I’ve been in a coasting of sorts ever since that moment.

The other instance I hold onto from that first experience was one of inheritance. During that first Korte, I was biding my time in the line up one of the first big hills when a man wearing one of the red “Spirit of 35” Birkie bibs pulled up next to me, and shouted, “Ben!” I looked over, and got an introduction, “I’m Jim O’Connell, your Grandpa and I used to be out here together,” and in an instant, the Birkie Trail seemed to stretch before me to a different, looser, sense of time construed not around some linear march through life, but instead by the connections you make in it.

I choose to believe there’s a reason there have been so-many repeat Birkie winners. There must be a logic behind why Caitlin Gregg, Matt Liebsch, David Norris, Alayna Sonneysn and those others who come back to compete for the top step of the Birkie podium every year. I choose to believe it’s probably along the same lines as those who are pulling over to breathe in the pines, and thank the volunteers, and make their way to Hayward from Wave 8, and 9 and 10.

The real power of the Birkie is in repeating the ritual. Every February, a whole sport heads to one neck of the woods. Popping through old sawmill towns, gaining that first view of the Namekogan river on the drive to Hayward, the bridge welcoming you into Birkie-land which has always read “SPOONER BLOWS” in your rearview mirror. The “Viking Warriors” in full regalia still make their way to Hayward. The Sawmill Saloon in Seeley with its Birkie Bash, and seeing snowmobilers and Birkie champions, alike, gain equal purchase over a fish fry and a good ol’ can of Leinie’s O.’

Through the many seasons of our lives, the Birkie has become communion: a gathering around for each winter’s vespers. In skiing that fifty kilometers, we’re reminded that the winter can be warm. It can make you shed a few layers. The harsh cold is no match for the warmth that human souls, pointed together in the same direction, can provide. And that, burning brightly, is the source of “Birkie Fever.”

The Birkie: a dream dreamed, a dream realized, and a dream that skis on.