Contributing Photographer: Michael Weinstein Our last ride of the week is a ride to Manitowish Waters, WI, where the Little Bohemia Lodge is located. http://littlebohemialodge.com/ I figured we would have lunch there since the food is excellent at the lodge. We took Trail 8 heading west and once again, the trails were stupendous. It's just amazing, every trail perfect. The weather was beautiful, too: sunny and the upper 30's. Gotta love March riding.The ride there ended up being 62 miles of rolling hills and woods and, once again, Trail 8 is one of my favorites. When we arrived at Little Bohemia, we had a bit of a surprise. This isn't the first time I've been skunked by Little Bohemia not being open when I thought they were. According to their website, they are open for lunch ... read more

Contributing Photographer: Michael Weinstein We awoke to a freezing drizzle in Copper Harbor. This is probably the worst condition for riding. The drizzle freezes to the visor of your helmet within seconds and reduces visibility to close to zero. By the time we finished breakfast across the street at the Pines Restaurant, the drizzle changed over to snow, thankfully. It snowed hard after that all morning. We rode back over Brockway Mountain, but it was snowing too hard to see much of anything. We rode down to trail 124 which runs southeast from Phoenix to Gay. I have several fovorite trails in this part of the world and Trail 124 is one of them. The trails that make my favorite list are always scenic and remote with stretches of curves and some straightaways. 124 is all ... read more

Contributing Photographer: Michael Weinstein We planned on making a variation of Dawn's Loop today. We left The Gateway at 9:00 AM and headed west towards Bent's Camp on the Cisco Chain of Lakes. The trail goes over 4 lakes in the chain, marked by orange barrels. We rode the lakes north to the Cisco Bar, then further north to Trail 2 in Michigan. We headed west on Trail 2 to to Trail 1, which we rode south to Presque Isle, WI. We stopped for lunch at the Skyview Lodge in Presque Isle: http://www.skyviewlodge.com/ At this point, we had ridden a bit over 50 miles, and every mile was perfect riding. We couldn't believe how smooth the trails were considering that it is a Monday after the weekend riding. After lunch and the welcome break we headed ... read more

It's been a very slow beginning to the snow season here in the upper Midwest. There have been a couple pretty good snow storms, but they have tracked much further south than the northwoods of Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I usually ride. Southern and central Wisconsin have a large array of well maintained snowmobile trails similar to the northern trails. As a matter of fact, Wisconsin has over 25,000 miles of snowmobile trails, the most of any state in snow country. I rode in Green, LaFayette and Dane counties last week with my friend, Pat. It was good enough that I was more than willing to come back this week with Jan. We're staying at the Americinn in Monroe, just north of the Illinois-Wisconsin state line, north of Freeport, IL. The area ... read more

This trip has gone really well. The weather, which obviously is out of our control, has been fantastic. The planning, which we did control, was very good with one exception. I planned today to be an 8 hour bus tour of Denali National Park. Three years ago, I couldn't fit this into my itinerary and drove into the park with the Suburban to see what I could see. Well, you can only drive private vehicles 16 miles into the park and that doesn't afford you much of a look at the park. My mistake was driven by the faulty memory that it was about 50 miles from Talkeetna to Denali. It's more like 115 miles, which would take about 2-1/2 hours. We had to meet the tour bus at 8:15 AM, so we woke up around ... read more