A hint as to the nature of the Oak Park Ski Club came in an e-mail sent out before the club’s recent trip to northern Michigan: “P.S. . . . No confetti, final answer.”
This three-night trip to the club’s lodge in Boyne Falls, within easy driving distance of three major ski resorts, would be over New Year’s, so it was understandable that a confetti question would arise. Still, it was a promising sign that this was a group of people that took festivity seriously.
However, we in our little threesome–me, my 16-year-old daughter, Nina, and her friend Melissa Romeo, 15–were outsiders. Can newcomers just show up and be treated like friends?
Apparently, yes.
Within days, we were privy to the in-jokes. We knew that club mainstays Bill Campbell and Kevin Smith enjoy hooting from the chairlifts like monkeys. We knew that the bedroom with several steps down at its entry was nicknamed the “DUI Challenge.” We knew–well, I knew–that a club member had inadvertently mooned longtime member Rose Bragdon’s mother at Rose’s wedding.
A trip with a family-oriented ski club can make an ideal family vacation. The presence of other kids means that yours could make new friends. You could make a few yourself. And because clubs can get group discounts on everything from lodging to lift tickets and equipment rentals, the prices can be excellent.
To really get to know people, a trip with the Oak Park Ski Club sounded ideal. It is the only Midwest club that owns its own lodge–an unprepossessing building five minutes from Boyne Mountain and a 40-minute drive from Harbor Springs and two other major ski resorts, Boyne Highlands and Nub’s Nob Ski Area. The club bought it in the early 1960s and turned it into a lodge that sleeps 42. There’s nothing like a communal kitchen to foster togetherness.
And there is nothing like a bargain to ease a family’s budget. This trip cost $90 for adults and $45 for kids, and included three nights’ lodging, continental breakfasts, a dinner and two lunch parties in warming huts on the ski slopes, not to mention all the card games and DVDs you could stay up late to play or watch.
The girls and I arrived the night before anyone else, driving past Boyne Mountain–a huge, white mass glowing so brightly into the night that the sky was lit up. The almost exclusively man-made snow on its slopes was the only white stuff in sight.
From the outside, the lodge, on a quiet residential street, looked like an ordinary house except for the ski club’s sign. On the inside, it was built for ski business. A glass case was packed with trophies. A pair of old wooden skis flanked the fireplace. It worked, if you had a quarter (the fireplace was a generator of coins for laundering the bed linens).
There were a few bedrooms on the first floor, ranging from a wood-paneled double to a mini-barracks packed with five bunk beds. Upstairs were more bedrooms, including ours–the lodge’s family room, with a double and a bunk bed.
The lodge is built for group hanging out. The huge wood-paneled living room has a TV and an assortment of mismatched sofas. The large kitchen has banquette seating for a crowd.
Members and their guests come up year-round, either on organized trips or on their own, paying nominal fees by the night. It is a self-service kind of place; there is no staff, so it is open when people have made arrangements to be there.
And it is well-used in summer. Like many ski clubs, the Oak Park Ski Club does more than ski. Warm weather trips are outdoorsy getaways featuring hiking and visits to Mackinac Island; the ferry is an hour’s drive from the lodge.
Maintenance is done by volunteer grunt labor; in preparation for this trip, club members spent eight weekends working on rehabbing the women’s bathroom.
There would be 32 of us on this trip, but early the next morning, there was only David “Head Lizard” Smith, who had arrived late in the night, sitting in the kitchen.
Smith, 27, of East Dundee, is a club kid grown up. His mother, Mary, and stepfather, Kevin, who also live in East Dundee, are veteran club members.
Now Smith, a former Marine who works for an electrical distributor, is the lodge’s president. His unofficial title derives from the nickname club members adopted for themselves–the Lodge Lizards. A toy lizard used to travel with the club until it was “kidnapped” by someone who began sending photos of the lizard in distant locations along with ransom notes.
The Head Lizard was keeping an eye on the weather and conditions, unfortunate subjects on a mild and dry weekend.
“It doesn’t look good,” he sighed. However, when conditions are bad, skiing with a club can be a particularly wise choice.
“We party as much as possible and ski as much as we can,” he said.
The girls and I set out to see how much we could. Ski, that is.
After an abortive attempt to rent equipment at Boyne Mountain–the only boots in my size were wet inside, a dismal prospect–we drove 30 miles to Harbor Springs and the area’s other ski resorts.
We headed for Nub’s Nob, beloved by the club because the family-owned resort has been particularly welcoming, rented our gear, spent an incredible amount of time putting our ski clothes on, walked out Frankenstein-style and looked at the mountain.
It looked like the snow version of a comb-over. The only snow was on the runs. The woods and the rest of the mountain were bone-dry.
But who cared? We were there to ski, not look.
And the skiing was surprisingly fine.
Sure, Nina referred to the artificial snow as a “frozen water product.” But even she had to concede that it was pretty good to ski on–a little thick-feeling in the 35-degree weather (normal highs are 33 in December and 28 in January), but perfectly enjoyable and a lot more pleasant than the icy sheen I skied on out East. We made ourselves at home on the intermediate-level Dories Bowl, chasing the elusive parallel turn, while Melissa, who had only skied once before, took a lesson.
At the end of her lesson, she was skiing parallel.
We happily joined the traditional desperate push for one last run as the night-skiing lights turned on. Melissa declared her newfound love of the sport, and Nina and I pronounced ourselves converts to skiing in the Midwest.
We drove back, stopping with profound gratitude at the Mudhen Espresso drive-through in Petoskey, which achieved mythic status over our trip when we realized it was the only upscale coffee joint we would find.
Back at the lodge, we made ourselves at home in the kitchen. The guys fiddled with a new stove they had just installed. Bill Campbell stepped outside for a moment, and David Smith locked him out and enjoyed the moment immensely.
At one point the laughter in the room grew so loud that someone by the stove shouted, “Quiet! We have to hear if the gas is on.”
“You’ve basically just joined a big family,” said Rose Bragdon, 36, of Crystal Lake, a member for 15 years.
That’s what it felt like. A trip to the communal women’s bathroom included an encounter with youngsters chanting “Na na na na boo boo” at each other. (The men’s bathroom is communal, too, but there is also a unisex single bathroom.) A little blond girl wandered into our room by mistake in the middle of the night. At bedtime, 7-year-old Katelyn Bragdon, making the rounds of grown-ups with sweet goodnight hugs and kisses, kindly offered one to a newcomer.
To someone with a very small actual family, it felt pretty good.
It was a family of young children. The grade-schoolers were happy to have teenagers in their midst, but Nina and Melissa did not find a peer group, making me glad they had each other.
As for the grown-ups, we talked. The veterans recounted the club’s history. It was started in 1955 by a group of guys from Oak Park who enjoyed skiing, said Bragdon, who was club president during last year’s 50th anniversary festivities. Membership grew so rapidly that the club set a limit of 1,000.
But ski club membership in general has declined. Today, the Oak Park Ski Club has 186 members. “A lot of ski clubs are either combining or quitting,” Bragdon said. “A lot of people own time shares, or they use mileage points [to ski]. And people can go online” to arrange ski trips instead of relying on clubs. Some, too, are reluctant to make commitments as far in advance as club trips require.
Like other ski clubs, the Oak Park Ski Club also organizes trips out West, although only its Midwest activities are open to children. And it has ranged even farther afield, going skiing in Cortina and Innsbruck, biking in Switzerland and hiking in Chile.
Anna Krebs, 44, of Vernon Hills, who had just arrived with her husband and their three sons, brought out an intimidating liquid she had made of 192-proof rectified spirit from her native Poland mixed with lemon and honey. The more adventurous adults did shots, but Bragdon, who had some experience in the matter, demurred.
“I hate to say it, but it tastes like when you throw up,” she confided.
I took a pass.
A Scrabble game broke out. Nina and Melissa stayed up with the grown-ups. Nina eagerly joined the game, which lasted past midnight (and hats off to Keith Krebs, 44, an airline pilot, for “ionize” and “diadem”).
A core of club members was talking in the kitchen when the girls and I went to bed. The Head Lizard pounded on our doors at 7 a.m. to wake us for breakfast. The others were sitting in pretty much the same spots, though their bathrobes suggested that they had slept.
Jeremy LaScola, 36, of Round Lake, who works in computer systems integration, took friendly ribbing when he wandered into the kitchen wearing a dark robe.
“What’s with the Hef look?” remarked John Bragdon, 49, Rose’s husband and a network engineer.
The Hef look was soon replaced by ski gear. We all dressed for the slopes, trooped out and drove in our cars up to Boyne Highlands.
As at the other resorts, the snow was on the slopes and nowhere else. But to our delight, the spring skiing conditions had scared off other skiers. The wait in lift lines, which can be as long as 20 minutes, now ranged from zero to five minutes. Nina, Melissa and I skied a wide beginner’s bowl. Early on, I fell in what skiers would call a partial yard sale–in the course of my tumble one ski fell off– but then got back to pleasant business.
At noon, it was time for brats and beer. The club was holding a hill party at a warming hut at the foot of the high-speed chairlift. Bill Campbell, David Smith and Kevin Smith were standing on the patio, drinking beer and watching skiers barrel down.
“It doesn’t get any better than this,” sighed Kevin Smith, 49, who when he is not skiing decked in his special ski earring–he alternates between a jeweled skull and a scimitar–is a computer programmer.
But it did get better when we headed down toward a different lift, and Campbell and Smith sang a few bars of one of the parody ski songs they make up. This was a paean to mature skiing, with apologies to U2–“With or Without Knees.”
A group of us met at the top of an intermediate run shrouded in fog. Just before we headed down, the advanced skiers having kindly agreed to slow down, Nina passed on a tip Campbell and Smith had given her on the lift up: When you turn, your chest and shoulders should be facing the direction you are going.
And there in the mist, everything became clear.
Something about that advice spoke to me. I began making parallel turn after effortless parallel turn. Now that I wasn’t worrying about what my legs were doing, they were somehow doing what they should have. My new club friends had taught me how to ski better.
After that, it was a whole afternoon of fun, if you don’t count the time we tried to walk across mud in our skis and Nina fell down and couldn’t get up, to the great pleasure of some kids in the lift above her.
Back at the lodge, we sat in the kitchen while Rose Bragdon, who works as a caterer and a home day-care provider, finished making massive amounts of fried chicken, roasted potatoes and vegetables for dinner. We sat and talked, basking in sweet apres-ski weariness and cooking steam.
After dinner, six kids and eight adults settled onto sofas in the living room to watch “The Chronicles of Narnia” on DVD, followed by “I, Robot.” Bill Campbell, wearing his “Manure Occurreth” T-shirt, sat with his wife, Mary, whom he met through the club. Nina and Melissa snuggled together on another couch.
Upstairs, some of the other kids were playing a serious game of hide and seek. In the kitchen, an intense game of canasta was building up steam that ended up lasting until 2 a.m.
A family outing? Yes, and you didn’t even have to bring a family of your own.
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bbrotman@tribune.com
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IF YOU GO
FINDING THE CLUBS
To find a ski club, consult “Midwest Skier,” the annual directory published by the Chicago Metropolitan Ski Council, available free at area ski shops like Viking and at REI, or visit the council’s Web site, www.skicmsc.org. The umbrella organization includes 78 clubs in seven states.
You can get to know a club’s members by attending one of the regular social meetings most clubs hold year-round. Most of the clubs also have activities like biking and camping during the non-ski season.
If the prospect of vacationing with strangers is intimidating, keep in mind that you don’t have to marry the people you meet at a ski club, though plenty of people have. You may make close friends, or you may not. But even if you have nothing more in common with the club’s members than skiing, that, and the opportunity to step outside your usual social circle, can be enough.
The Oak Park Ski Club offers a particularly communal experience because of its lodge. Other ski clubs offer accommodations at motels or commercial lodges.
For more information on the Oak Park Ski Club, visit www.oakparkskiclub.org, or call Rose Bragdon at 815-444-7783. Membership costs $35 a year, but non-members may go on local trips.
To reach the family-oriented Four Winds Ski and Social Club, which has many members in the Itasca/Roselle area, visit www.fourwindsski.org or write the club at P.O. Box 77, Itasca, IL 60143. The club is planning an outing to Nub’s Nob, Mich., for March 1-5 (prices vary) and another trip to Jackson Hole, Wyo., March 25-30 ($715 per person, including air fare, lodging and lift tickets).
The Chicago Friars Ski & Bike Club offers annual family trips to Granite Peak in Wausau, Wis. The Feb. 16-18 trip is filled, but the club expects to offer it again next February. Visit www.chicagofriars.com or call Jill Hronek at 773-761-1492.
–B.B.
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For many clubs, it’s all about being family-friendly
Some ski clubs welcome children, but others do not. In fact, the question of whether to do so has been a thorny one. Club members who have children want to be able to ski with their families, but single members are often hesitant to be surrounded by other people’s children, said Keith Fanta, president of the Chicago Metropolitan Ski Council.
The issue has come up in response to demographic reality, as members who joined as singles have married and had children.
“There’s been a large influx of families since I joined in 1989,” said Edward Solms, president of the Oak Park Ski Club. “It’s no longer a singles club.”
Some clubs designate particular trips as family trips. However, that solution is not foolproof. One of the clubs Fanta belongs to recently offered a family trip, but “all the single people were afraid to sign up for it because they expected to be in a condo with kids. It didn’t get enough signups, so it got cancelled,” he said.
The Oak Park Ski Club welcomes children on its Midwest ski trips and local year-round events like camping. However, it still restricts membership to adults, and its western trips are for adults only.
Other clubs have redefined themselves as family clubs. The Four Winds Ski and Social Club, in the west suburbs, did so about 10 years ago to combat declining membership, and is pleased with the results.
“We’re pretty much thriving,” said club president Robin Paarmann. The club plans trips around spring breaks and school holidays, and includes children through college ages. Its Midwest trips are reasonably priced and popular; there were 110 people registered for the club’s trip this weekend to Granite Peak in Wausau, Wis. The price was $449 for a family of four, including two nights’ lodging, lift tickets and ski rentals. (For more on trips, see If You Go.)
There are members without children, including Paarmann herself, but no tension between the groups. “We all look out for everybody’s kids,” Paarmann said.
When one young man in the club had his Eagle Scout ceremony, some 30 members of the club attended.
More ski clubs are including children, said Fanta, and he thinks doing so is essential for clubs to survive. Ski club membership is in decline, and excluding children can be a deal-breaker. “If the club doesn’t allow [children], people have to choose, and for the most part they’re going to choose the family over the club,” he said.
–Barbara Brotman
