Things get a little crazy when spring invades Michigan's northwest lower peninsula

A competitor in the spring Slush Cup competition at
Michigan’s Shanty Creek Resort discovers just how cold March
can be when you haven’t worked up enough speed to stay
out of the water. (Traverse City Convention & Visitors Bureau)

All winter long, the ski hills at Michigan’s Shanty Creek Resort are crowded with earnest, serious skiers trying to get as much use as possible out of their lift tickets.

Until March rolls around. That’s when you start seeing people skiing in halter tops and cutoffs. Ski-jumping over slushy ponds. Racing monster trucks up the hill and racing cardboard pirate ships down. According to Shanty Creek’s Lindsey Southwell, it’s just the way Michiganders cope with March, a month that isn’t really winter and isn’t really spring.

“Spring skiing can get a little weird,” she says. “We’ll be sitting on top of six feet of base, and it’s not going to all melt away because we get some warm sunshiny days, so people just relax and decide to have some fun.”

Shanty Creek has been capitalizing on this what-the-heck attitude for over 40 years; these days the resort’s March calendar is stuffed with outlandish events designed to keep people coming back even after the good powder has disappeared.

The first, on March 5-6, is the celebrated “Slush Cup” – the resort’s most popular winter event --where skiers compete to see you can get up enough speed to make it across a 40-foot pond filled with icy waist-deep water. This bit of insanity draws 50 to 70 contestants and hundreds of spectators even in so-so years, but this spring it’s also the weekend for Shanty Creek’s annual Mardi Gras celebration, so there’ll be lots of other games, parties and music. (And maybe some gumbo to warm those half-frozen pond-skiers.)

This strategy of combining a popular ethnic celebration with spring-fever silliness gets repeated again March 11-13, when the resort pairs its March “Irish Weekend” – remember, St. Patrick’s Day is March 17 – with another of its offbeat promotions: the Cardboard Classic. This downhill race down Schuss Mountain is a free-for-all on homemade sleds; the only rule is that they have to be made entirely out of cardboard, taped or glued.

“It’s amazing to see what people come up with,” says Southwell. “”We’ve had several pirate ships, and last year a team made an entire beer-pong table out of cardboard and rode down on that.”

Traditionally March 19-20 is the last weekend of skiing at Shanty Creek, an benchmark that is always celebrated with a Hawaiian carnival theme. But in the past three years another event has extended the season to the end of the month – in an entirely different way. On March 26-27, skiers give way to truckers in the Schuss Mountain Snow Challenge, a 400-yard uphill race through the snow for off-road trucks and ATVs.

Winter-weary four-wheelers have comer to regard the Snow Challenge as the start of the spring season. It’s a classic side-by-side hill climb race, where anywhere from 80 to 90 vehicles roar their way up the hill for two days. Proceeds from the race are donated to the Disabled American Veterans.

Shanty Creek is a 4,500-acre recreational complex perched above the village of Bellaire, about 30 miles northeast of Traverse City, and is the region’s leading full-service winter resort for skiing, tubing and snowboarding. (Ski Magazine rates it the Midwest’s number-one destination in value, dining, lodging, weather and après ski activities.)

Sprawling across an undulating plateau in Michigan’s Chain of Lakes region, Shanty Creek is actually a complex of three interlocking “villages” -- The Summit, Cedar River, and Schuss -- connected by trail systems and serviced by a reliable shuttle system: Its ski areas feature a 450-foot vertical with 49 runs for every ability level, plus four snowboarding terrain parks and a tubing park. Its other facilities include over 500 rooms, 72 holes of championship golf, a Wellness Spa and over 35,600 square feet of meeting space.

For more information on spring-fever skiing at Shanty Creek, go to their web site at www.shantycreek.com. To learn about other late winter/early spring adventures, activities and attractions in the Traverse City area, contact the Traverse City Convention & Visitors Bureau at 1-800-TRAVERSE or on line at www.TraverseCity.com