Mount Bohemia Is the Ski Area the Midwest Deserves
The improbable Midwest mountain that helped kill the worst version of skiing
Drive to the end
Corn flats. Flyover. Factory towns robbed of factories. Vape shops and GMCs and Jesus and firearms, if interstate billboards are sociological bubblegum cards. The upside maybe football and Chicago, the MJ Bulls, big-name universities, freshwater lakes, cheese, freeways that are actually free, a high tolerance for drinking in public. But nothing special, maybe. Probably.
This is the outsider’s version of the Midwest, but it is also the Midwesterner’s version of the Midwest, which most actual Midwesterners define as the stretch of land from eastern Ohio west to about the Missouri River. Basically the Big 10 Conference pre-Penn State. A fine place to live but nowhere to visit on purpose. The opposite of everyone’s version of New York City.
But Midwest exceptionalism does exist. To reach it, drive north. Far north. Then keep going. Up US 41 or 45 to M-26, until the highways fuse in the wild and snow-socked Keweenaw, a peninsula hanging off a peninsula into the second-largest lake on Earth.
The only way to arrive is in a blizzard, in the dark, empty C4 cans clattering on the passenger-side floormat. Through Houghton, Michigan Tech, past dorms and campus buildings and frat houses and chain hotels. Ice sculptures, intricate and enormous, left over from or in preparation for Winter Carnival. Then downtown brickwork and gridded blocks, bars everywhere, a steep hill angling toward the river. Across the latticed Portage Lake Lift Bridge into Hancock, another hardware-and-drugstore cutout from 1954. Then back into the immense night.
The road feels endless but it isn’t. The highway terminates 46 miles north, on the shores of Lake Superior, at Copper Harbor, a town as freighted with industrial ghosts as the name implies. But your likely destination will be five miles short of this peninsular tip-top, when you reach the parking lot at Mount Bohemia.
Lonie
Lonie Glieberman walks downhill at quarter past 10. He is dressed to ski but we do not ski yet. We enter the Bohemia-owned lakeside house-turned-hotel that I am sharing with ski patrollers from across the Midwest, stationed for their annual rotational week at Boho. The “hotel” does not provide sheets or towels or pillows or a reliable cellphone signal. But it does have internet and a kitchen. Lonie, Boho’s energetic founder and owner, cooks us eggs. He wants to know what I’d seen the day before in Wisconsin. Were the ski areas busy? Did they have snow? Were they having a good winter? He refers to them as his “competitors.” This feels like the manager of the Yankees asking me for a field report on my son’s T-ball team, but Lonie is serious. He treats the Midwest like the NFC North. A regional dogfight. Evergoing. Respectful but rabid (Bohemia has formed reciprocal pass arrangements with nearly two dozen ski areas in surrounding states).
Lonie washes the dishes and leaves to walk his dogs. A man in a gigantic pickup truck materializes to tow my rented minivan up the snowy hill. At Bohemia, nothing and everything always seems to be happening all at once.
Boho: The Legacy
Our skiing was boring and we knew it. One hundred fifty ski areas, all attempting to be some version of the same thing: mini-Colorados with interstate groomers and sundecks.
Bohemia arrived with the new millennium, at the end of skiing’s stale period, its groomers-and-racers-and-stay-out-of-the-woods-now-kids liability-paranoid ‘80s and ‘90s. Perhaps this is not a coincidence. Like shaped skis and twin tips, which ended the reign of the “snowboard park,” made skiing cool again, and eased turns for the masses, Bohemia laid a new blueprint for what a Midwest ski area could be. No beginner runs. No grooming. No snowmaking. No rentals. No terrain park. No ski school. Most Midwest ski areas offered all of these things but no glade skiing at all; Bohemia would offer almost nothing but glade skiing, and would let you jump off the cliffs and rocks that the rest of the Midwest walled off with orange tape.
Lonie
As I boot up, Lonie wanders the interconnected base area yurts, iPhone wedged in his helmet. Skiers who can’t find Bohemia’s phone number somehow find Lonie’s. Someone from Wisconsin wants Thursday’s wind forecast. Another caller needs to modify a reservation. Later Lonie is on hold to change someone’s plane ticket for an upcoming Bohemia-sponsored Italy trip. He is eating donut holes from a plastic container. Now he is off the phone and in an animated discussion with kitchen staff about parfait cups. The clock winds toward noon. At last, we leave to go skiing.
Boho: The Brand
Mount Bohemia has two chairlifts serving its 800- to 900-foot vertical, a triple and a double. Both came used from Georgian Peaks, Ontario, though Skytrac replaced the top and bottom terminals of the triple over the past two summers. Both chairs are green and purple, a color scheme that feels inspired by a stoner’s blacklit bedroom. The green was supposed to be forest green, Lonie tells me, but “someone ordered the wrong color green” 25 years ago. Enough to cover 42 lift towers. The colors became a core part of Bohemia’s brand.
Lonie is big on brand. Bohemia would make sense as the domain of some eccentric who fights his HOA over approved mailbox colors and thinks that turn signals are a government conspiracy, but Lonie has an MBA. He created Bohemia not because he pined for a sick ski area where he could jump off of things, but because he saw an unfilled niche in the market – one that hundreds of other ski area operators insisted had no sustainable audience in America. Lonie is a good skier but not an ostentatious one. He skis fast, rarely stops. But he does not jump off of things or talk about jumping off of things.
“Lonie, do you like skiing?” I hear someone ask him at one point during our two days skiing together.
The question surprises me. Both because it’s an absurd question for someone who founded Middle America’s most beloved ski area, and because it’s incredibly insightful.
Lonie pauses before answering.
“Yeah, I like it,” he finally says, in a way that you might describe your 10th favorite restaurant.
Another pause.
“This isn’t what I thought I’d do,” he adds.
Boho: The Skiing
All ski areas sell illusions. Marked runs rarely follow a mountain’s true fall line. Trailmaps tend toward the aspirational, especially outside of the West. Sun Valley sells groomers and Snowbird sells powder, but both can be tracked out by 10 a.m. Throwback, hardcore, Ski-It-If-You-Can Mad River Glen makes snow, grooms nightly, and runs modern chairlifts sheathed in 1940s wrapping paper.
Bohemia’s illusion: wild, untamed, unhinged skiing in all its cliff-hucking, no-rules, rabblerousing glory. It’s not that Boho is peddling lies. The skiing is in fact tough, scrappy, steep, novel, and challenging. Cocaine on longboards. The illusion is that this terrain just is, as though Lonie pulled in, sprung the base yurt, and said “Go get ‘em Fellas.” Bohemia’s 585 acres are some of the most deliberately crafted ski terrain in America. Boho is mostly glades, and these glades are perfect. The spacing is perfect. The fall lines are perfect. This glory is not nature alone, though Lake Superior burying the forest in 200-plus inches of annual lake effect helps. This is 25 years of summer glade clearance that has blazed an expansive tree-skiing network through testy Midwest forest.
The skiing, as a result, is excellent. Trails shoot in all directions off the summit. It is impossible not to get lost, to take the same run twice, to plot a deliberate path down the mountain using the trailmap. Skiing away from the lift unload, the forest swallows you whole. The runs go on and on, at times steep and often not, endless branch-offs, a sensation that surely you went too far. You stay alert for cliffs, but the deadfall that often boobytraps eastern glades is mostly absent. But massive and labyrinthian as it is, you are unlikely to get lost at Bohemia. Ski trails here flow like water. Ski long enough and you’ll reach a lift or, just as likely, the road.
Video by Stuart Winchester, #GoProBro.
#BohoNation
If you ski to the road, you will probably have to wait a few minutes for one of Bohemia’s four shuttles to arrive. And here you will meet and mingle with Boho Nation, large groups tumbling from the woods, hooting and smiling and perhaps slightly high. They are from Illinois or Wisconsin or Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Each group is different, yet they are all the same. They come every year, they will tell you. It’s their tradition. Their best one. Everyone seems tremendously proud to be here.
Lonie asks everyone questions. He thanks them for coming. He never introduces himself. He never needs to. Everyone knows Lonie.
Brobe
Lonie drives us back to the mountain for dinner. I want beer, and Lonie doesn’t drink. It is after 7 p.m. and Lonie stills wears his full ski kit. A Spirit Mountain lift ticket dangles from his pants, so faded that the date is no longer visible.
When we arrive at Boho, a man in a bathrobe is circling a witch’s cauldron outside the Nordic spa. He demands to know when the fire starts. “We don’t do fires on Tuesdays,” Lonie tells him. Brobe, pointing to a pile of cardboard boxes, informs Lonie that it’s his “lucky day,” because “I’m gonna burn that garbage for you.” Lonie tells Brobe that he will not, in fact, be burning those boxes. This seems to annoy Brobe. Brobe is a lifetime season passholder, he reminds Lonie. But Lonie likes rules. And one rule is that fires are made on designated nights and with designated fire-starting materials, which do not include discarded Amazon boxes commandeered by a Brobe eight deep into a case of Old Milwaukee. “Let’s not make that lifetime pass a one-year pass,” Lonie says. Brobe feels compelled to point out that he was one of the first to purchase Bohemia’s $1,399 lifetime pass, and bought not one but several of them. “Five grand, all in,” he says. He smiles but moves herky-jerk, animated, ready, it seems, for a fight, with shouts or knuckles or both.
Abruptly, though, Brobe stills himself, considers Lonie.
“What’s my name?” Brobe asks, suspicious, certain he’d just twisted a moral throttle that would turn the argument.
“Matt,” Lonie answers immediately, as though the question were as obvious as his own name.
Mount Bohemia, I’ll point out, has thousands of season passholders.
“My Man!” Brobe exclaims, raising his hand for a Bro-five.
Pilgrims
Bohemia’s daily lift-ticket rate is $95. For that reason, most skiers opt for the mountain’s $99 season pass ($109 if you want to include Saturdays). And because they have the pass anyway, and because the ski area is so remote – Keweenaw is the least-populous county in both Michigan and the entire legacy-Big-10 Midwest – almost no one comes to Bohemia for just one day.
In the nighttime yurts I sip beer as Lonie pingpongs in and out of sight. Boho’s common areas feel like a wedding reception where you don’t know any other guests, but you know by being here that you share something important. I am more of a watcher than a talker, but talking in such places is easy and I listen to the assembled’s stories.
Like pilgrims they have come from all over. They are here from Massachusetts and they are here from the West. They are here for the first time because they’d heard there’s nothing else like Bohemia, or for the 10th time because they’re sure that there isn’t. Each of them, even the loyalists, seem vaguely surprised to be here. There is a sense that everyone is living a story they will tell for the rest of their lives.
Midwest skiing never had this. No checklist spot. No Mecca. No Jackson or Alta or Palisades or Aspen or Whistler or Mad River Glen or Killington. The Midwest, pre-Bohemia, was a disconnected set of ski solar systems. There was no reason to travel from one part of the region to another to ski. Skiers who lived in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula or Minnesota or Wisconsin skied within a couple hours of home and then drove to Colorado for vacation.
Bohemia changed all that. Suddenly, a clear center of gravity existed, a commons for this vast, snowy, ski-crazed region that had always looked elsewhere for a more thrilling version of skiing. Within a decade, the custom had rooted itself within the culture: no matter where you lived in the Midwest, at some point you had to get to Boho. And local ski areas, observing and then understanding this, evolved (slowly) into more interesting versions of themselves. Fast ropes, big parks, hike-up terrain, skiing in trees. Midwest skiing 2025 is a much more compelling animal than Midwest skiing 1995. Thank Bohemia for that.
But Boho accomplished something even more improbable than making Midwest skiing interesting. Because Bohemia is not just the only ski area of its kind in the Midwest, but the only ski area of its kind on the continent, it has, for the first time, inspired people who do not live in the Midwest and have never skied in the Midwest to journey to Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, in not-insignificant numbers, for recreational skiing.
The pride Midwestern skiers feel in this fact cannot be overstated. Bohemia is our Chicago, our Jordan Bulls, our auto industry and our Great Lakes. The thing we have that no one else does. That you cannot find some better version of somewhere else.
Brobe
After my first beer, I find Lonie talking on his phone near the snowshoe rental counter. Brobe is back, waiting for the call to end. He has another “bone to pick” with Lonie, he tells me. He adds, without prompting or context, that he “could buy this whole place for cash.” This sounds dubious, but also squares with the notion that a man standing drunk in public wearing a bathrobe probably has no boss to whom he worries this information could be conveyed. I leave Lonie to deal with him. Cardboard baskets of salad and chicken arrive, along with several pizzas. The night grows fast and fuzzy by my third beer.
Boho: The Legacy
I ski another day at Boho before turning the van south toward Iowa. I stay the night at a Dubuque Holiday Inn Express adjacent to a Volkswagen dealership, a car wash, and a McDonald’s, a commercial strip swallowed by single-family homes and framed by wide roads blinkered with stoplights. A staid portrait of the Midwest exactly as people imagine the Midwest.
But that’s not quite fair to Iowa. Nearly everyplace in America looks like this. Boring is not special in this country. It is our default. This is why New York, a city that simply feels like a city to most of the world, hits so many Americans like an industrial tornado, an anarchic swarm of people and traffic and noise. And it is why, in our postwar suburban exodus from downtowns, we buffed our ski areas into over-groomed interstate superslides, mirrors of the built environments in which we grocery shopped and ran out for pizza and went to the movies.
But suburbia-on-snow is the worst interpretation, and the worst version, of skiing. Its appeal is limited, its experience predictable. But I get it. When hundreds of ski areas were shuttering in the ‘70s and ‘80s, operators, on the defensive, applied the geometry and aesthetic of the broader culture to their leisure centers. Forty-eight trails groomed nightly. No jumping allowed. GS turns on 215s. Your big thrill will be those 14 NASTAR gates. No wonder so many skiers drank. Safe but boring.
Bohemia did not change American skiing on its own. Twin tips, fat skis, Jay Peak glades, Silverton, OB gates at Jackson, stronger liability shields, and the internet (among other factors) collectively shoved skiing out of its handsomely-sweatered-and-bare-headed-Austrian-instructor, water polo and tennis-adjacent, art-of-the-carve era and into an age of lift-served tree-pow-and-park skiing. And Boho proved that this once-fringe version of skiing could not only exist, but thrive in America’s least-respected major ski region.
Bohemia, accessible but remote, wild but sculpted, of a type but singular, is one of the most unique ski areas in the country. It is a place that every skier, everywhere, ought to journey to at least once. And that makes it the ski area that the Midwest, one of the world’s greatest ski regions, deserves.
More Bohemia
Nothing quite captures the Boho spirit like Mount Bohemia TV:
I teamed up with Slopes to document my 2024-25 ski season. Check out day one of my two-day run at Bohemia:
And check out previous installments:
Greek Peak: NY’s Most Complete Ski Area? + Exploring Surface-Lift New England
Saturday, Jan. 18 to Monday, Jan. 20 – Greek Peak
Never thought someone could make me want to make a ski trip to the Midwest. Great article - just love these stories!
Great article! Always wanted to visit. Would love to see a trip guide for Boho! Where to fly into (Duluth, Green Bay, Chicago?), best way to get there, where else to ski on the way and back, etc..