By Brian Clark
Special To Channel 3000

When Ocha Potter proposed building the Keweenaw (pronounced Kee-wa-nah) Mountain Lodge during the Great Depression, many locals thought he was nuts.

But Potter pushed his idea through and added a nine-hole golf course to boot. Laid-off miners found employment on this Works Progress Administration (WPA) project, which allowed them to feed their families for a time.

Detractors called it "Potter's Folly." But when the resort became a popular destination, promoters dubbed it the "jewel of the Keweenaw Peninsula," which looks like a bent index finger sticking out into Lake Superior.

For the past 75 years, the lodge has lured visitors from all over the country to stay in its 34 Lincoln-log-style cabins and small motel, play golf, dine and use the lodge as a jumping off point to explore the northern edge of Michigan's wild and beautiful Upper Peninsula.

This year -- and Potter would surely have loved the boldness of this plan -- the lodge and its big, roaring fireplaces opened for the winter season, which can run well into April up here.

Guests can stay in winterized cabins and the motel, snowshoe or cross-country ski on 13 kilometers of groomed trails, toboggan, ice skate or even practice their snowboarding tricks on a terrain park -- named in Potter’s honor -- that is lighted at night.

They can also snowmobile on nearby trails or head over to the Mount Bohemia ski and snowboard resort to carve turns, jump off cliffs and have a good time negotiating some of the steepest slopes in the Midwest.

And when evening rolls around, guests can head for the lodge restaurant, where the heads of a big bull moose, caribou and elk watch over diners. Ronan says the fresh lake trout, Norwegian salmon, 24-ounce lamb shank, mushroom ravioli or other dishes are popular. (I can vouch for the salmon, but I’ll have to try the trout on my next visit.)

All in all, the region is a delightful winter playground, one that I’d been curious about since moving back to the Midwest from San Diego nearly seven years ago.

I'd only ventured north into the UP, as locals call this area, once two years ago to canoe in the Sylvania Wilderness area just over the UP border, about 25 miles north of Eagle River, WI. But that was in the late summer and I promised myself I'd have to come back to sample the region in the winter.

So return I did, with family in tow. I couldn’t have been more pleased with what I found. We skied at Mount Bohemia, tobogganed on the lodge sledding hill and played games in front of a crackling fire in our cabin.

We also drove along the west shore of the peninsula in the late afternoon light and saw big slabs of ice driven ashore by the wind and then stopped for an early dinner one night at the Eagle Harbor Inn.

The Keweenaw Mountain Lodge is run by Cormac Ronan, a Dubliner by birth who worked in Chicago at the Hilton Hotel for a few years before meeting, as he describes it, a "gal of Finnish descent who lured me north."

For someone whose experience with winter in his native Ireland was limited mostly to chilly rain, he took to the snow.

"I found that getting out into it in the winter is fun and makes the time go by a lot faster," said Ronan, who is also the lodge chef. "Staying inside and waiting for summer just makes the time drag on."

Ronan said Keweenaw County, which operates the lodge, got (in a throwback to the WPA) a federal grant to winterize the lodge, the motel and nine of the cabins to make the resort a year-round destination.

This coming summer, he hopes to make at least six more cabins comfortable for cold-weather guests and expand the dining area in the lodge by winterizing a large porch.

Now that Ronan has a terrain park practically in his backyard, does the 45-year-old plan to take up snowboarding?

"I think I'm too old for that," he chuckled. "Bones take too long to heal. I think I'll just stick with snowshoeing. And one of these days, I’ll have to get out on the cross-country trails."

If you go: For more information on the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge, call 906-289-4403 or go to www.atthelodge.com. Rates for the cabins start at $75 on weekdays and $129 on weekend nights. If you stay Friday and Saturday evenings, Sunday night is free.

Use of the terrain park and sledding hill are free, but the skiing on the cross-country trail is $5. For details on Mount Bohemia, go to Mount Bohemia's Website