Rib Mountain among most popular parks
Kevin Keeffe first visited Rib Mountain State Park as a toddler, when his parents took him “up the hill,” as he puts it, for a picnic more than 700 feet above Wausau.
Keeffe, 62 years old and a Friends of Rib Mountain board member, has been to the park countless times in the decades since then and often enjoyed the myriad trails in the preserve with his own kids. His daughter was so fond of the 1,500-acre park that she chose it as the setting for her high school graduation photos.
On the edge of Wausau, Rib Mountain — a fourmile-long hunk of nearly 1.5-billion-year-old quartzite — gets more than 400,000 visits a year, Keeffe said. That makes it one of the top five most popular parks in Wisconsin, up there with Devil’s Lake and Peninsula state parks.
Keeffe grew up skiing on the north side of Rib Mountain at what is now known as the Granite Peak Ski Area. Started in 1937 with six runs and a half-mile long T-bar, it now covers more than 400 acres and has 75 runs, four terrain parks and five chairlifts.
It will remain open for spring skiing until April 15, with a Splash Bash pond skim and patio luau on the 14th. Like their father before them, Keeffe said his kids also learned to ski at the resort and his daughter now teaches skiing in Aspen, Colo.
“It’d be kind of hard to grow up in Wausau and not have tried skiing,” Keeffe said. “A lot of people got their start here and then gravitated to bigger, Western venues.”
The resort’s 700-foot vertical descent and three high-speed lifts make it arguably the top ski area in Wisconsin.
According to a metal plaque at the summit of Rib Mountain, the park opened in 1923 after the estate of Jacob Gensman donated 40 acres. Several years later, a Kiwanis group gave the park another 120 acres.
It has grown significantly since then, Keeffe said, with the last purchase of property coming several years ago when the state bought an abandoned quarry on the western edge of the park.
Though Keeffe said it may be of dubious accuracy geologically, the Gensman plaque reads: “This area was originally a sandy beach swept by the ocean. The sand was hardened to quartzite and by upheaval tilted on edges and raised to its present height.” It also states, incorrectly, that “the summit of this rock is the highest known point in the state, 1940 feet above sea level.”
“Nowadays, we just say that Rib Mountain was once considered the highest spot in Wisconsin,” Keeffe said. The state’s highest point is actually Timm’s Hill, which stands at 1,951 feet about 65 miles to the northwest. “It’s pretty easy for people to get those numbers mixed up. Regardless, it’s a wonderful chunk of forested rock and a great place to hike and ski.”
When I visited Rib Mountain recently, a friend and I spent the morning one day carving turns on the well groomed slopes of Granite Peak. Then we moved to the trails on the remainder of park, parking our car part of the way up the mountain and hiking — sometimes through the snow — to get to the summit for views over the surrounding countryside.
Keeffe said many people who come to Rib Mountain climb the tower that rises another 60 feet above the park’s 1,924-foot summit, which he said was measured by the county surveyor a few years back, making it the third-highest point in the state.
Keeffe, who figures he’s been up and down the lookout hundreds of times, said kids are often excited to climb the tower. They also like to scramble on the rock formations, including the Queen’s Chair.
When he’s working at the Friends-operated concession stand on the summit, kids will enthusiastically tell him they’re headed up the lookout.
“I ask them to come back and report how many steps there are to the top,” he said.
“Their answers are usually somewhere between 96 and 100. I accept all their reports as accurate,” he said, chuckling. “They also like using the steps that were carved in the rocks 80 years ago by young men working for the Civilian Conservation Corps.”
My friend and I walked to a viewing platform, complete with mounted binoculars that cost 25 cents to use, to gaze out to the southwest toward Nine Mile Forest, which is popular with cross-country skiers and snowshoers in the winter and mountain bikers and hikers in the summer.
Then we made the obligatory ascent of the tower, where we had 360-degree views of the surrounding landscape, including Wausau and the Wisconsin River. When we descended the lookout, we hiked over snowy and icy trails to watch the sun set in a red ball of fire.
Keeffe said the Friends group and Granite Peak generally get along, though some Wausau residents have objected strongly to the resort’s expansion plans.
But he said he remains most disappointed by a decision by the state seven years ago that removed an overnight camping area on the summit.
“There was something very special about sitting around the campfire up there as the sun went down and seeing the city lights come up,” he said. “There were a lot of kids like myself who had their first camping experience in that campground.”
But Keeffe remains an enthusiastic supporter of the park, during all seasons of the year.
“March is usually the heaviest snowfall month that we have,” he said. “So there will be snow on Rib Mountain — at least in the shadier spots — for some time to come. In fact, a local television station holds a contest each year to predict the date when the last bit of snow disappears. Sometimes that doesn’t happen until June.”
More information: Friends of Rib Mountain State Park offers snowshoe hikes, naturalist programs, a summer concert series and other activities. See ribmountain.org or wiparks.net.
The website for Granite Peak Ski Area is skigranite peak.com.
Getting there: Rib Mountain State Park, 4200 Park Road, Wausau, is 185 miles northwest of Milwaukee via I-41, Highway 10 and I-39.