You call that snow?
Hurley gets well over 100 inches a year
HURLEY – “The snow makes me feel warmer,” said Dee Genisot.
As soon as she said it, Genisot, who lives in the village of Gile about three miles west of Hurley, worried people might not understand. They might think she’s crazy or weird or something.
“It’s just that it’s so comforting when it’s all around me,” she explained.
Even with that explanation, many die-hard residents of Wisconsin, full of Ice-Bowl-“frozen-tundra” winter swagger, still might think she’s crazy or weird or something. But people from around Hurley understand.
Snow makes Hurley Hurley. Snow is to Hurley what Lambeau Field is to Green Bay, Harley-Davidson is to Milwaukee and the Capitol dome is to Madison. It gives residents an identity and outsiders a reason to visit. It’s a source of wonderment, pride and tourist dollars.
From 1988 to 2018, Hurley has received at total 5,856 inches of snow, or 488 feet. That’s nearly twice as tall
as the State Capitol, which is 284 feet, 5 inches; 1.3 times the length of a football field (360 feet); or 57 times the length of a 2018 Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Ultra Classic (about 8.5 feet).
It’s an average of 16 feet of snow per year. That’s a lot of shoveling.
Hurley sits on the edge of Wisconsin’s northeastern border with Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, about 300 miles north of Milwaukee. The 1,480 people who live here embrace their winters with a hearty dose of sisu, a Finnish term that is roughly translated to mean rugged toughness, tenacity and determination.
Genisot is no exception. She goes for daily walks, no matter the weather, and loves taking pictures of the deep snow around her home in Giles, just east of Hurley. She also has been a bit disappointed in recent years. Global warming has lessened the snowfall amounts recently, Genisot said.
After all, it was mid-December, and so far only a little over 40 inches had fallen in the Hurley area.
“This is nothing,” Genisot said.
White, wet gold
The Iron County Economic Development website spotlights a table of annual snowfall for Hurley that goes back to 1988. Snow peaked in 1997 with 302 inches — just over 25 feet of snow. A paltry 121 inches, only 10 feet, fell in 2017.
The page also touts a string of “Wisconsin Winter Weather Facts,” and it shouldn’t surprise anybody that Iron County and the Hurley area dominate the statistics. Hurley lays claim to having the greatest seasonal total of snow (that winter of 1996-97), greatest monthly total (103.5 inches, January 1997) and deepest snow on the ground, excluding drifts (60 inches or 5 feet, on Jan. 30, 1996).
Kelly Klein, the Iron County Economic Development office director, coined the phrase “Snow Capital of Wisconsin” around seven or eight years ago.
Klein grew up in Richfield, Minnesota, not exactly the tropics, and moved to the Hurley area years ago to work at an Ironwood radio station. It didn’t take long to realize that the Hurley-Ironwood winters were in a class by themselves.
So when he took the job as director of Iron County’s effort to build its economy, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to tout the area as a winter playground.
“It’s a blessing,” Klein said. “And it’s kind of a hassle sometimes . ... The shoveling, it does get tiring.”
Big Snow Country
If you were to design a landscape for full snowfall potential, you would be hard-pressed to improve on the country around Hurley and its Michigan sister city, the larger Ironwood. The massive lake and the rising hills work together to create Big Snow Country, another of the region’s titles.
“It’s an area of high terrain. It’s in a perfect orientation with Lake Superior,” said Geoffrey Grochocinski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Duluth, Minnesota, which covers the Hurley area.
When winds blow out of the north, which they frequently do, Grochocinski said, they pick up moisture from the Great Lake, which rarely freezes over completely.
The distance the air moves across the water is called “fetch” in meteorological terms. The longer the fetch, the more time the air has to pick up moisture. The fetch distances for Hurley often are significantly more than other northern cities such as Duluth, Bayfield and Ashland. That longer fetch sets Hurley apart.
But there’s more.
The Gogebic Range, the band of hills that run from the the Upper Peninsula into Wisconsin, roughly 15 miles from Lake Superior, rise upward from the lake and act as a kind of wringer.
“When air lifts, the range squeezes it (the moisture, in the form of snow) out,” Grochocinski said. “As it moves up the terrain it gets colder and reaches its saturation point. And that means a lot of snowfall.”
A new kind of sisu
It was about 25 degrees when Britta Schroeter, 24, and Josh Clark, 29, pulled into the parking lot of Wolverine Nordic Ski Trails a recent December evening.
The couple, engaged to be married, live in Ashland, about an hour’s drive to the west. But there wasn’t enough snow in Ashland, so they decided to make a trip to Britta’s hometown of Ironwood, Michigan, so they could get some quality Nordic skiing in.
Fit and friendly, Britta, a nursing student, and Josh, who works in sales, might just represent a new kind of sisu. They have grit and determination of the Finnish miners who settled in this area, but they also take time to appreciate the beauty and fun living in the north offers. When not being covered in snow, Britta and Josh both work as kayak guides on Lake Superior.
Growing up in Ironwood gave Britta grit to deal with harsh weather, and appreciate it at the same time.
“Winter is a very important time for me,” Britta said. “It fuels my everything. Relationships, recreation, health, kind of. It’s something I look forward to.”
Shoveling was a regular occurrence, seemed like every day. “So we wouldn’t be late for class, we got really good at shoveling the snow,” Britta said. “In March it got a little old. But as long as we could ski, it was good.”
A 10-inch snowfall was commonplace, she said. “Down south, they shut everything down,” she said.
Josh enjoys winter, too, but his enthusiasm isn’t quite as intense as Britta’s.
“I think it’s good to get outside. And it’s important to have opportunities like this (to cross-country ski),” Josh said. “I enjoy getting outside, but I also enjoy getting back inside and getting some hot chocolate at the end of the day . ... You can’t like (winter) every day.”
But they loved winter that day. They said goodbye and offered quick waves, and the couple gracefully glided off into the dark woods.