none-ridges-llc-bmzak

Spring Explodes

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:21:31 GMT

From calm to calamity and back again

The end of March blurs into the beginning of April. One month indistinguishable from the other. A calm silence of snowmelt drips and seeps into the earth. The hush of the wind rises, an inhalation gathering strength through the charcoal trunks oozing sap. Then, the nesting ducks choose a pond.

Sedate, they glide across the glass surface divulging no effort that furiously paddles below the waterline. The pair turn and twirl in a dance of circles, quiet quacks of duck chatter, until they sense the watcher. Their lithe necks tense. In a moment she calls the alarm. His webbed feet push down, his body rises, his wings ignite the explosion that launches him like a missile through the trees announcing -- SPRING!

The frenzy spreads to other birds who greet the first rays of dawn in a growing cacophony of cheeps, whistles, chirps and calls. The battle for territory to fulfill their biological imperatives plays out in beak first attacks in rapid looping dives past my head then hitting my pantleg as their flight fight distracts from my presence.

A seemingly endless train of storms ride the Jetstream trestle across the nation. The dark of night rumbles like an approaching war across the ridges, its flashing munitions inexhaustible, powerful, frightening. By morning the puddles, wash outs, run off, and floods show us weaklings that the clouds will do their will. We are so small.

But so is each flower that pushed through the duff. From the night’s violence, rise violets. An army of Dutchmen hang out their tiny britches. The tightly wrapped sepals protecting the buds suddenly undress their Spring Beauty to wear raindrops like jewels. Yellow Trout Lilies swim up through the leaf fall and bow their heads awaiting sunshine. Honeysuckle unfurls verdant flags to wave at a brief patch of clear sky. Even the sugar maple flowers, like hops on a vine before they flock into canopy. And a dance of daffodils trumpet the arrival of a new morning.

Howl to Midnight

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:33:18 GMT

Let me fuel a new howl to midnight

Coyotes clean my bones, snap my sinew

Devour my acids so I become you

A silent shadow slipping through moonlight

Build Bridges Not Bombs

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:59:29 GMT

A Call to American Action

A handmade footbridge once crossed the southern lobe of the pond at Ridges – Hike & Ski Tours . Otto Hoermann built it from some standing dead elm trunks and pine boards to cross to an isolated, boggy peninsula that looked upon his pondside guest house. He back filled a strip of shoreline to raise it above the muck and placed a bench there for two to sit and enjoy the morning.

Long since lost to the ooze, the absent bridge cut off access to that view. Eventually mildew, must, and moss swallowed the guest house before we burned the wreckage. During a decade’s disuse, nature’s thicket closed around Otto’s hand-masoned stone wall left standing after the fire.

Otto, a German World War I veteran, survived unknowable horrors, lost an entire family and engineering career, escaped a spiraling Germany, worked and saved through the Great Depression, faced deep suspicion and distrust from his American neighbors during a second world war.

His plight reminds me of the first stanza of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The words of poets past and Otto still speak to me through the vestiges of his West Michigan homestead. From war, Otto found the strength to emigrate, remarry, to build: this pond, that guest house, a bridge.

Last week, inspired, I decided to fill with conviction to put something good into a worsening world. I carted retired electrical poles to the concrete block landings still sitting below the moss of that southern lobe of the pond. I set the spans. I felled the ash tree choked to death from the emerald ash borer and split the logs into rough, two foot planks. I zipped a dozen oak saplings from their stems and cut them into six inch pegs. I drilled and pounded all together without a cent of steel. My hands are rough and my knees ache. I built a bridge.

My bridge creaks and rocks when I walk across it, sounding like the mast of a ship on a turbulent sea letting the voyager know he’s atop the living-killing water, the stretching-disintegrating timber. But my bridge provides innocence temporary respite, I will not drown if I cross it. I must not be victim to the “blood-dimmed tide” nor a waiter for the Second Coming...

Pondside mornings dazzle. Slants of sun cut through the forest to reflect off the dark mirrored surface of the water. Cedar trunks and cabin timbers shimmer with an amber glow reminding every atom of nature to awaken, to vibrate, to sing.

What a view afforded to the builder of a bridge.

What Happens Next?

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:01:41 GMT

An existence of perpetual surprise.

On March 4 ^th I figured that I clicked into my skis for the last time. The late crust snowpack receded like an ocean wave off the strand into the heat of false spring. I stayed in the shadowed corners of the meadows, brown straws of last season’s grass protruding through in a widening stubble. On the final climbs of some south facing slopes, I high kneed over large patches of brown duff to reach the northside descent.

Then full daytime sun cooked into the sixties. Snow fog hung over the ice patches until they all disappeared. Skunks started to spray, porcupines lumbered, and I pulled a tick off the dog. The yellow spears of daffodil foliage pierced the hillside waiting for enough sun to turn them green, snowdrops crested the hill, and I began the crocus hunt.

The clocks sprang forward and the sunset walks started after dinner and lingered past eight o’clock. My nose tested the air for wild onion. I shagged a bucket of golf balls in the front yard in a stiff breeze, dreaming of summer obsessions.

But seasons, especially springtime in Michigan, are rarely straight forward. Fits. Starts. Stops. Backtracks. Blizzards.

This winter produced good cross-country skiing despite entire snowpacks arriving and disappearing a total of four times this season. The most likely final snowstorm (but who knows) hit us before the Ides of March on past St. Patrick’s Day and today I was lucky enough to enjoy one more of those great ski treks.

A fresh cold inch filled yesterday’s sticky tracks where the warm ground melted things from below. But the new snow and nighttime teens made today a smooth ride from start to finish. I hit every trail of the year. Each gliding stride sparked joy. All the legacy trails now connect with seven new trails cut since September, the two newest cut just this March.

I felt the accomplishment of “having built” Ridges – Hike & Ski Tours accompanied with wonder, envisioning more to come. I count my fortune to experience so many days amid the trees I love like an irrational number, each one a unique experience without the possibility of replication. When I meld what is old with what is new there sounds an alarm in my soul that wakes me every day, excited to see, shape, feel what happens next…

This writing was accepted for publication by the Journal of Radical Wonder.

Available here < https://www.thejournalofradicalwonder.com/monthly-challenge >.

Scroll down to the fourth piece on the page. I'm also on their contributors page in alphabetical order by last name.

A Quadrillion Diamond Morning

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:11:43 GMT

A field of flickering facets

Last night's flurries settled silently by morning in two fresh inches of cold smoke that covered the back country tracks across the valley. With nary a cloud above the slants of light cut through the tree trunks unfiltered and ready to dazzle.

Mornings like today can only be experienced first hand like July fireflies at dusk in a forest glen or Aurora Borealis all green and purple across the night sky. Today, light and cold collaborate, a living shimmer that vibrates across the woodland, a pulsation following the rhythm of my skis.

Only the reflection of the sun off the gentle ripples of the brook outdo the brilliance of the unbroken snowscape sparkle. I am so glad I clipped in the skis today to bear witness to this winter wonder.

Boulder Ridge

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:01:32 GMT

When the duff is showing, the duff gets going.

So far, January disappointed with a lack of cold days and snowfall. On the 8th the mercury rocketed to the 60s and the wind speed into the 40s. The snowpack officially packed up. An eight inch average of snow across the landscape disappeared underground and down the roadside gullies in 24 hours. What one day was winter white, withered to wet duff. So, I stood up off my duff and hit the woods.

I discovered the latest deer herd highway curving up a hill that winds its way off the property and I spied an opportunity. What nature's daily migration provided, I decided to widen. A deep V of deer tracks showed the path of least resistance. On the first day, I trimmed the small branches out of the way with an orange handled pair of clippers. Then I pulled as many downed limbs out of the dwindling snow as I could to clear the forest floor. At the top of the knoll there appeared a perfect divergence that would allow for an up an over trail and an apex of the ridge escape back down to the open meadow.

The next day the fully brown landscape shaped to the growl of my chainsaw. Small maples, ironwoods and beech trees zipped off at the ground and I sculpted a wider ski trail. A metric ton rock tinged with moss rode the rib of the ridge, reminded of Michigan's glacial past. I christened the route, Boulder Ridge.

To the west a straight shot flowed south parallel to the property line. There I finished and named the second descent, Deer Downs. It cheered me up knowing that when the snow returned I could once again taste the forest fruit of my labor and glide.

To Make Much of Time

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:57:00 GMT

How do we spend our most precious resource?

I grew up attending dinners that my parents hosted in their small Swiss Chalet many times a year. When company visited, Mom set out the fancy plates in the dining room on the multi-leaf pine table that grew or shrunk with the size of the crowd. Her best napkins themed for the season waited with a fold under the knife and spoon. Stemware, mugs, and flower speckled bowls appeared from somewhere. In the kitchen Dad toiled filling every surface with steaming entrees, pureed sides, and thick slabs of bread that once fully prepared turned the corner into the dining room where the guests waited. The table was full: of dishes, of food, of people. I remember very little space. Yet somehow all of it and us magically fit.

Grandparents, neighbors, colleagues, old friends, new friends, cousins, uncles, aunts, current students, former students, community members recently met, exchange students, college roommates and others were welcomed. I remember the groups' collective smiles through a nostalgic sweet and savory haze of dinner's steam filling the room. All ate well, conversed throughout the meal, well past dessert. Many a guest was loathe to leave my parents dining room table so they lingered in each other's company. Most lost track of time. Left hours after they intended.

Time.

This vein of mid 20th century hospitality runs to the heart of Ridges - Hike & Ski Tours . I believe people so enjoyed their time with my parents that they never forgot them, that dining room, this property, the kindness served them at the hands of my parents. In fact I know it. People I had never met before have stopped me in mid-sentence when they connected me in their mind to my parents. Then they proceeded to tell me their recollection of one of those meals that I did not attend being off at college or out of the house in my adult life. Their tale was strange and yet familiar as I have eaten many of those meals.

Susan, Mike and I enjoyed one of those type of gatherings when they took a Ridges Ski Tour this week. On the trail our conversation moved to the natural rhythms of climbs, descents and pauses. In the cabin our words interspersed with the cadence of spoons scraping bowls and clicking glasses toasting our company. I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon and felt it was not quite time enough.

A quixotic paradox of timelessness/not time enough.

Physicists tell us time is relative in the cosmos. It curves, warps, slows, speeds, even runs parallel at the quantum level where two separate beings a parsec apart feel the same thing at the same time. It seems beyond our ken.

But it is not.

Here on earth we can bend our time, accelerate, slow, even stop our time like a German watch behind glass that has not ticked in half a century only to start again when we make much of time, together...

True Snow Birds

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 02:53:31 GMT

Who needs Florida?

I believe that if songbirds decide to live somewhere then it must be a great place, just in need of little music. After all, they can take to a wing and fly away at a moment's notice, but here at Ridges they take up yearlong, Michigan residence.

I spot a rather large flock of American robins each winter. Sometimes I find them in my front yard pear trees feasting away. They are such messy eaters that their scraps fall to the snow where the local deer herd skulks to snack like silent black hulks at three in the morning.

Most frequently in January and February fifty to two-hundred robins gather at the spring where they flit to the comparatively warm water flowing out from under a ridge. They bathe and drink and perhaps warm themselves in the perpetual ribbon of heat bubbling from the hill.

On the back forty they inhabit the blackberry patch, but find even more fruit overhead in the wild grapes clinging like frozen caviar to the vines twisting through the treetops. Winter foraging requires much greater caloric consumption to stay warm so the land must provide abundant food for them to return year after year.

At Ridges we maintain the manicured and the wild places side by side, one to appreciate the other. No need to travel all the way to Florida. Turns out we like the cold and I would hate to miss the song.

Happy New Year

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 02:09:45 GMT

It's always a wish.

Not only do cameras struggle to capture steeps they also always diminish the volume of falling snow.

One could wonder if this snow globe is half empty or half full. The air was far thicker with flakes as I stood there looking out my front door. If you crank the volume the sound of the wind is just about right, but the video captured snow looks diminished by half.

Is that bad or good?

Like most everything it stands ripe for debate with ardent camps for and against. Their strong opinions pinned to their perception and colored by their past. We all experienced 2025. Eight billion plus perspectives with not one the same, a spectrum in micro-gradients ranging from horrible to hallelujah. How could we ever agree?

The over exuberant - Happy New Year! The sceptic - Happy New Year? The resigned - Happy New Year. The wait and see - Happy New Year... and then there is me - Happy New Year No end punctuation, a conscious choice recognizing the phrase for what it really is, a wish, a hope, that need not end, but may not start.

We expect too much from happiness. We expect it to sweep us off our feet. We expect that first hit heroin high ad infinitum. We expect it to shout and jump and flash like some Instagram Reel. But we may miss the real that is often humble, uncinematic, even ordinary because we could not quite see the right number of snowflakes in our photos. We spend a lifetime chasing our past or yearning for a horizon we cannot reach.

But happiness lives only in the moment, not past, not future, only present.

So, I wish you many moments: the fleeting, the languorous, the humorous, the joyful, the tearful, the contemplative, the imperceptible, and the deeply felt. Experience them all.

Be present.

Happy New Year

Blizzard Feast

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 01:02:25 GMT

Landscape always alive

The bomb cyclone winds started to rage around 2:00 AM last night. I could only imagine the carnage they might lay across the trails in downed limbs or completely toppled trees across the property. I awakened before daybreak to the whistle of wind that pops and cracks the roof trusses overhead.

I looked for the bloodshot glow of the bedside clock, but it sat dark. The power outage began around 5:00 AM and my first thoughts went to how we would warm the house. I felt an extra crackle in the air as I swung my legs from under the cocoon of down. The temperature had not yet significantly dropped, but I knew it a wise time to build a fire.

Sonny rose from his dog bed to investigate my predawn clattering. We pulled back the newly snow coated tarps from the woodpile in search of something resembling dry lumber. I brought the logs in stages to the garage because the outdoor furnace stood useless with no electric pump to move the heat into the house.

Sonny's curiosity piqued at my shoulder. He sat on his haunches and cocked his ears left then right as he watched me load the fireplace with tinder, place the logs, then set it ablaze. Once we successfully chased away the chill, we hit the trails.

Any evidence of early December ski tracks disappeared in the melt of warm days, rain, and now the fresh depth of snow drifting around tree trunks. At first glance the landscape appeared desolate. In the depth of the woods an old growth beech rocked for the last time in the wind and cracked forty feet above the ground. The crown splashed down in a shower of splinters. We were glad to be eighty yards farther down the trail instead of crushed or impaled behind.

But even if it kills you, the landscape is never dead.

In the final trail loop of the morning Sonny caught the scent of the deer flushed from the thicket of briars. The snow once clean, frozen, and lifeless drew the eye up the slope following the bounding pock marks of deer, then dog.

When I clicked out of my skis for the day, the wind still gusting and snow falling, shrill chirps trilled through the sibilant air. Up above a flock of cedar waxwings feasted amid the flakes. Their frantic flapping and jockeying for fruit fed them for another day.

Life continues without end.

Slashed them all

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:23:57 GMT

Hit every run - just don't stop naming them.

More than half a dozen ridges reach their fingers through the property. On many I have cleared several new descents in the last five years or kept existing trails open with constant removal of windfall branches, fully downed trees, or trimming away head-knockers. Maintenance never ends and if the snow piles deep, the ski trail feels like it never ends too.

On this day I vowed to hit every trail in one ski session and lay down a base time. The key was just to power through every climb and stick every landing no matter how intense the name of the descent.

I laugh at some of the names I assigned to runs at four-years-old: Kindergarten, Cliff and Killer come to mind. The more sinister the name the greater the likelihood I fell on it back in the day when I would step into my three pin bindings on my red Gravdal skis. Then I associated the success of my day to how many times I fell. In my mind I would subtract one fall if I ironed out a walrus track my big sister left in the trail on a fall and I did not lose verticality.

I still use the same names for those runs today. Some of those runs of the early 80's no longer exist, filled in by the constant creep of the forest on hills that once rolled open. Jump, for instance succumbed to the forest and over all those years I never caught much air on it even though I tried. I have no designs on cutting it back into existence.

This year I point my tips down Slash, Flash, Gravesend, Barnburner, Escape and Side Saddle for the first times. Each brings its own challenges. The fact that I escaped injury on all after multiple drops thus far in the season is a minor miracle. This winter may stretch long with many more opportunities for me to kill myself, so fingers still crossed, just hopefully not my ski-tips.

This day's stats

Steeped in spirits

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 03:21:46 GMT

The camera cannot capture steeps

Most skiers can identify with watching a Warren Miller film. They sit there slack-jawed, salivating as someone rips endless pillows at a sixty degree pitch on some heli-skiing dream run. The crisp air twinkles off the sapphire sky and they cannot help themselves from thinking I could do that...

But it's a movie shot five thousand miles away at 120 frames per second. Miller can speed it up, slow it down, pull away on a helicopter, or zoom in on the spray of snow ejecting off piston driving knees and it's a pro skier born with a genetic defect omitting fear, who probably already bled through three knee surgeries and some rehab stints. We definitely cannot do that .

And.

Cameras cannot seize steeps. Look below. Can you see them? I can't. But I know they are there.

Steeps are ghosts, ephemeral chills meant only for experience, never recorded.

Join me at Ridges. Let your skis crown a crest. Lean over the ledge. Attune your ear to the spirit of steeps whose sibilance whispers only on the wind of that moment. Pins on the back of the neck, snowmelt watery knees, and the small chatter of teeth do not show in the photos, but they will live in your memory. The sensations that make you shudder, invisible to the shutter, remind that here, you can live deliberately.

Neil Marshall Visits Ridges

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 03:45:35 GMT

Teacher, Coach, Mentor, Colleague, Friend, Brother.

It sounds like I led a pack of people across the road and through the woods, but in reality it was an army of one borrowing some skis and falling in behind to experience first hand what Ridges has to offer. Neil Marshall who I have known for more than 30 years drove down from Ludington to breathe some fresh air, raise the heart rate, and hear some stories of the land.

As I readied the cabin at dawn, condensation rose off the spring fed pond and raced north to freeze in fractals off low hanging branches and cedar foliage.

At 9:00 AM inside the cabin a desktop thermometer read 18 degrees Fahrenheit. I lit a fire and knew it would be a long warm up, a good 40 degrees more before it would feel chilly.

We could not possibly imagine a better ski day than December 8, 2025. Well over a foot of snow settled like cream underski after a sub-zero night. By 1:00 PM we hit the perfect cross-country ski window of low 20s, blue sky, and rosy cheeks. We clicked in and glided to the climb rising to the northwest.

We moved together enjoying the day, me and the man who I first knew as my biology teacher, who once handed out artifacts to reveal when I turned the desiccated object over and over in my bare hand that I held petrified animal scat. Me and the man who asked me to join Quiz Bowl. Later when we worked together at Hart High School he was my mentor and colleague who convinced me to coach that very team upon his retirement. And in all those days of school, careers, conversations, cribbage and countless laughs he became my friend. I trust Neil's character, his intellect and his opinion so I could think of no one better to run through a tour of my burgeoning business - Ridges. I love this man like a brother and feel so blessed that in retirement we still find time to take part in each other's lives.

Thank you Mr. Marshall for today, ten-thousand yesterdays and for many more tomorrows. As always, your compassionate spirit spurs me on...

Improving the property at Ridges

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 03:10:26 GMT

Shaping the land - enhancing its natural beauty - remembering its history

I started cutting firewood for Otto and Anna our German expat neighbors when I was four years old. Otto needed small logs to fit in their wood fire cooking stove to prepare their meals and heat their small woodland home in the center of their dead end road, 160 acre property. It would take my sister and me stacking four and half rows of 16 inch logs to fill a load before Dad would let me be done for the day.

When I was four that took.... FOREVER!!! (Probably because I barely worked).

Always done before lunch I could wile away the afternoons as I pleased all summer. Dad would return to the woods to cut our firewood in the afternoon without us. Often I would follow the growl of the chainsaw and sneak out to his worksite. I stayed out of sight lest he put me back to work. When I grew bored of his labor I headed to the creek.

There I would redirect the flow of water, build dams, dig pools, remove busted limbs that clogged the flow of the stream and splashed away the days. In my little mind I was the giant shaping the world even if it washed away before I rolled down my pant legs for the jog home.

Now - 44 years later I make a little bit more lasting impact than those summer afternoons. The fall of 2025 my vision of a ridge top trail the length of our central ridge took many weeks of long labor days. The trail I cut measures just under a quarter mile in length with multiple descents cleared for the current ski season.

The land and I worked together. The trail is not a straight Roman road subduing the countryside. Instead I cut the standing dead and weaved through the line of pines and hardwoods so I could remove the fewest live trees possible. Das Pine Line is now my favorite trail at Ridges, not just because it is the newest, but because it opens up new views over the old homestead of Otto and Anna, and meanders past their grave stone.

I feel the trail pays homage to their memory, continues what they started, allows me to share in their Letztes Stelldichein in Ewigkeit, Amen.

none-ridges-llc-bmzak

Spring Explodes

Howl to Midnight

Build Bridges Not Bombs

﻿

What Happens Next?

A Quadrillion Diamond Morning

A field of flickering facets

Boulder Ridge

When the duff is showing, the duff gets going.

To Make Much of Time

How do we spend our most precious resource?

True Snow Birds

Who needs Florida?

Happy New Year

It's always a wish.

Blizzard Feast

Landscape always alive

Slashed them all

Hit every run - just don't stop naming them.

This day's stats

Steeped in spirits

The camera cannot capture steeps

Neil Marshall Visits Ridges

Teacher, Coach, Mentor, Colleague, Friend, Brother.

Improving the property at Ridges

Shaping the land - enhancing its natural beauty - remembering its history