Winter in Door County

A season in the thumb where the snow stays white while the crowds stay away

Story and photos by Alan Solomon
12:00 AM PST, February 15, 2004

Some of you are not going to read this story.

I can hear it: Door County in winter? You nuts? And off you'll go to the Home&Garden section . . .

Which I understand. Right about now, many of you are wishing you were someplace with palm trees--or someplace with actual slopes, or casinos, or cuisine beyond cheese curds.

Well, I don't blame you. Have a good time and send a postcard.

Now, for those of you who are still with me here:

Door County in winter is kind of neat. Of course, it helps if you think Door County in summer is kind of neat.

Door County in summer means beaches and live theater and galleries and wineries, and lighthouses and restaurants, and fishing and fish boils, a quintessential Door County ceremony whose true highlight--far more than the flames and foam and fish--is the concluding cherry pie.

It's a succession of villages, some of them charming. It's bicycling the backroads. Washington Island. A little golf. A walk in the woods.

It's lodging ranging from Victorian inns to mom-and-pop motels to resorts that test the limits of "quaint." Plus cottages for those who like cottages and condos for those who like condos.

It's crowds, especially on July weekends, when the year-round population of 28,641 quadruples and every one of the 114,564 are in SUVs on Wisconsin Highway 42 between Egg Harbor and Ephraim at the exact same time--5:47 p.m. on Saturday--gawking in wonder at the SUV in front of them.

"Summer's a madhouse seven days a week," says Tom Blackwood, park superintendent at Peninsula State Park in Fish Creek. "We have 473 campsites and they're filled seven days a week for about two months out of the year. We have 2,000 people living in the park every day."

"You can't just get into your car and drive to Sister Bay," says Ellison Bay bookseller-publisher Kubet "Kubie" Luchterhand. "You're going to get behind somebody who's looking off into the fields--`Oh, there's an apple tree over there . . . '"

Nonetheless, sane people adore Door County in high season, and they're right.

Which brings us to Door County in winter.

It's quiet.

More than anything else, it's quiet.

Even when a fresh midweek snow lures ski-toting tourists to Wisconsin's "thumb" by the, um, dozen, it's quiet.

"People always come in here and they say, `What do you do up here in the wintertime?'" says Luchterhand, no longer a Roosevelt University anthropologist but forever a pure-bred Wisconsonian.

"Well, what people do in Door County in the wintertime is they kind of take a deep breath and they relax."

According to Tom Lyons, who speaks for the Door County Chamber of Commerce, maybe two-thirds of the county's lodgings are open on winter weekends, and perhaps half the restaurants and possibly 40 percent of the shops. Weekdays--especially Monday through Wednesday--that shrinks to the degree that you'll still find food and shelter and maybe a bag of dried cherries, but you'd best call ahead.

There is, for sure, a different feel to Door County in winter.

I walked into the lobby of a relatively elegant hotel in Sister Bay (weekend rates start at $124) on a January Friday hoping to get a room. I was greeted by an empty front desk, a small sign that said the clerk had momentarily stepped out, an emergency phone number and an honor bar where a man, presumably a guest, was having an honor beer, munching on honor taco chips (with salsa) and watching CNN's coverage of the primaries.

It was 4:30 p.m. The guest, a Democrat, left around 5 with a lady friend. At 5:20, I called the emergency phone number. The congenial woman who answered calmly said someone should be there around 6.

Puzzled and no longer patient--the Chicago in me surfaced--I used the lobby restroom, then drove down the road to the Coachlite Inn, a very pleasant motel where the prevailing nightly weekend rate was $45.

My story didn't surprise Nora Zacek, Coachlite owner. That, she said, is Door County in winter.

"Sometimes," she said, "we'll leave keys on the desk marked `smoking' and `non-smoking' with a note that says, `Pick one. We'll settle in the morning.'"

Just walk right in

On another day, I found Ellison Bay Pottery, back in the woods off the main drag. I'd been told the studio-gallery was open, that the potter, John Dietrich, was on the premises and that his work was both wonderful and for sale.

Well, the gallery was there. The lights were out, but the door was unlocked, so I walked in and flipped on the lights, hoping to find John Dietrich. What I found was work both wonderful and for sale, and an affectionate cat, but no John Dietrich.

A day later, I found John Dietrich clearing snow from the gallery walkway and apologized for just walking in. People do it all the time, he said. Sometimes they'll take an item and leave payment and a note.

"They sort of apologize for not knowing the tax," he said. "Or it's, `Here's the money. Keep the change.'"

But John, your door was unlocked . . .

"Haven't locked the doors in the 30 years I've been here," said John Dietrich.

If this had been July, when the crowds come, chances are he would've been in the gallery, keeping watch between firings. But in winter, everything, and everybody, is just a little more relaxed in Door County, and that's just one of the charms.

"You can come here in winter and you can see things you never even imagined were here, because you can see through the trees," said Leif Erickson, who tends to things at Fish Creek's congenial Bayside Tavern.

"You've got time to take your eyes off the road--because you don't have people in front of you."

Erickson, not incidentally, also performs here with the Paul Sills Community Theater, something else you won't see in summer--it's a winter program--and that leads us to this:

Door County in winter is quiet, but it ain't dead.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

When there's snow, and there usually is, the cross-country skiing is excellent (and, of course, uncrowded). For the slightly less coordinated, there are places to rent snowshoes, and there are trails to use them in peace.

"It's pretty easy," says Lauren Gress, who rents them at Sister Bay's Bayshore Outdoor Store. "It's mimicking walking. For the most part, they're pretty beginner-friendly."

There are sledding hills, most famously Hill 17 on what, in summer, is the 17th fairway at the Peninsula State Park golf course. And there's ice fishing--and I know I'll lose people here, but guys, listen up.

"Sometimes," says Diane Charlier, who runs Brian's Bait and Tackle in Sturgeon Bay, "they'd rather be out there with a beer than home with their wife."

"When my wife knows she's going to sleep in for a day and let's me know ahead of time, I'm gone, first thing in the morning," says Steve Allen, 24, an electrician by trade. "For me, it's the quiet time. There's nothing around.

"And fish out of the colder water does taste much better."

The fish: perch, northerns, walleye, trout. All anyone needs, says Charlier, is something to cut a hole, a bucket to put their stuff in, a jigger pole or a tip-up (both less technical than they sound) and some bait.

"It's a popular thing up here," she says.

There's also snowmobiling. That would send me to the Home&Garden section, so we'll skip that.

Most of the peninsula's best restaurants--the Inn at Kristofer's, Mr. G's, the Greenwood, White Gull Inn, Mission Grille, Nightingale Supper Club, the Viking, Sister Bay Bowl and more--are open at least on the weekends, which start as early as Wednesday. (These names will mean something to Door regulars; newcomers are in for some happy discovery, and yes, there's more here than curds.) Al Johnson's Swedish Restaurant (see?) is open every day, though the goats that lunch on the roof, literally, are elsewhere.

"They're never up in the winter," says Annika Johnson, Al's daughter. "They're at his son's farm."

There's even a fish boil, just one and on Friday nights only, at the White Gull.

Plus some wineries are open, and the Hy-Line Orchard store is waiting for you with full stocks of dried, preserved and liquefied cherries and apples. "It's a quiet time, but we leave the door open," says Hy-Line owner Loretta Robertoy. "We'd have to heat it anyway."

But most of all . . .

To walk in pristine snow on an absolutely silent beach in Newport State Park, dune grass poking through the drifts, Lake Michigan frozen white and unmoving.

To be on Cana Island, with its lighthouse looking like a candle on vanilla frosting, and have it to yourself.

To stroll the streets of Ephraim, prettiest of the Door County towns, without the intrusion of constant traffic.

To ski on a cross-country trail where the only sound is the sweet rush of your skis.

To explore farm roads and discover a working artist with time to share and talent that's humbling.

To be with someone you like a lot in a room with a fireplace that's more than decorative.

To not have to wait for a table. Anywhere.

To enter a tavern from the winter chill, an uncrowded, unhurried, warm tavern, and know immediately this is a Wisconsin place and that you are among friends.

"If you want sun and warmth, go to Florida," says Lyons, the man from the chamber. "Or Mexico. If you want a lot of noise and want to be with 5,000 of your closest friends, go to Vegas.

"You want indoor water parks, the Kalahari's great," says Lyons. That's in the Dells. "That's not what we are."

What is Door County in winter?

"A great place to relax," says Dietrich, the potter.

"It's nice to be out in the woods, quietly," says Gress, the snowshoe renter.

"There are wonderful things," says Luchterhand, the bookseller.

"The snow is beautiful," says Robertoy, the grower.

"Here, the snow stays white," says Blackwood, the keeper of the park.

It is Door County's best season.

E-mail Alan Solomon: asolomon@tribune.com"> asolomon@tribune.com