Can Bankruptcy Save Whitecap Mountain? Maybe, But It’s Up to the Weather Now

The Wine Hut has orange shag carpet. This is the first thing you need to know. The second is that nobody has replaced it – not in the decades since it was installed, not after the main lodge burned down, not when new ownership arrived with plans to modernize. The carpet stays. It has become, through sheer persistence, a statement of intent.

The hut itself sits about a mile from the hotel, reachable only by ski or snowmobile, perched on Thunderhead Mountain like something that wandered out of the 1970s and refused to leave. Wood-burning stove. Walls shingled with photographs and patches and the accumulated evidence of sixty winters. The building was a logging company office once, then a trapper’s cabin, then – through some alchemy that defies business school logic – the spiritual center of a ski resort most Americans have never heard of.

On a good day, you can stand by the stove with the door cracked open, cold air mixing with woodsmoke, and watch Weber Lake stretch out below like a scene from a Norwegian tourism brochure. Someone hands you mulled wine served in a paper cup. Strangers start talking. A guy from Milwaukee tells you about his uncle who worked here before there were two mountains. Time goes soft at the edges.

This is Whitecap Mountain. And it almost didn’t exist this winter.

The Numbers

The bankruptcy filing landed on November 19, 2025 – a Wednesday, for those keeping score. Midwest Skiing Company LLC, Chapter 11, Western District of Wisconsin. The paperwork told a story in the language of accountants: annual revenue collapsing from $1.4 million to $197,000 in a single season, an 86 percent cliff dive. A $1.86 million loan gone sour. A foreclosure ruling in August. The filing was a tourniquet, a legal mechanism to stop the bleeding long enough to figure out if the patient could be saved.

The culprit, according to court documents, was snow. Or rather, snow’s conspicuous absence.

Whitecap has spent decades marketing itself as Wisconsin’s snowiest ski resort – not an idle boast but a geographical fact. Sixteen miles from Lake Superior, directly in the crosshairs of the lake-effect machine, this place reliably collected 200 inches or more each winter while resorts further south scraped by on whatever they could manufacture. The 2022-23 season delivered 260 inches, a banner season. The following winter brought less than 30. The season after that, 60. Two years. That’s all it took to nearly kill a place that had survived since 1962.

The Bones

The Penokee Range doesn’t look like much from the road – lumpy, forested, modest in the way of Midwestern topography. This is deceptive. The rocks beneath these slopes are 2.7 billion years old, formed when continents were just starting to exist and Earth looked more like a hostile alien planet than anyone’s vacation destination. These mountains once stood as tall as the Alps. Erosion has been working on them for longer than multicellular life has existed, grinding them down to 400-foot ridges that wouldn’t impress a Colorado teenager.

But the bones remain. Three mountains. Forty-three trails sprawling across 400 acres – not cramped and repetitive like so many Midwestern ski hills, but varied enough that devoted skiers call this terrain the best in Wisconsin and Michigan combined.

Iron made these communities. Miners pulled 325 million tons of ore from the Gogebic Range between 1877 and 1967, and the towns that sprouted around the shafts – Hurley, Ironwood, Upson – built their identities on extraction. When the last shipment left for Granite City Steel in 1967, those identities had to be rebuilt from scratch. Tourism emerged as the answer. Snow became the new ore.

Whitecap opened with a single rope tow and a small lodge. Two years later, Dave and Evie Lundberg bought the place and began what would become a 54-year project in stubbornness. They ran it on a shoestring – one account used exactly that phrase, and it fits like a worn ski boot. They traveled through Bavaria, took photographs, scribbled notes: “this would look good for the hotel.” They built something with character instead of capital. Soul instead of polish.

Dave Lundberg died in 2018. The resort changed hands. The new owner, a ski industry veteran, walked into a property with aging lifts, deferred maintenance, and exactly the kind of potential that either makes you rich or breaks you completely. He got the second option first.

The Fire

January 18, 2019. A fire sparked near the second-floor bar – closed for renovations, mercifully empty. By morning, despite fifty-plus firefighters from nine departments working through the night, the Bavarian-themed lodge was gone. Restaurant, bar, rental shop, the accumulated character of five decades – reduced to debris and insurance claims.

Except there was no insurance claim. The policy had been cancelled for non-payment before the fire. A lawsuit followed, arguing Wisconsin law required automatic renewal. The court disagreed. Whitecap absorbed roughly $5 million in losses without a dollar of coverage.

The next morning, the lifts opened on schedule.

“As long as we had electricity for the ski lifts, we were going to open,” the owner later said. Through that long night, he kept glancing north toward the Wine Hut, watching for any glow that might mean the fire had spread. The shag carpet survived.

The resort stabilized. Aging lifts got fixed. A new base area got improvised. Plans for a rebuilt lodge took shape. The hard part seemed finished. Then the snow stopped coming.

The Climate

Here is what climate change looks like in Wisconsin: winter warming twice as fast as other seasons. Northern counties seeing average lows climb six to nine degrees since 1950. First freezes arriving later each fall, last freezes retreating earlier each spring. “Winter,” as one state climatologist put it, “is being squished on both ends.”

The Hurley area historically receives more snow than anywhere else in Wisconsin. The lake-effect engine that made this region “Big Snow Country” hasn’t stopped running. It’s just become unreliable in ways that would have seemed impossible a generation ago.

Other Wisconsin resorts have adapted by investing in snowmaking. When nature won’t cooperate, you manufacture the product. It’s expensive and energy-intensive and produces something aesthetically inferior to the real thing, but it keeps the lights on and the lifts spinning.

Whitecap never built that infrastructure. Why would they? This was the place where natural snow was guaranteed, where powder days arrived with the regularity of rent payments. The snowmaking capacity that exists here amounts to a handful of guns, enough to cover a few runs in a pinch, nowhere near enough to sustain a season when the sky refuses to deliver.

“We were making snow around the clock for seven or eight days in a row and then the warm weather hits,” the owner told a local television station. “We lost out on our whole Christmas and New Year’s holiday week.”

The Community

The bankruptcy announcement hit social media and something unexpected happened: people cared. Not in the abstract way people care about endangered species or historical landmarks – in the specific, personal way that suggests real attachment.

Mount Bohemia, the cult-favorite UP ski area that trades in unmarked terrain and proud weirdness, posted public support. Former employees surfaced with memories and well-wishes. “Hope everything comes out well for Whitecap!” one wrote. “Worked there many years ago and love the terrain! Charming place for sure.”

Another comment landed like a small prayer: “We are sorry to hear of the bankruptcy and are praying for you to be able to use this fresh start to get the diamond out of the gem that is Whitecap.”

“Dude, I have had so many stellar days there,” one devoted skier told a reporter. He called skiing there when the lake-effect dumps a “spiritual” experience. He wasn’t being ironic.

The executive director of the Hurley Area Chamber of Commerce noted that generations of locals have memories of skiing these slopes. The connection runs deeper than lift tickets and lodging revenue. When a place like this disappears, something goes with it that accountants can’t measure and marketing can’t replace.

The Path Forward

A federal judge granted interim approval for Whitecap to use its cash on hand, which means season passes will be honored and employees will get paid. The resort is hiring. An opening date hasn’t been announced – waiting, presumably, on snow that may or may not arrive.

The ski industry has a term for what happens when people look out their windows and see bare grass: the “backyard effect.” No snow in the yard, no snow on the brain, no drive to the mountain. It’s a perception problem, solvable with webcams and social media and aggressive messaging about how snowmaking has you covered.

What’s happening to Whitecap isn’t a perception problem. It’s a climate reality that no webcam can fix.

“The past two seasons have been historically bad for ski resorts, not just Whitecap Mountain,” an attorney for the resort told reporters. The Chapter 11 filing, he said, “provides a path forward.” Perhaps. Bankruptcy reorganization saves companies all the time. But Whitecap’s fundamental challenge isn’t debt structure or operational efficiency. It’s the weather. And every credible projection says the weather is heading exactly the wrong direction for a natural-snow ski resort in northern Wisconsin.

The Wait

The Wine Hut will be there this winter, assuming enough snow falls to justify the trek. The wood stove will burn. The orange shag carpet will remain gloriously, defiantly unchanged – a middle finger to everyone who ever suggested that progress requires replacement. Someone will pour mulled wine into paper cups while skiers stomp snow from their boots and tell lies about the run they just finished.

Whether any of this persists beyond this season depends on Lake Superior’s thermal mood, the timing of cold fronts, the willingness of creditors to accept whatever deal emerges from bankruptcy court. The owner has survived an uninsured catastrophic fire and two historically brutal winters. He’s still fighting.

“It’s always been my idea to pay respect to this area’s history of logging, and mining, and also skiing,” he told a reporter after the fire. “That’s a big part of this area, the snowsport capital of Wisconsin.”

The title feels precarious now. Granite Peak has claimed the mantle of Wisconsin’s largest resort. The consolidators are consolidating, investing in snowmaking infrastructure that can withstand whatever the climate throws at them. Places like Whitecap – independent, character-rich, stubbornly dependent on actual snow – look increasingly like artifacts from a world that’s slipping away.

The question isn’t whether skiing survives in Wisconsin. It will, in some form, with enough artificial snow and adjusted expectations. The question is whether places like this one – places where the carpet stays because replacing it would miss the point – survive alongside the efficient operators and corporate consolidators.

The snow will either fall this winter or it won’t. The lifts will either keep spinning or they won’t. And in that little cabin on the mountain, the wood stove will wait for someone to light it.

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