Wakefield and Bessemer sit almost on top of each other in Michigan's far western Upper Peninsula, twin Gogebic County mining towns whose modern identity has shifted almost entirely toward the deep, reliable snowpack that has earned the surrounding hills the nickname Big Snow Country. Two of the region's best-known ski areas, Big Powderhorn Mountain and Blackjack, sit within a few minutes of both downtowns, drawing a winter sports crowd that the towns' original mining-era founders could scarcely have anticipated.
Big Snow Country
The hills around Wakefield and Bessemer average roughly two hundred inches of snowfall a year, a genuinely enormous total driven by lake-effect moisture rolling off Lake Superior and dumping its snow almost precisely where the local terrain happens to rise into skiable elevation. That reliable, heavy snowpack has made the surrounding area, marketed collectively as Big Snow Country, one of the more serious winter sports destinations anywhere in the Midwest, an identity considerably removed from the iron and copper mining economy that originally built both towns.
Downhill skiing here draws visitors from across the Upper Midwest specifically for snow totals that Michigan's more heavily trafficked ski areas further south and east simply cannot match, giving Wakefield and Bessemer a winter tourism economy that has, in recent decades, become considerably more central to local livelihoods than either town's original mining industry ever was.
From Blackjack to Snowriver
Lumberman Paul Steiger, who had already invested early in nearby Big Powderhorn Mountain, developed his own resort at Blackjack together with his family, opening the mountain to skiers in December 1977 and running it as a family operation for roughly three decades before selling to a Wisconsin investor around 2007. Big Powderhorn Mountain itself, a two-hundred-fifty-acre ski area spanning Bessemer and Ironwood townships, developed alongside Blackjack as the anchor of the area's growing ski tourism economy through the same decades.
In 2008, new ownership acquired both Blackjack and Big Powderhorn, rebranding the combined operation as Snowriver Mountain Resort, with Blackjack itself renamed Black River Basin under the new corporate identity, a consolidation that brought the area's two signature ski hills under single ownership for the first time in their history while keeping both mountains open to skiers drawn specifically by the region's exceptional, lake-effect-driven snow totals.