TURTLE MOUNTAINS - Our own North Dakota has a place where winter settles in, deep enough and long enough to make it a snow-lover's wonderland.

Kids are lucky if they grow up in the Turtle Mountains, a unique formation covering about 1,200 square miles that rises abruptly 800 feet off the prairie on the south and gently settles back down north of the Canadian border.

Kids generally have a happier heart for winter than grownups. And in the Turtle Mountains, after a regular old school day, they can rush home, grab their skis and snowboards and head to Bottineau Winter Park.

In the dusky twilight, with fresh snow falling and the hills all lit up, they ride the lift up the hills and make run after run until someone says it's time to go home, or the park closes - whichever comes first. Some even belong to a ski racing team.

There aren't many places in North Dakota where kids can do that.

There's only one Turtle Mountains. The area attracts thousands of winter visitors to ski, snowmobile, cross-country ski, snowshoe and ice fish.

It attracts people who want to explore the great white north, where the weather blows in from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, not Sidney, Mont.

It attracts people to the splendor and solitude of the woods. Protected by trees, the snow stays in powder longer because it's not pounded into hardpack by the wind. And the snow, when it snows, falls straight down.

The trees, even stripped bare for winter, are a profusion of beauty to most North Dakotans, whose eyes are so accustomed to the horizontal ease of prairie and sky.

The Turtle Mountains, home of Lake Metigoshe State Park, Bottineau Winter Park and a tiny piece of the Turtle Mountain Reservation on the southeast, are an accidental landscape.

Thanks, glacier

If a big, cold glacier hadn't come along 25,000 years ago, the Turtle Mountains would look a whole lot different today.

In fact, what they'd look like is the Killdeer Mountains in western North Dakota - a series of broad mesas, or buttes as they're more commonly called.

The glacier inched down from the north and hung around for some 10,000 years, give or take, shearing rock and sediment into the ice.

When the weather moderated and the glacier retreated where it came from, a piece of it got hung up on top of the higher mesas, which eventually became the Turtle Mountains.

That stranded or stagnated hunk of ice didn't melt for 3,000 years.

When it finally did melt, it melted unevenly, creating hilly and irregular depressions, perfect for collecting water into sloughs and lakes. There was more precipitation then - about 50 inches a year - and the average temperature was several degrees cooler than now.

The glacier also left a thick layer of sediment that sprouted spruce, tamarack, birch, poplar and mosses, much like northern Minnesota.

John Blumle, a geologist whose notes describe their formation, said the technical terms for the Turtle Mountains are "hummocky collapsed glacial topography" or "dead-ice moraine."

Neither of those technical terms reflects the woodsy beauty of the Turtle Mountains, which are a far smaller landform than North Dakota's western Badlands, but equally as alluring in their own right.

Who goes there?

Moose go there, for one.

In the Turtle Mountains, everyone hopes to see a moose, which thrive in the lush protected woods, judging from the volume of moose poop on the trails.

There also are elk, coyotes, deer and any number of bird species and small furbearing critters flitting about the forest.

While visitors like to count their wildlife sightings, people who live in the Turtle Mountains like to count their visitors. More is good, more is better.

And also unlike the western Badlands, the Turtle Mountains has a well-developed winter tourism season.

Most years, the Turtle Mountains has a dependable snow base. People who get short shrift from snow elsewhere in the state know they can haul their snowmobiles north and head out on 250 miles of tree-lined trails.

Lake Metigoshe State Park in the Turtle Mountains gets about 12,000 visitors from November through March. That's less than the average June alone, but certainly reflects interest in playing in the snow.

At the Bottineau Winter Park, an average of 10,000 lift tickets get sold in a season, with a lot of skiers dropping down from the small north-of-the-border towns in Canada.

Nina Pettys, the park's administrative officer, said the park's three rental cabins are booked solid on weekends in February, as busy as any time in July and August.

Unlike summer, though, most weekdays are wide open, making them perfect for snow lovers who don't have school schedules to consider.

On a good weekend, it's estimated some 500 to 1,000 snowmobiles are out on the trail system, the whine of their engines carrying through the hills. They come to stop temporarily at watering holes like Twin Oakes Resort, Calvin's Clinic and the Dockside.

It's all about the snow. If it crashes in an unseasonable January thaw, cancellations come rolling in. They like it cold in the Turtle Mountains, for just that reason.

"Zero is a good spot," said Larry Hagen, park manager. "And if we got 60 inches of snow, everybody would smile."

The Turtle Mountains had about 2 feet after last weekend's storm. At Winter Park, there were 48 inches of snow on the ski runs, about half manmade, manager Bob Blatherwick said.

Minuscule snow depths elsewhere, like in Bismarck, don't amount to much more than "fire danger" to folks from the Turtle Mountains.

Forest fire

Ironically, the beauty of the Turtle Mountains was caused by fire.

A major blaze rolled in off the prairie in the 1880s, burning most of the forest, with the exception of an island in Lake Metigoshe and patches here and there.

The fire opened the forest back up and new birch and aspen sprouted from the roots of the dead trees, creating North Dakota's most expansive birch and aspen forest.

Today, though, those aspen and birch are maturing, and shade-tolerant trees like elm and ash are growing in beneath their branches.

Larry Kotchman, state forester, said short of another fire, the only way to preserve the birch and trembly aspen is to log out the mature trees so saplings again can sprout from their roots into the open sunlight.

There is some private logging going on in the Turtle Mountains. When it's managed right, it has the hoped-for effect of promoting new birch and aspen.

Kotchman said the North Dakota Forest Service is conducting similar logging on its own 13,000 acres of the Turtle Mountain forest for that very purpose.

"It's really unique and very beautiful," Kotchman said.

The Forest Service maintains camping and picnicking spots on its acres, visited by about 30,000 people every year, who hike, hunt and generally enjoy their surroundings.

Four seasons

There are journals in Lake Metigoshe State Park's rental cabins, provided for visitors to leave their thoughts and impressions.

In August 2004, one little girl wrote that the weather was too hot outside - so hot that they couldn't have a campfire, the main reason they'd come in the first place.

"Now mom's packing up to go home," she wrote, clearly ticked off at Mother Nature.

That's North Dakota, all right - four seasons running the gamut from way too hot to way too cold.

At least in winter, a person can always put on another layer, head outside and light a campfire if so inclined.

In the Turtle Mountains, that's what people do.

Mother and daughter Jean Brunkow and Joni Gebauer, of Sioux Falls, S.D., traveled 500 miles to their Turtle Mountain cabin to get outside. They put on snowmobile gear - stressing how important it is to keep the neck area covered - jumped on their snowmobiles and took off, mom in the lead.

"It's something to do together," Gebauer said.

Her mom said they would go out daily during the week they had together in the cabin, enjoying the contrast of nights tucked inside watching old movies together.

Nearby, dad Gale Feland and son Greg Feland fired up the fish auger and drilled a hole into the ice on Lake Metigoshe. They hooked up some live minnows and were after a few perch for supper, fishing in the late afternoon light that lingers longer that far north.

They were dressed right in heavy boots, pants and jackets and the all-important headgear.

But Gale Feland said summer is his favorite season in the Turtle Mountains.

"When you live here, you make the best of it," he said.

Not all motors

Motors on snowmobiles, fish augers and chairlifts, not to mention trail groomers and snowplows, certainly have their place in the Turtle Mountains.

But there is a place for quietude, too.

There is a place for listening to the sound snow makes when it hits the ground or the sound of your own breathing.

One of those places is on the 13 miles of groomed cross-country ski trails in Lake Metigoshe State Park, the longest ski trail system in the state.

Greg Stewart, of Bottineau, watched the thermometer head to 10 degrees and decided to skip work that afternoon. It was the perfect temperature for the wax on his skis, and he was itching for some fresh air and exercise.

He's a frequent trail user, but said so far, he's been unsuccessful in convincing the park staff to put in a hot tub at the trail's entrance warming shed.

The ski trails are groomed wide enough for two tracks and for anyone who'd like to snowshoe between or beside them.

A long stretch of the trail is on the 49th parallel, the boundary line between North Dakota and Canada. There, the forest is clear-cut to ease border patrol by snowmobile and helicopter.

It is a spectacular part of the ski trail, with long, swooping hills, worth the climb up for the rewarding glide down.

The park rents skis and snowshoes for $10 a day.

Brad Pozarnsky, of the Turtle Mountains, has an unusual nonmotorized way of enjoying the snow. He's a dog sledder, moderately famous for being the only North Dakotan to race in the Alaskan Iditarod, which he did in 14 days and five hours back in 1998.

Pozarnsky has 28 dogs, all of them raised and loved by him, most trained to pull a sled.

He said he loves traveling alone in the wilderness with his dogs.

"Like today," he said, after a frosty, exhilarating dog sled run down the Turtle Mountains trails, "where else can you go and find that quiet and peacefulness?"

In North Dakota, there are many places to find quiet and solitude. This is hardly a state where traffic constantly whizzes by or where people constantly interrupt our solitary wanderings.

But quiet and peacefulness are more profound in winter, when the snow itself acts like a sound barrier and muffles the background noise.

The Turtle Mountains are the best of North Dakota's winters. People who are from there learn, like Feland, to make the best of it - and more.

"The seasons - I enjoy them all so much," said Steward.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@westriv.com.)