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LEIF ENGER: Saturday nights, the Golden Eagle Lodge hangs kerosene lamps beside the trail, so you can keep skiing after dark. The string of lanterns stretches off into the distance, bright enough to light your path, dim enough not to veil the stars.

RAY ANSCHEL: We were out on the trail tonight. And I said to Jennie, I said, just stop and be quiet. And that wonderful no sound, just the breath coming from your mouth. And it's exquisite.

LEIF ENGER: Ray Anschel and his daughter Jennie are up from the cities drinking cocoa in the lodge. He teaches writing at a community college. She's on break from school out East. After the frantic holidays, they came north for peace.

JENNIE ANSCHEL: Even seeing the people that you really love seeing, after a while you just want to be able to like, be where no one can reach you. There's not a phone, and you can think.

RAY ANSCHEL: It's the same reason I can't stand going to malls. I just covet the quiet and maybe the utter simplicity that's out here. You don't really need an awful lot. A cup of hot chocolate and a stove, and that's great.

LEIF ENGER: Peace, says lodge owner Dan Baumann, is his chief commodity, and it's a perfect product for the '90s. In high demand and short supply, peace is expensive. A mid-winter week in most Gunflint Trail cabins will cost you from $600 to $1,000, if you can get a reservation.

DAN BAUMANN: We have a five-year waiting list to get in for New Year's. It's impossible to get in, literally.

LEIF ENGER: Baumann is amazed at what's happened to Minnesota winters. When his family bought the Golden Eagle in 1976, it was a rundown summer business. Four small cabins. Very few visitors. But cross-country skiing was just getting popular.

Other Gunflint resorts were spiffing up old logging roads and offering them as trails. In the early '80s, the Baumanns risked everything. They borrowed big, winterized the resort, and built seven new cabins.

DAN BAUMANN: We were struggling along. But every year, we got underneath us. We got a little better, and the business got stronger. And we got to the late '80s, the business just started taking major leaps. We're at a point right now where winter is almost better than the summer.

LEIF ENGER: The Baumann story coincides with several tourism trends. Since the late '70s, there's been steady growth in the so-called silent-sports. Cross-country skiing, hiking, snowshoeing. With the federal designation of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, people also became more interested in wilderness. Perhaps inevitably, friction soon developed between the silent-sport enthusiasts and those who preferred machines.

Meet Weasel. It's not his real name, but it's the one he likes. Weasel is 12. Been driving snowmobiles since he was nine. This one's his very own, a present from dad.

SPEAKER 1: It's a Skiddo Formula SL 1995. It's light. It's fast. It'll go about 70.

LEIF ENGER: Weasel and his group are spending the evening at a place called The Hungry Jack Lodge, a few miles from The Golden Eagle. The front door of Hungry Jack's popular bar and restaurant faces the lake. Most people arrive by snowmobile. If you come in a car, you have to park in back and walk around.

SPEAKER 2: Weasel.

SPEAKER 3: Send Weasel.

SPEAKER 4: Come on, Weasel

LEIF ENGER: Hungry Jack's is one of the Gunflint's best-known snowmobile hotspots. These guys, every last one of them from Twin Cities suburbs, have been coming back for years--

SPEAKER 2: To experience perhaps the last frontier.

SPEAKER 3: The women.

SPEAKER 2: No, no.

SPEAKER 3: You're seeing parts of Minnesota you would never normally see. And you're socializing with your good friends. And it's a good time.

SPEAKER 4: We've built a lot of friendships through snowmobiling.

LEIF ENGER: Jerry Parson is the owner of Hungry Jack's. White-bearded, gruff, and outgoing, Parson remembers the scrapes of the middle '80s. Snowmobilers riding over groomed ski trails. Skiers finding unoccupied sleds in the woods and tossing away the keys. Both camps say those things don't happen anymore. Their respective trails are established and marked, and never the Twain shall meet. Parson says the differences between his clientele and Dan Baumann's can be explained in a few, mostly accurate, clichés.

JERRY PARSON: Cross-country skiers are more environmentalists. We call them the greens, the tree huggers. And that isn't all bad. I'm not-- that's just their group.

And snowmobilers are bikers, jet skiers. They're machine people. And you always have that conflict.

LEIF ENGER: Parson, like Baumann, was a purely summertime resorter at first until snowmobiles began breaking sales records in the late '70s. Minnesotans now own about 275,000 registered sleds. That's a lot of dinners and overnight stays, and also a lot of decibels and Budweisers. At the bar, a customer who didn't want his name used said snowmobilers have developed a habitual defensiveness.

SPEAKER 5: We're under the gun right now. You're burning fossil fuels. That's bad.

You're treading on the environment. That's bad. In the public eye, it's not a very good thing.

LEIF ENGER: All the same, it's common for 250 snowmobilers to hit Hungry Jack's on a Saturday night for a room or dinner or fuel. Jerry Parsons says 35% of his business now occurs in the winter. And this winter for both silent and motorized sports has been better than most.

With much of the state barren of snow, snowmobilers and skiers have been flocking to the Gunflint in record numbers. High school cross-country ski teams have driven five hours north to practice. Resorts have sold up to 10 times the usual number of one-day trail passes. In the ongoing debate over who's most important to the region, the greens or the machines, one business owner told MPR, it's foolish to have an opinion. Leif Enger, Main Street Radio.