CABLE, Wis. — Four concrete towers in a mowed field mark where Telemark Lodge stood, a few miles east of Cable.

After moldering vacant for years, the storied lodge was demolished in 2021, though the towers remain. The tallest two are elevator shafts, each of the three stories marked by a different colored set of doors, shut for the last time to all but rock pigeons.

“I want to turn the shafts into rock climbing walls,” said Ben Popp, executive director of the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation. Popp is leading the push to do what’s historically been elusive, to make a thriving year-round business at the start of the continent’s grandest cross-country ski race.

Popp is a whirlwind of energy. He’s pacing around the Hub, a glass and timber structure with soaring south-facing windows that

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