Goodbye analog; hello digital! Exciting changes have happened in The Leelanau School’s auditorium, and no one is more enthusiastic about them than the Glen Arbor Players. The theater group’s 2026 season starts this spring as Phase 1 of auditorium renovations, funded by grant money and generous community donations, has just been completed.
Following months of deliberation and impassioned public hearings, the Leland Planning Commission tonight rejected Apollos Properties’ special use permit application for a Youth for Christ “Lighthouse” ministry in Fishtown. In so doing, the Commission sided with findings-of-fact from outside attorney Tom Grier that found grounds to deny the special use permit. Conversely, Grier—an attorney with Running Wise & Ford—also prepared a separate document that offered the Commission a path to approve the ministry. The apparently dueling reports seemed to give the Commission defensible legal ground in the event that Apollos’ owner Jim VanSteenhouse, known as the “Bear Man,” appeals the decision or sues the Township. Much of the debate centered around whether a Youth for Christ ministry could qualify as a “club” allowed in Leland’s C-1 business district. Grier’s analysis that opposed a special use permit concluded that “private clubs, meeting halls, churches and religious institutions are not allowed as permitted or special land uses in the C-1 district.”
Heavy rain in recent days has resulted in flooding at The Mill, the iconic restaurant and cafe just east of Glen Arbor, which remains open with regular operating hours despite the hurdle. Three culverts were removed in the past couple years upstream and under County Road 675. A remaining culvert downstream from The Mill, beneath the Overbrook Drive entrance road for The Homestead resort, is underwater and stemming the flow of the river. The problem could worsen with more heavy rain expected tonight and in the days to come. The problem is not new, but has exacerbated since a late winter snowstorm in March and ensuing spring melt overwhelmed the river’s watershed.
After eight years of development and more than 42 miles of pathways constructed, the Leelanau Conservancy has completed the multi-use trail network at Palmer Woods Forest Reserve, the Conservancy reported in a press release in early April. The finished system includes more than 27 miles of purpose-built mountain bike trails and 15 miles of hiking trails. These pathways are open year-round, guiding hikers, bikers and skiers through the peaks and valleys of this glacially formed landscape. Palmer Woods, a 1,115-acre Old-Growth Forest, is the Conservancy’s largest property and was acquired in 2016. Trail development began in 2018.
Traverse Indivisible and Leelanau Indivisible are teaming up to hold a third No Kings national day of action in Traverse City on Saturday, March 28, as millions gather nationwide to protest the Trump administration’s policies and politics, at home and around the world. Organizers say they expect as many as 7,000 people to march in Traverse City “as small-town America pushes back against authoritarianism.” In a city of 16,000 people, that would make No Kings Day one of the largest protests in Northern Michigan history. The march begins at 1 pm at F&M Park in downtown Traverse City. Click here to read our coverage in the Glen Arbor Sun of the impact of the Trump administration’s politics and policy on Northern Michigan communities.
Glen Arbor earned the designation of Tree City USA by the Arbor Day Foundation in late February. A small, but persistent, group of local business owners and residents decided that it was time to ensure Glen Arbor’s recognition of trees as being crucial to the natural beauty of the small town’s scenic corridor/backdrop and the globally rare ecology of the surrounding Glen Lake and Crystal River watersheds. They worked for over a year to gain community support and build a coalition, the Glen Arbor Beautification committee (GAB), and meet the standards of the Arbor Day Foundation.
The Homestead is among a select group of resort properties nominated for the Best Of Hour Detroit awards. The Glen Arbor resort is nominated alongside the likes of the Grand Hotel, Inn at Bay Harbor, Hotel Walloon, Saint John’s Resort and others in the Michigan Resort category.
Schools and most businesses were closed across northern Michigan on Monday as a winter storm continued to move through the region. The storm that started Sunday wreaked havoc Up North, with 31 inches of snow hitting Three Lakes in the northwestern Upper Peninsula while more than a quarter-inch of ice coated trees and power lines across the northern Lower Peninsula. The storm battered the area almost exactly one year after a devastating ice storm toppled millions of trees, knocking out the region’s power grid and leaving thousands of customers in the dark—some for as long as two weeks.
The snow is falling fast and furious. Schools and businesses are closed. Northern Michiganders are arming themselves once more with shovels, snowplows and snowblowers. Nevertheless, the feared ice storm and threat of mass power outages that meteorologists warned us about appears not to have materialized—at least not in Leelanau County.
For women in particular, art has long been a vehicle for confronting gendered, social, or political marginalization. Across generations, women have used storytelling, language, the body, performance, and self-representation to make experiences previously overlooked visible. That art resonates in present-day America—a time marked by rising authoritarianism, assaults on reproductive rights, threats to LGBTQ+ communities, pervasive gun violence, environmental instability, the humanitarian crisis surrounding migration, and now, an escalating global conflict in the Middle East. This tradition of female conscience persists today, urgent and uncompromising, manifest in the work of a cohort of women artists here in northern Michigan, presented in the exhibition “We Will Not Whisper” which is on display at the Alluvion in Traverse City until April 11.