Glen Arbor Sun’s top stories of 2015
Photo by Rob Karner
From staff reports
2015 was the year of the storm. The “wind shear” on Sunday, August 2, packed 100-mile-per-hour gusts, toppled thousands of trees in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and around the Glen Lakes, rendered Glen Arbor impassible for days, caused millions of dollars in damages and cast a national spotlight on our rural town.
Our coverage of the storm throughout August and into the fall dominated our attention and caused a dramatic increase in readership. Online views of GlenArborSun.com, which typically reach about 1,000 a day during the high summer months, hit 78,000 the evening of the storm and a whopping 140,000 the following day. We turned the homepage into a live blog, with updates nearly every hour, during the week following the storm. While other local news outlets covered the storm in print, and with a paywall blocking free access to their websites, GlenArborSun.com quickly became the primary resource for up-to-date information on the state of Glen Arbor.
It’s rare for the Glen Arbor Sun, which celebrated its 20th year in 2015, to publish more than two or three stories about the same subject, but this megastorm was the biggest story to hit Glen Arbor in modern times — bigger even than the crowning of Sleeping Bear as “the most beautiful place in America” in 2011. As such, our top 3 stories, 6 of our top 10, and 10 of our top 20 stories from 2015 chronicled the storm, its heroes, its aftermath, what caused it, and important decisions ahead about what to do with the downed trees on Alligator Hill.
Without further adieu, here are our top 20 stories on 2015:
2, Which Glen Arbor roads are impassible
3, How you survived the Glen Arbor storm: stories from the people
5, Views of the destruction from the sky
6, Tips for finding morel mushrooms
7, Glen Arbor bear returns with cub, captured on video
8, What caused the perfect storm
9, Everyday superstar in Sleeping Bear
10, Affordable housing in Glen Arbor? Some say it’s possible
11, Community resilience: How Glen Arbor picked itself up after the megastorm
12, Cedar Rustic Inn will become Big Cat Brewing Company
13, Breaking Points
14, Will Leelanau County take Remo Polselli to court over Sugar Loaf?
15, What’s the future of Alligator Hill?
16, Black bear visits Glen Arbor
17, Peter and Cassidy Fisher’s boomerang home
18, Photos sought for book chronicling Glen Arbor storm
19, Leelanau’s early Polish settlements
20, Walking the Lake Michigan beach a public right or trespassing?
