Join the Glen Arbor community for the inaugural family-friendly Pumpkin Fest from 1-6 p.m. on Oct. 22. This celebration of Fall will take place in downtown Glen Arbor all afternoon, giving participants time to carve their artistic creations, enjoy family-friendly activities and contests, followed by a Pumpkin lighting at dusk and a community Dinner.
Bob Hawley (Republican) and Peter Van Nort (Independent) are running for Glen Arbor Township Supervisor. We conducted the following Q&A with the candidates.
To close out the traditional tourism season on Labor Day weekend, Glen Arbor businesses will hold Sidewalk Sales from Thursday, Sept. 1 until Monday, Sept. 5. Visit downtown for the best deals of the season. #shopsmall in #glenarbor
The 18 x 34 foot Ugly Tomato market and gift shop on the corner of M-22 and Lake Street seems almost lost in the madness of downtown Glen Arbor. Most summer afternoons it sits idle, both doors open, welcoming the summer breeze. But the place is anything but calm. The miniscule shop withstands frequent and intense rushes of customers. The rising sun brings a surge of people, eager to get their hands on still-warm pastries and confections. Afternoons attract a steady trickle of both locals, who rely on the shop for produce, and tourists who are often surprised to find such a concentration of local goods in one store. From the chipmunk named Alvin, who demands chopped pecans by the handful, to the witty t-shirts and signs, the Ugly Tomato might be small but it oozes character. It is this sort of quirkiness that draws in curious first-timers and seasoned locals over and over again.
This photo essay looks back at the devastation caused by the storm on Aug. 2, 2015, that ravaged Glen Arbor and the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and where we are today.
On July 19, Glen Arbor will welcome “Gem Hunter” Gary Bowersox who will speak at a special Tea Talk in the garden of Becky Thatcher Designs.
The streets of downtown Glen Arbor are packed these days with tourists, beachgoers, and shoppers. The tills hum at apparel shops, rented bikes and kayaks roll off the assembly line at Crystal River Outfitters, and there’s a hungry line out the door at Art’s Tavern. But “help wanted” signs on storefronts, restaurant entrances and social media appeals, have become as ubiquitous in our tourism boomtowns — in Glen Arbor and up and down the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Meet Chris Touhey and his wife Laura, both 34 and exceptions to Michigan’s “brain drain”. Chris grew up near Glen Arbor (his family lived for a time in a farmhouse near Port Oneida that’s now in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore), left for school in Ann Arbor then spent a decade in sunny southern California. He and Laura moved this past January into a one-bedroom home that he built near the old Dickinson Gallery on south shore of Little Glen Lake. Their daughter Finley was born in February. Touhey, an architect by trade, works for a construction firm that, as luck would have it, is doing a project for the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in nearby Peshawbestown.
The 18th annual Sleeping Bear Dune Climb concert will take place Sunday, July 10, at 7 p.m. Imagine a beautiful summer’s evening at the foot of the Dune Climb in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, hundreds of families enjoying their pre-concert picnics and then a musical program provided by artists of national stature: this is the magical mixture which has filled audiences with warm memories every year since the first Dune Climb concert in 1998. The setting is magnificent and the music is even better. The concert at the Dune Climb is presented annually by the Glen Arbor Art Association and is free to the public. Because of the unique venue and incomparable music it routinely draws a large audience.
His work is washing windows, but his passion is mushrooms. His dream is to grow them commercially. Cluckey meets me at Art’s Bar on Lake Street in Glen Arbor on a muggy May morning. He’s just come from washing the windows at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church across the street. By reputation and in person, he’s the Glen Arbor version of legendary Johnny Appleseed, a quintessential backwoodsman with good skills, good stories, and palpable integrity, a great window washer and a gifted mushroom finder.