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.
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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.
Since the Lanphier Observatory was built 40 years ago during the bicentennial year of 1976, visitors to the Glen Lake area and the Leelanau School have oohed and aahed at the wonders of the universe they can see through a 14-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegranian telescope.
Benzie County natives Ethan Przekaza and Meg Doby — the latest in our occasional series on northern Michigan boomerangs — are exceptions to Michigan’s brain drain. Earlier this year they moved back from Colorado, bought a house in nearby Beulah and landed work in March at Matt and Katy Wiesen’s Crystal River Outfitters in Glen Arbor.
When the conversation turns to how the arts are represented in a community, one might point to a museum within the city’s limits; or to a restored movie theater where art house films are screened alongside blockbusters. Those are outward, bricks-and-mortar symbols of a community’s cultural life. But what, then, are the less visible characteristics of a community in which the arts are an integral part?
Everyone here has a favorite Lake Michigan beach. But what about those smaller lakes that dot our woods and meadows, or the creeks and rivers meandering through our woodlands? Which inland waters are preferred by locals who have lived in the area for a long time?