Start your New Year’s holiday off with this simple checklist of resolutions you’re sure to enjoy, and maybe even keep, while snowshoeing at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Spend more time with family and friends. Check. Get some exercise. Check. Learn something new. Check. Connect with nature. Check. Explore your very own national park. Check.
Election season kicks into high gear in Leelanau County next week, as the Grand Traverse Area League of Women Voters holds a candidates forum for Leelanau County Board of Commission candidates (Districts 4, 5, 6, 7) on Monday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. at the Leelanau County Government Center.
The Leelanau Peninsula Wine Trail carries on a great holiday tradition in Northern Michigan with the 2013 Toast the Season wine tour either of the first two weekends of November. Choose your weekend to tour the wineries of Leelanau — either Nov. 3-4 or 10-11. The tour is self guided and participants may visit member wineries each day in any order desired, between the hours of 11am to 5pm Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.
With a face as weathered as one of the boulders from his fields, and a blunt demeanor to match, Glen Noonan presents a formidable figure in the complex social and geographical landscapes of Leelanau County. This farmer, businessman, political fixture and quiet benefactor to many has plowed his fields, herded cattle, shaken cherries and picked apples, mined gravel, raised seven children with his late wife Ella, been the backbone of some key local government boards, and helped shape virtually every realm of life for the region’s residents for over six decades.
When you walk through the dining room at the Cedar Rustic Inn (by the blinker just north of Cedar) on a warm evening, you pass through the back door into a cozy and charming courtyard that is shaded with umbrellas amid young maples and birch trees surrounded by tomato and lima bean plants, peonies, hydrangeas, and flower baskets mounted on the wood walls. If it’s a Wednesday night you’ll probably see Bob Smith of Glen Arbor sucking on his fingers as he polishes off the full rack of ribs. (He claims that some of his charter-fishing customers from Florida recently brought some of those leftover ribs out on the Mariah for their lunch. When they threw the bones over the side it must have attracted the salmon, because the next several fish they caught had rib bones in their mouths! But that’s a fish story.)
Katy and Matt Wiesen, owners of Crystal River Outfitters, the Cyclery and the M-22 Store in Glen Arbor were named among the region’s 40 most influential people under age 40. The honorees were treated to an exclusive fete hosted by Northwestern Michigan College inside its Dennos Museum Center, as reported this morning by the Ticker.
Meeting Taro Yamasaki for the first time, one would never guess that this soft-spoken, bespectacled man with a bit of gray in his beard wasn’t a typical Up North transplant with his slice of heaven amongst Leelanau’s trees, beaches and lake scenes. Then he begins to talk about his life’s work as a photojournalist, whose strong, often beautiful pictures paradoxically convey searing images that indict those who not only perpetrate violence upon their fellow beings, but also those of us who stand by, silent or indifferent or ignorant.
The Leelanau Scenic Heritage Route Committee, Michigan Department of Transportation, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Traverse Area Recreation and Transportation (TART) Trails, and Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes are proud to announce that the Federal Department of Transportation 2012 Public Lands Highway Discretionary (PLHD) program has awarded $1.62 million for the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail (SBHT). The PLHD funds will be used to construct 3.17 miles of the trail starting at Port Oneida Road and ending at Leelanau County Road 669/Bohemian Road.
The Leelanau Conservancy will hold its annual Picnic and Auction on Thursday, Aug. 2 at the Newton Farm overlooking the Manitou Islands on Jelinek Road. The 100-acre farm near Gills Pier was permanently protected by the Leelanau Conservancy in 2004. The picnic begins at 5 p.m. and features a silent and live auction, as well as pre-picnic field trips, a Kids Tent and a short program that includes recognizing the Conservancy’s “Volunteer of the Year” and “Business Supporter of the Year.” A local foods-focused meal will be served, along with local wines. Tickets are $30 for adults until July 30, when the price increases to $35. Tickets for Kids Tent children under 12 are just $5.
That pie you ate at Cherry Republic last week wasn’t the fruit of a local tart cherry farmer’s labor — not this year, at least. The Glen Arbor retail company’s quick-thinking president Bob Sutherland imported those pie cherries from Poland after extreme weather this spring all but wiped out northern Michigan’s tart cherry crop.