Leelanau County ranks second in the state in health, according to a study conducted by the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute. The study is based on healthy outcomes — a measure of length and quality of life — and health factors, which measures health behaviors, access to and quality of clinical care, social and economic factors, and physical environment.
The Leelanau Peninsula Chamber of Commerce will hold its first annual Bird Fest, June 1-5. This event is billed as “a unique birding festival with a conservation theme.” The festival will offer a wide variety of unique field trips including Birding by Tallship, endangered Great Lakes Piping Plovers, a 300 acre prairie, and pontoon boat to the Leelanau Conservancy’s Cedar River Preserve.
Seeking solitude, Ruth Rombaugh of Northport said goodbye to her family last May and stepped out on a 220-mile walk across Michigan. She would be spending the next three-and-a-half weeks making her solitary way from Empire to Oscoda along the Shore to Shore Trail on a journey of self-discovery. “
Courtesy of the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service — A newly elected state representative who says he doesn’t believe in man-made climate change and supports building a nuclear power plant in northern Michigan is standing by his recent claims about wind power, despite fact checking that indicates most of his assertions were incorrect.
The Port Oneida Rural Historic District — the picturesque tapestry of late 19th century farms, fields and rolling hills, just east of Glen Arbor on M-22 — will soon have a Cultural Landscape Management Plan, which Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (the local branch of the National Park Service, or NPS) will develop together with an Environmental Assessment.
There is no better way to get outside and burn off some of those extra holiday calories than by joining a Park Ranger at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on a special holiday snowshoe hike on Sunday, Dec. 26 and/or Thursday, Dec. 30.
Leelanau County’s “elephant in the room”, the long-shuttered Sugar Loaf ski resort, is back in the news following a quiet autumn season after the eccentric Las Vegas boxer-turned-businessman Liko Smith returned to the West Coast empty-handed. Resort owner Kate Wickstrom has been courted in recent months by at least two suitors, including David Skjaerlund, from Owosso, near Grand Rapids.
This fall marks the 30th anniversary of what has been called “the most widely watched PBS series in the world.” According to one of the show’s co-writers, almost a billion people worldwide have watched “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” and gained an understanding of humanity’s place in the universe, and the paths taken by early astronomers to achieve that knowledge. For 26 of those years, Norm Wheeler has shown all 13 television episodes of “Cosmos” to his high school science students at The Leelanau School in Glen Arbor.
State representative-elect Ray Franz favors cutting “Pure Michigan” funding by as much as 80 percent, the soon-to-be legislator from the 101st District told the Leelanau Enterprise last week. Franz said he would reduce funding from $25 to $30 million down to $5 to $6 million, while comparing Michigan’s tourism economy to keeping the books at the Onekema grocery store he owns.
Avian botulism returned to Lake Michigan this year, killing more species and lasting longer than other recent outbreaks, according to state wildlife officials and researchers. The increase came after a two-year lull. The outbreaks first hit Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Benzie and Leelanau counties in 2006. The die-offs rapidly spread across northern Lake Michigan shorelines and killed an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 birds in 2007.