The Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA) is celebrating the fifth anniversary of its successful Bike-n-Ride program. BATA’s Bike-n-Ride service has been helping cyclists enjoy bike trails in Grand Traverse and Leelanau Counties for five years. This years’ service started Saturday, May 20 and runs through the summer and fall until October 22.
About a block up the road from the old Cannery down on the shore in Glen Haven, Henry “Hank” Bailey gets out of a white Lexus in front of an abandoned, turn-of-the-century building that looks like it used to be a store. The whole village is deserted and sad. Glen Haven today is a bleak little shore-side ghost town in the bright sunlight. It’s the off-season, middle of May, the leaves on the trees are in delicate shades, fuzzy-looking and babyish in their newness.
The League of Women Voters Leelanau County (LWVLC) will host a forum entitled “Towards an Age Friendly Leelanau: How do we get there?” at noon on Wednesday, May 3, in the lower level of the Government Center in Suttons Bay.
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.
The road to our own personal ‘Tour de Leelanau’ started, in a grand sense, around the summer solstice, when we and our bikes pedaled out of the Chicago area with the intention, like so many others, of getting ‘out to the country’ to celebrate the warm months. Earlier, in the spring, while living and working in Los Angeles, we used a program called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) to get in contact with a number of farmers situated up and down the western coast of your great state.
Peter and Cassidy (Edwards) Fisher are exceptions to the Michigan brain drain. Natives of Glen Arbor and bearing last names that are part of the town’s fabric, they forsook the East Coast and returned five years ago to make Leelanau their home.
Gov. Rick Snyder today directed the Michigan State Police to amend a recent disaster declaration for Grand Traverse County to include Leelanau County after severe thunderstorms caused widespread damage in both counties on Aug. 2.
It was a hundred-years storm. Thin trees snapped like matchsticks; thick ones toppled, one atop another, like felled soldiers. The storm’s straight-wind blast left houses with gaping holes, thousands of residents with no power for days, a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore that is, said one official, unrecognizable, and a cleanup that could take years. Mission Point Press, a Traverse City publisher, will soon release a book chronicling the historic event of Sunday afternoon, August 2.
Add “sticky mat” to your haul-to-Lake Michigan list. Yoga on the Beach is coming to Glen Haven, Aug. 13, at 8 p.m. near the cannery. “I really like bringing yoga to places where people wouldn’t normally do it,” said Amy Hubbell, Leelanau County yoga teacher and one of this event’s organizers. “Yoga on the beach is a unique way to get out and enjoy nature as you tap into health and well being.”
Albert Einstein once wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” He said it was fodder for everything from great scientific discovery to art. In the greater Grand Traverse region, such mysteries are unearthed in old articles, uprooted by the farmer’s plow, and some hidden away for protection. Each reveals something about the people who once lived here, whether the prehistoric native peoples or early settlers, they tantalize us with the mystique of the unknown.