Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Superintendent Dusty Shultz announced that the National Park Service proposes to develop a trail system (“Kettles Trail”) on federal lands in the Bow Lakes area of the National Lakeshore. To do so, the National Lakeshore will prepare an Environmental Assessment (EA) which will describe and analyze alternatives for the Kettles Trail.
Kent Kelly reports that the group, Friends of Sleeping Bear — which is independent of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore but helps the local Park maintain amenities such as the new Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail — seeks trail ambassadors for the Trail. Friends of Sleeping Bear will hold a kick-off meeting on Thursday, May 2, at 2 p.m. at the Blacksmith Shop in Glen Haven, one mile west of Glen Arbor.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is teaming up with the Clean Energy Coalition to reduce the environmental impact of its fleet by 15 percent and to share information about alternative fuels and fuel-efficient driving habits with the 1.3 million visitors who visit the National Lakeshore each year.
Effective March 1, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was required by “sequestration” (a series of automatic, across-the-board permanent spending cuts) to reduce its annual budget by 5 percent. The park must absorb that cut in the remaining seven months of this fiscal year that ends September 30. The federal law imposing sequestration requires that each park take this cut.
It wasn’t quite a “road to Damascus” epiphany, but Rob Serbin did find the road to Little Traverse Inn last year. The Glen Arbor realtor finally sold the restaurant on M-22 for the second time in seven years, this time to Scotsman Graeme Leask, after it sat idle on the market for 18 months. The sale was emblematic of Serbin’s monster year, which saw his company’s net sales surge by 250 percent. Numerous realtors in the Glen Arbor area shared that good fortune.
Photographer Ken Snyder will host a free Worldwide Photo Walk at the Sleeping Bear Dunes on Saturday, Oct. 13 from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. The walk leaves from the Glen Haven Cannery Boathouse and is open to anyone with a camera who loves to take pictures and enjoys meeting fellow photo enthusiasts.
Matt and Keegan Myers’ M-22 brand is back in the news, but for the wrong reasons. The iconic logo, of course, graces t-shirts, hats, coffee cups, bumper stickers, wine, and other items sold at retail stores in Traverse City and in Glen Arbor. The Myers brothers, who live on Old Mission Peninsula and run the annual M-22 Challenge, have made a killing since trademarking the logo about a decade ago. Sales reached $2 million this year, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The third annual Port Oneida Run — a 5K Barn to Barn Trail Run/Walk in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore will take place on Saturday, August 4. The natural trail offers an inspiring alternative to paved courses, meandering through beautiful meadows, forests, and the pastoral landscape of farmsteads from the late 1800s in the Port Oneida Rural Historic District with bluff views over Lake Michigan.
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.
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.