Podcasts about lower peninsula

Michigan, with its vast forests, remote wilderness, and deep-rooted Native American legends, has long been a hotspot for mysterious Bigfoot sightings. Known locally by names like "Sasquatch" or “The Michigan Wildman,” reports of encounters stretch from the Upper Peninsula down to the wooded trails of the Lower Peninsula. Witnesses describe large, hairy, ape-like creatures standing over 7 feet tall, with glowing eyes and a powerful, musky odor. These elusive beings are often spotted crossing rural roads, lurking near rivers, or vocalizing through howls and tree knocks deep in the night.Some of the most famous hotspots include the Manistee National Forest, the Huron Mountains, and remote areas near the Sleeping Bear Dunes. Eyewitness accounts often include chilling experiences—unexplained footprints, sudden silences in the woods, or eerie feelings of being watched. Michigan researchers and Bigfoot enthusiasts continue to document sightings, collect evidence like audio recordings and plaster casts, and investigate these ongoing encounters. Whether seen as folklore or fact, Bigfoot remains an enduring mystery rooted deeply in Michigan's wild and untamed terrain.#Bigfootb #Sasquatch #BigfootSightings #BigfootHunters #BigfootEvidence

Surviving the Ice Storm: Nature's Resilience and Challenges John and Richard are joined by Dr. Greg Corace to discuss the aftermath of the impactful ice storm that hit the northern lower Peninsula at the end of March. Greg shares his insights on how this natural event affected the woods around us. Greg is a professional Forest and Wildlife Ecologist and is a contact for the Forestry Assistance Program in Alpena and Montmorency Counties. He began working at the Alpena-Montmorency Conservation District in July 2019.  Greg has a Bachelor's of Science (Zoology) and a Master's of Science (Biology) from Northern Michigan University and a Ph.D. (Forest Science) from Michigan Technological University. Greg was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana. Click here for Greg's full resume/CV. Over the last 20+ years, Greg has conducted forest planning, applied research, management, and inventory and monitoring on public and private lands in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan.  As an aside; if you are interested in learning more about the storm, the National Weather Service also has a great write-up(weather geek stuff) on the storm – definitely worth a read. As always; we're grateful for your time and hope you enjoy our shows.  The Lovells Township Historical Society is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the heritage of Lovells and northern Michigan. Through our museums and events, we strive to enrich our community and preserve the important history of the area while sharing it with our residents and visitors. The Lovells Township Historical Society is a 501 (c) (3) organization whose genesis can be traced back to the August 1990 Heritage Days Celebration. For a more detailed history of the Historical Society, visit here.    

For decades, Michigan State University has been working with partners in Detroit to support the city's economic development, advance the arts, transform schools, improve health and protect the environment. And, after a successful and illuminating trip with visits along the western Lower Peninsula of Michigan in the fall of 2024, this May, the Spartan Bus Tour headed to Detroit.Just as the inaugural Spartan Bus Tour demonstrated how Spartans are making a difference across the state, a tour of metro Detroit illustrated how the partnerships between the city and Michigan State are changing our state for the better.Taking place May 5 and 6 with stops at 12 locations in the Detroit area, the tour was led by MSU President Kevin Guskiewicz, and included a delegation of 50 faculty and administrators who explored the breadth and depth of the university's research, outreach and education impact in a city that, like MSU, values resilience, hard work and a commitment to solving problems and empowering people for better lives.Conversation Highlights:(1:20) - President Guskiewicz sets the scene. (2:00) - The Zekelman Holocaust Center opened its doors in 1984 in West Bloomfield and relocated to the current Farmington Hills location in 2004. It was the first stop on the tour. The center is home to the Holocaust Museum exhibit and an extensive research library, archives and special exhibit galleries. Each year, more than 150,000 people visit the center, whose mission is to engage, educate and empower by remembering the Holocaust. Eli Mayerfeld is CEO of the Holocaust Museum.(6:35) - The second stop on Day 1 was at the Detroit Partnership for Food, Learning and Innovation, or DPFLI: The DPFLI was founded in 2017 and is MSU's first urban agriculture center. Housed within MSU Extension, the partnership in northwest Detroit focuses on research and education to improve the lives of Detroiters and serves as a community space for residents. Naim Edwards directs DPFLI, George Smith directs MSU AgBioResearch and Dave Ivan directs the Community Food and Environment Institute.(16:07) - The third stop on Day 1 was at The Shepherd and LANTERN, which are part of Library Street Collective's ongoing artistic commitment to Detroit's Little Village neighborhood. Anthony Curis is co-founder of The Shepherd and Library Street Collective. (21:30) - The fourth stop on Day 1 was a visit to Magna International: Magna International is the largest automobile parts manufacturer in North America with its U.S. headquarters in Troy. Heather Holm is talent attraction and employer brand manager.(23:44) - Stop five on Day 1 was at the Apple Developer Academy: Partnering with MSU, Apple's first U.S.-based academy was launched in 2021 in Detroit where participants learn the essentials of coding, design and business with Apple tools. The academy offers free programs of 10 months and four weeks, and, to date, has graduated more than 1,000 learners from the metro Detroit area. Sarah Gretter is director of the academy, and Anny Staten is assistant director.(27:10) - The final stop...

We're wrapping up another month this weekend on Outdoor Magazine radio. First, Kyle Green of The Greenway Outdoors talks about a plan to kill nuisance geese across Michigan. Then, Tom Campbell from Woods-n-Waternews takes us inside their latest edition. Hour two features steelhead guide Paul Schalfley of Riverside Charters in Manistee. Justin Tomei from MUCC is up next with a discussion about a proposed license fee increases and a plan to allow baiting in the Lower Peninsula. In this week's final hour I talk with Doug Ward of Xpress Fishing Charters on Detroit River and Saginaw Bay walleye. We wrap it all up with chef Dave Minar and another great recipe.

Discover how more than one weather pattern system impacted the Great Lakes Region per U.S. Upper Midwest & Southwest Ontario Canada between late October into early November 1913. Find out what hurdles faced the U.S. Weather Bureau involving storm forecasting in 1913. Get an in depth analysis behind when the storm first struck Lake Huron including final aftermath. Discover exactly where Presque Isle Township is located in Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Determine primary reason why the need for a lighthouse was so strong around Presque Isle Harbor during early 1830's. Get introduced to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Officer Major Orlando Metcalfe Poe. Understand importance behind steam fog signals. Get acquainted with Rogers City, Presque Isle's official county seat. Learn just how large Lake Huron truly is along with the total number of islands it possesses. Understand just how severe the threat level was involving 50 Mile stretch of shoreline between Cheboygan & Presque Isle Lighthouse. Figure out how 40 Mile Point Light got its name including total number of shipwrecks recorded along Lake Huron's waters since 2006. Determine if in fact the Straits of Mackinac connect multiple Great Lakes. Understand significance behind Spectacle Reef Light from a cost standpoint. Go behind the scenes and learn exactly how the Straits of Mackinac went about getting its name. Learn how vehicles accessed Straits of Mackinac prior to 1957 along with discovering an assortment of fascinating facts about the Mackinac Bridge itself. Discover how the Anishinabe People navigated around Straits of Mackinac prior to European arrival including lighthouses getting built. Receive a timeline of events between 1829-1892 leading up to constructing Old Mackinac Point Light. Learn if Old Mackinac Point Light provided vital services to railroad car ferries and how it became impacted once Mackinac Bridge opened. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michigan Cider: The Great Cider State with Paula Englin Michigan has earned its place as a leader in the cider industry, boasting the highest number of hard cider businesses in the U.S. In this episode, Paula Englin, Executive Director of the Michigan Cider Association, discusses the state's growth in cider, the role of education, and how Michigan cider makers are shaping the industry with events like the well known cider competition GLINTCAP – Great Lakes International Cider and Perry competition. MCA Executive Director Paula Englin With nearly 195 cider businesses and a thriving community, Michigan truly is The Great Cider State Growing Michigan Cider: Collaboration & Education The Michigan Cider Association was founded over a decade ago to bring cider makers together, advocate for legislative needs, and expand consumer awareness. Today, the association focuses on education, providing opportunities for cider makers at all levels—from home enthusiasts to large-scale producers. One of the recent big initiatives has been working with the Cider Institute, formely known as the Cider Institute of North America (CINA), to offer subsidized cider education. Michigan cider makers have benefited from foundational courses, cider guide certifications for taproom staff, and marketing efforts that drive cider sales across the state. Mapping Michigan's Cider Scene Michigan's unique geography, shaped by the Great Lakes, creates an ideal environment for growing apples. Many cider makers source their fruit locally, often within 30 minutes of their production sites. Here's how the cider landscape breaks down: To use this Hand Map – Hold up your left hand, palm facing outward, with fingers together and thumb extended—this mimics Michigan's Lower Peninsula, often called “The Mitten,” with Detroit near the base of the thumb and Traverse City near the tip of your pinky. Metro Detroit (Thumb region) – A hub for orchards and cideries, home to well-known producers. Southwest Michigan (Pinky side of the mitten) – A mix of wineries and cideries, taking advantage of the region's wine industry crossover. Grand Rapids & the Fruit Ridge (Center of the mitten) – A major apple-growing region supplying cideries statewide. Traverse City (Top of the mitten) – A destination for cider lovers, known for high-quality cider apples and innovative makers. Cider Events That Put Michigan on the Map Michigan's cider industry thrives on consumer engagement, and events play a major role in getting more people to appreciate and support local cider. Michigan Apple Festival (Sparta, MI) – A harvest celebration featuring local apple growers, cider producers, and even an apple peeling contest! Cider Week Grand Rapids (May 9-17, 2025) – A week of cider-focused events, including pairing dinners, tap takeovers, and a board game night at House Rules in Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids Wine, Beer & Food Festival – Showcasing a variety of Michigan ciders to educate new consumers and cider fans alike. GLINTCAP: Great Lakes International Cider and Perry competition Michigan is also home to GLINTCAP (Great Lakes International Cider & Perry Competition), the world's largest cider competition. Paula now oversees the event, which continues to grow, introducing a low and no-ABV category for the first time in 2025. One major shift? Judging is now fully digital, improving feedback delivery and accuracy. The competition also expanded international accessibility, making it easier for cider makers worldwide to participate. Contant the Michigan Cider Association Website: https://michiganciders.com/ Mentions in this Cider Chat Totally Cider Tour to the UK – send an email to info@ciderchat.com to get on the wait list for spots opening on this 2025 tour taking place August 25-31, 2025 and future cider tours. Letter from Patron Rod – Become a patron of Cider Chat via Cider Chat Patreon Stone Ridge Orchard May Wassail – follow on Instagram Episode 296 Bauman's |Oregon's Destination Farm Cidery

Originally uploaded October 8th, re-edited December 17th. Chris Holman welcomes back Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Ph.D., President, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. Welcome back you just had your Investiture on Sunday, share what that is, with the Michigan business community? During that you had a speech covering several things; tell us about a New merit based scholarship ? Share about Expanding transfer student programs for those transferring from community colleges to MSU? What is the Native American Tuition Advantage program? Tell us about Creation of a Green and White Council ? We hear you will have a Spartan Bus Tour going around Michigan for 3 days, what's that all about? » Visit MBN website: www.michiganbusinessnetwork.com/ » Watch MBN's YouTube: www.youtube.com/@MichiganbusinessnetworkMBN » Like MBN: www.facebook.com/mibiznetwork » Follow MBN: twitter.com/MIBizNetwork/ » MBN Instagram: www.instagram.com/mibiznetwork/ Michigan State University students, faculty, staff, alumni and dignitaries gathered to celebrate the investiture of MSU's 22nd president, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Ph.D., at 2 p.m. on Sept. 29 at Wharton Center's Cobb Great Hall. Presidential investitures are typically held in a leader's first year in office to publicly and formally “vest” them with the authority of the office and acknowledge, introduce and celebrate the new leader. Investitures also represent continuity, connecting a university's present with its past and allowing new leaders an opportunity to express their vision for the institution's future. Guskiewicz, a noted academic leader and neuroscientist, embarked on a 52-stop listening and learning tour of MSU's colleges and major administrative units during the first several months of his presidency. These visits underscored for the president the student-focused, passionately public work that happens at MSU every day. Michigan State University President Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Ph.D., with nearly seven months at the helm of the presidency, is helping to write the next chapter of MSU's storied history — one that continues to be student-centered, with a focus on inclusivity, accessibility and global impact as a leading public research university. Guskiewicz highlighted several initiatives during September 29th's investiture ceremony he and university leadership plan to roll out in the coming weeks and months, including efforts to increase accessibility to an MSU degree, meeting the needs of a 21st-century workforce, and the second iteration of the university's Global Impact Initiative that was approved by the Board of Trustees in June. To increase access and reduce financial barriers to a quality, accessible, world-class education, Guskiewicz announced a new merit-based scholarship named after MSU's first president and first lady, Joseph R. and Sarah L. Williams. The scholarship will fund tuition, food and housing, and an education abroad or other experiential education opportunity for undergraduates. Guskiewicz also announced the establishment of the Native American Tuition Advantage program, an expansion of the current Spartan Tuition Advantage program. Students from anywhere in the United States or Canada who meet tribal affiliation criteria will qualify for in-state tuition levels and potentially the Spartan Tuition Advantage program. Also, from Oct. 21-23, Michigan State University President Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Ph.D., and a group of faculty and administrators are set to go out on the inaugural Spartan Bus Tour. Intending to visit locations throughout the western Lower Peninsula of Michigan to build community connections and strengthen MSU's commitment to education, research, outreach and extension.

...Widespread heavy rain threat developing from the central and easternGulf Coast to the entire East Coast tonight into Wednesday......Arctic air to plunge south and eastward across the northern Plains,Upper Midwest, and Great Lakes tonight into Wednesday......Another round of significant lake effect snow to begin Wednesday andcontinue through Thursday downwind of the Lakes...A developing storm system over the Southeast U.S. is set to bringwidespread heavy rains from the central and eastern Gulf Coast to theentire East Coast tonight into Wednesday. A wave of low pressure willrapidly strengthen and move northeastward across the interior Mid-Atlanticand Northeast, dragging a strong cold front along with it. Ahead of thefront, warm and moist air will set the stage for numerous showers andthunderstorms, some of which could become strong to severe. This isespecially the case across eastern North Carolina on Wednesday, where theStorm Prediction Center has issued a Slight Risk (level 2 of 5) for severethunderstorms capable of producing damaging wind gusts. Elsewhere alongthe Eastern Seaboard, the main concern will be a period of heavy rain withembedded strong thunderstorms and intense downpours. Despite much of theregion currently experiencing moderate to extreme drought conditions, therain, while mostly beneficial, could still lead to some localizedinstances of flash flooding. The more urbanized locations and poordrainage areas would have the greater risk of flooding issues.The cold front will sweep across the East Coast Wednesday into Thursday,with much colder air surging in from the north and northwest in its wake.This Arctic blast will first plunge into the northern Plains and UpperMidwest tonight before expanding eastward across the Great Lakes,Mid-Atlantic and Northeast Wednesday and Thursday. High temperatures thenext couple of days will be roughly 10 to as much as 30 degrees belownormal. The cold post-frontal air mass will also help to change rain tosnow across the western slopes of the Appalachians and interior portionsof New England and the Northeast with at least modest accumulationslooking like a decent bet.Attention then turns to yet another round of significant lake effect snowdownwind of the Great Lakes Wednesday through Thursday. The aforementionedArctic air will stream across the still relatively warm Great Lakes andignite intense bands of lake effect snow, initially downwind of LakesSuperior and Michigan on Wednesday and then downwind of Lakes Erie andOntario Wednesday night into early Thursday. By the time the snow startsto taper off on Friday, snowfall totals of 1 to 2 feet are likely in thefavored Snow Belt across portions of northwest and western New York State,far northwest Pennsylvania, far northeastern Ohio, the Upper Peninsula ofMichigan and the western portions of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 10. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 17. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoJohn Melcher, CEO of Crystal Mountain, MichiganRecorded onOctober 14, 2024About Crystal Mountain, MichiganClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Petritz FamilyLocated in: Thompsonville, MichiganYear founded: 1956Pass affiliations: Indy Pass & Indy+ Pass: 2 days, no blackoutsReciprocal partners: 1 day each at Caberfae and Mount Bohemia, with blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Caberfae (:37), Hickory Hills (:45), Mt. Holiday (:50), Missaukee Mountain (:52), Homestead (:51)Base elevation: 757 feetSummit elevation: 1,132 feetVertical drop: 375 feetSkiable Acres: 103Average annual snowfall: 132 inchesTrail count: 59 (30% black diamond, 48% blue square, 22% green circle) + 7 glades + 3 terrain parksLift count: 8 (1 high-speed quad, 3 fixed-grip quads, 2 triples, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Crystal Mountain's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himThe biggest knock on Midwest skiing is that the top of the hill is not far enough away from the bottom of the hill, and this is generally true. Two or three or four hundred vertical feet is not a lot of vertical feet. It is enough to hold little pockets of trees or jumps or a racer's pitch that begs for a speed check. But no matter how fun the terrain, too soon the lift maze materializes and it's another slow roll up to more skiing.A little imagination helps here. Six turns in a snowy Michigan glade feel the same as six turns in Blue Sky Basin trees (minus the physiological altitude strain). And the skillset transfers well. I learned to ski bumps on a 200-vertical-foot section of Boyne Mountain and now I can ski bumps anywhere. But losing yourself in a 3,000-vertical-foot Rocky Mountain descent is not the same thing as saying “Man I can almost see it” as you try to will a 300-footer into something grander. We all know this.Not everything about the lift-served skiing experience shrinks down with the same effect, is my point here. With the skiing itself, scale matters. But the descent is only part of the whole thing. The lift maze matters, and the uphill matters, and the parking matters, and the location of the lift ticket pick-up matters, and the availability of 4 p.m. beers matters, and the arrangement base lodge seating matters. And when all of these things are knotted together into a ski day that is more fun than stressful, it is because you are in the presence of one thing that scales down in any context: excellence.The National Ski Areas Association splits ski areas into four size categories, calculated by “vertical transportation feet per hour.” In other words: how many skiers your lifts can push uphill in an ideal hour. This is a useful metric for many reasons, but I'd like to see a more qualitative measurement, one based not just on size, but on consistent quality of experience.I spend most of my winter bouncing across America, swinging into ski areas of all sizes and varieties. Excellence lives in unexpected places. One-hundred-and-sixty-vertical-foot Boyce Park, Pennsylvania blows thick slabs of snow with modern snowguns, grooms it well, and seems to double-staff every post with local teenagers. Elk Mountain, on the other side of Pennsylvania, generally stitches together a better experience than its better-known neighbors just south, in the Poconos. Royal Mountain, a 550-vertical-foot, weekends-only locals' bump in New York's southern Adirondacks, alternates statuesque grooming with zippy glades across its skis-bigger-than-it-is face.These ski areas, by combining great order and reliable conditions with few people, are delightful. But perhaps more impressive are ski areas that deliver consistent excellence while processing enormous numbers of visitors. Here you have places like Pats Peak, New Hampshire; Wachusett, Massachusetts; Holiday Valley, New York; and Mt. Rose, Nevada. These are not major tourist destinations, but they run with the welcoming efficiency of an Aspen or a Deer Valley. A good and ordered ski day, almost no matter what.Crystal Mountain, Michigan is one of these ski areas. Everything about the ski experience is well-considered. Expansion, upgrades, and refinement of existing facilities have been constant for decades. The village blends with the hill. The lifts are where the lifts should be. The trail network is interesting and thoughtfully designed. The parks are great. The grooming is great. The glades are plentiful. The prices are reasonable. And, most important of all, despite being busy at all times, Crystal Mountain is tamed by order. This is excellence, that thing that all ski areas should aspire to, whatever else they lack.What we talked aboutWhat's new for Crystal skiers in 2024; snowmaking; where Crystal draws its snowmaking water; Peek'n Peak, New York; why Crystal is a good business in addition to being a good ski area; four-seasons business; skiing as Mother; what makes a great team (and why Crystal has one); switching into skiing mid-career; making trails versus clearcutting the ski slope; ownership decided via coinflip; Midwest destination skiing's biggest obstacle; will Crystal remain independent?; room to expand; additional glading opportunities; why many of Crystal's trails are named after people; considering the future of Crystal's lift fleet; why Crystal built a high-speed lift that rises just 314 vertical feet; why the ghost of the Cheers lift lives on as part of Crystal's trailmap; where Crystal has considered adding a lift to the existing terrain; that confusing trailmap; a walkable village; changes inbound at the base of Loki; pushing back parking; more carpets for beginners; Crystal's myriad bargain lift ticket options; the Indy Pass; why Crystal dropped Indy Pass blackouts; the Mt. Bohemia-Crystal relationship; Caberfae; Indy's ultimatum to drop Ski Cooper reciprocals or leave the pass; and why Crystal joined Freedom Pass last year and left for this coming winter.  Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThe Storm's mission is to serve all of American lift-served skiing. That means telling the stories of ski areas in every part of the country. I do this not because I have to, but because I want to. This newsletter would probably work just fine if it focused always and only on the great ski centers of the American West. That is, after all, the only part of U.S. ski country that outsiders travel to and that locals never leave. The biggest and best skiing is out there, at the top of our country, high and snowy and with a low chance of rain.But I live in the East and I grew up in the Midwest. Both regions are cluttered with ski areas. Hundreds of them, each distinct, each its own little frozen kingdom, each singular in atmosphere and arrangement and orientation toward the world. Most remain family-owned, and retain the improvisational quirk synonymous with such a designation. But more interesting is that these ski areas remain tethered to their past in a way that many of the larger western destination resorts, run by executives cycled in via corporate development programs, never will be again.I want to tell these stories. I'm aware that my national audience has a limited tolerance for profiles of Midwest ski centers they will never ski. But they seem to be okay with about a half-dozen per year, which is about enough to remind the wider ski community that this relatively flat but cold and hardy region is home to one of the world's great ski cultures. The Midwest is where night-skiing rules, where blue-collar families still ski, where hunting clothes double as ski clothes, where everything is a little less serious and a little more fun.There's no particular big development or project that threw the spotlight on Crystal here. I've been trying to arrange this interview for years. Because this is a very good ski area and a very well-run ski area, even if it is not a very large ski area in the grand landscape of American ski areas. It is one of the finest ski areas in the Midwest, and one worthy of our attention.What I got wrong* I said that “I forget if it's seven or nine different tree areas” at Crystal. The number of glades labeled on the trailmap is seven.* I said Crystal had been part of Indy Pass “since the beginning or near the beginning.” The mountain joined the pass in May, 2020, ahead of the 2020-21 ski season, Indy's second.Why you should ski Crystal Mountain, MichiganCrystal's Loki pod rises above the parking lots, 255 vertical feet, eight trails down, steep on the front, gentler toward the back. These days I would ski each of the eight in turn and proceed next door to the Clipper lift. But I was 17 and just learning to ski and to me at the time that meant bombing as fast as possible without falling. For this, Wipeout was the perfect trail, a sweeping crescent through the trees, empty even on that busy day, steep but only for a bit, just enough to ignite a long sweeping tuck back to the chairs. We lapped this run for hours. Speed and adrenaline through the falling snow. The cold didn't bother us and the dozens of alternate runs striped over successive hills didn't tempt us. We'd found what we'd wanted and what we'd wanted is this.I packed that day in the mental suitcase that holds my ski memories and I've carried it around for decades. Skiing bigger mountains hasn't tarnished it. Becoming a better skier hasn't diminished it. Tuck and bomb, all day long. Something so pure and simple in it, a thing that bundles those Loki laps together with Cottonwoods pow days and Colorado bump towers and California trees. Indelible. Part of what I think of when I think about skiing and part of who I am when I consider myself as a skier.I don't know for sure what Crystal Mountain, Michigan can give you. I can't promise transformation of the impressionable teenage sort. I can't promise big terrain or long runs because those don't have them. I'm not going to pitch Crystal as a singular pilgrimage of the sort that draws western Brobots to Bohemia. This is a regional ski area that is most attractive to skiers who live in Michigan or the northern portions of the states to its immediate south. Read: it is a ski area that the vast majority of you will never experience. And the best endorsement I can make of Crystal is that I think that's too bad, because I think you would really like it, even if I can't exactly explain why.Podcast NotesOn Peek'n PeakThe most difficult American ski area name to spell is not “Summit at Snoqualmie” or “Granlibakken” or “Pomerelle” or “Sipapu” or “Skaneateles” or “Bottineau Winter Park” or “Trollhaugen,” all of which I memorized during the early days of The Storm. The most counterintuitive, frustrating, and frankly stupid ski area name in all the land is “Peek'n Peak,” New York, which repeats the same word spelled two different ways for no goddamn reason. And then there's the apostrophe-“n,” lodged in there like a bar of soap crammed between the tomato and lettuce in your hamburger, a thing that cannot possibly justify or explain its existence. Five years into this project, I can't get the ski area's name correct without looking it up.Anyway, it is a nice little ski area, broad and varied and well-lifted, lodged in a consistent little Lake Erie snowbelt. They don't show glades on the trailmap, but most of the trees are skiable when filled in. The bump claims 400 vertical feet; my Slopes app says 347. Either way, this little Indy Pass hill, where Melcher learned to ski, is a nice little stopover:On Crystal's masterplanCrystal's masterplan leaves room for potential future ski development – we discuss where, specifically, in the podcast. The ski area is kind of lost in the sprawl of Crystal's masterplan, so I've added the lift names for context:On Sugar Loaf, MichiganMichigan, like most ski states, has lost more ski areas than it's kept. The most frustrating of these loses was Sugar Loaf, a 500-footer parked in the northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula, outside of Traverse City. Sunday afternoon lift tickets were like $12 and my high school buddies and I would drive up through snowstorms and ski until the lifts closed and drive home. The place went bust around 2000, but the lifts were still standing until some moron ripped them out five years ago with fantasies of rebuilding the place as some sort of boutique “experience.” Then he ran away and now it's just a lonely, empty hill.On Michigan being “littered with lost ski areas”Michigan is home to the second-most active or semi-active ski areas of any state in the country, with 44 (New York checks in around 50). Still, the Midwest Lost Ski Areas project counts more than 200 lost ski areas in the state.On Crystal's backside evolution and confusing trailmapBy building pod after pod off the backside of the mountain, Crystal has nearly doubled in size since I first skied there in the mid-90s. The Ridge appeared around 2000; North Face came online in 2003; and Backyard materialized in 2015. These additions give Crystal a sprawling, adventurous feel on par with The Highlands or Nub's Nob. But the trailmap, while aesthetically pleasant, is one of the worst I've seen, as it's very unclear how the three pods link to one another, and in turn to the front of the mountain:This is a fixable problem, as I outlined in my last podcast, with Vista Map founder Gary Milliken, who untangled similarly confusing trailmaps for Mt. Spokane, Washington and Lookout Pass, Idaho over the past couple of years. Here's Lookout Pass' old and new maps side-by-side:And here's Mt. Spokane:Crystal – if you'd like an introduction to Gary, I'm happy to make that happen.On resort consolidation in the MidwestThe Midwest has not been sheltered from the consolidation wave that's rolled over much of the West and New England over the past few decades. Of the region's 123 active ski areas, 25 are owned by entities that operate two or more ski areas: Vail Resorts owns 10; Wisconsin Resorts, five; Midwest Family Ski Resorts, four; the Schmitz Brothers, three; Boyne, two; and the Perfect Family, which also owns Timberline in West Virginia, one. But 98 of the region's ski areas remain independently owned and operated. While a couple dozen of those are tiny municipal ropetow bumps with inconsistent operations and little or no snowmaking, most of those that run at least one chairlift are family-owned ski areas that, last winter notwithstanding, are doing very well on a formula of reasonable prices + a focus on kids and night-skiing. Here's the present landscape of Midwest skiing:On the consolidation of Crystal's lift fleetCrystal once ran five frontside chairlifts:Today, the mountain has consolidated that to just five, despite a substantively unchanged trail footprint. While Crystal stopped running the Cheers lift around 2016, its shadowy outline still appears along the Cheers To Lou run.Crystal is way out ahead of the rest of the Midwest, which built most of its ski areas in the age of cheap fixed-grip lifts and never bothered to replace them. The king of these dinosaurs may be Afton Alps, Minnesota, with 15 Hall chairlifts (it was, until recently, 17) lined up along the ridge, the newest of them dating to 1979:It's kind of funny that Vail owns this anachronism, which, despite its comic-book layout, is actually a really fun little ski area.On Crystal's many discounted lift ticket optionsWhile Crystal is as high-end as any resort you'll find in Michigan, the ski area still offers numerous loveably kitschy discounts of the sort that every ski area in the country once sold:Browse these and more on their website.On Indy Pass' dispute with Ski CooperLast year, Indy Pass accused Ski Cooper of building a reciprocal resort network that turned the ski area's discount season pass into a de facto national ski pass that competed directly with Indy. Indy then told its partners to ditch Cooper or leave Indy. Crystal was one of those resorts, and found a workaround by joining the Freedom Pass, which maintained the three Cooper days for their passholders without technically violating Indy Pass' mandate. You can read the full story here:On Bohemia and CaberfaeCrystal left Freedom Pass for this winter, but has retained reciprocal deals with Mount Bohemia and Caberfae. I've hosted leaders of both ski areas on the podcast, and they are two of my favorite episodes:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 73/100 in 2024, and number 573 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Get to know why combers are important. Receive an in depth analysis report behind SS Novadoc's journey on Lake Michigan starting around 12PM come November 11. Get introduced to William Krewell, Little Sable Point's Lighthouse Keeper, including his role behind performing communication miracle networking when so many other people were experiencing the exact opposite. Learn about the procedures which United States Coast Guard Stations along Lake Michigan required their crews to perform. Determine if there are special vessels within United States Coast Guard. Come across an unexpected situation impacting the Coast Guard along Lake Michigan Monday November 11. Discover just how intense the overall wind speed came out to be exactly along Lake Michigan. Learn exactly how bad the storm impacted Lansing Shoals Lighthouse. Figure out what exactly was the most widely common transportation practice operating regularly between Michigan's Upper & Lower Peninsula's in 1940. Go behind the scenes and understand why Little Bay de Noc endured the storm's overall brunt. Determine if Michigan's Lower Peninsula had fared any better than her counterpart to the north. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Oct. 17. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 24. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:When we recorded this podcast, Norway Mountain's adult season pass rates were set at $289. They have since increased by $100, but Hoppe is offering a $100 discount with the code “storm” through Nov. 1, 2024.WhoJustin Hoppe, Owner of Norway Mountain, MichiganRecorded onSeptember 16, 2024About Norway MountainOwned by: Justin HoppeLocated in: Norway, MichiganYear founded: Around 1974, as Norvul ski area; then Vulcan USA; then Briar Mountain; then Mont Brier; and finally Norway Mountain from ~1993 to 2012; then from 2014 to 2017; re-opened 2024Pass affiliations: Freedom Pass – 3 days each at these ski areas:Closest neighboring ski areas: Pine Mountain (:22), Keyes Peak (:35), Crystella (:46), Gladstone (:59), Ski Brule (1:04)Base elevation: 835 feetSummit elevation: 1,335 feetVertical drop: 500 feetSkiable Acres: 186Average annual snowfall: 50 inchesTrail count: 15Lift count: 6 (1 triple, 2 doubles, 3 handle tows)The map above is what Norway currently displays on its website. Here's a 2007 map that's substantively the same, but with higher resolution:View historic Norway Mountain trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himWhat a noble act: to resurrect a dead ski area. I'll acknowledge that a ski area is just a business. But it's also a (usually) irreplaceable community asset, an organ without which the body can live but does not function quite right. We read about factories closing up and towns dying along with them. This is because the jobs leave, yes, but there's an identity piece too. As General Motors pulled out of Saginaw and Flint in the 1980s and ‘90s, I watched, from a small town nearby, those places lose a part of their essence, their swagger and character. People were proud to have a GM factory in town, to have a GM job with a good wage, to be a piece of a global something that everyone knew about.Something less profound but similar happens when a ski area shuts down. I've written before about Apple Mountain, the 200-vertical-foot bump in Freeland, Michigan where I spent my second-ever day on skis:[Apple Mountain] has been closed since 2017. Something about the snowmaking system that's either too hard or too expensive to fix. That leaves Michigan's Tri-Cities – Midland, Bay City, and Saginaw, with a total metro population approaching 400,000 – with no functioning ski area. Snow Snake is only about 40 minutes north of Midland, and Mt. Holly is less than an hour south of Saginaw. But Apple Mountain, tucked into the backwoods behind Freeland, sat dead in the middle of the triangle. It was accessible to almost any schoolkid, and, humble as it was, stoked that fire for thousands of what became lifelong skiers.What skiing has lost without Apple Mountain is impossible to calculate. I would argue that it was one of the more important ski areas anywhere. Winters in mid-Michigan are long, cold, snowy, and dull. People need something to do. But skiing is not an obvious solution: this is the flattest place you can imagine. To have skiing – any skiing – in the region was a joy and a novelty. There was no redundancy, no competing ski center. And so the place was impossibly busy at all times, minting skiers who would go off to start ski newsletters and run huge resorts on the other side of the country.When the factory closes, the jobs go, and often nothing replaces them. Losing a ski area is similar. The skiers go, and nothing replaces them. The kids just do other things. They never become skiers.Children of Men, released in 2006, envisions a world 18 years after women have stopped having babies. Humanity lives on, but has collectively lost its soul. Violence and disorder reign. The movie is heralded for its extended single-shot battle scenes, but Children of Men's most remarkable moment is when a baby, born in the midst of a firefight, momentarily paralyzes the war as her protectors parade her to sanctuary:Humanity needs babies like winter needs skiers. But we have to keep making more.Yes, I'm being hyperbolic about the importance of resurrecting a lost ski area. If you're new here, that part of My Brand™. A competing, similar-sized ski center, Pine Mountain, is only 20 minutes from Norway. But that's 13 miles, which for a kid may as well be 1,000. Re-opening Norway is going to seed new skiers. Some of them will ski four times and forget about it and some of them will take spring break trips to Colorado when they get to college and a few of them may wrap their lives around it.And if they don't ever ski? Well, who knows. I almost didn't become a skier. I was 14 when my buddy said “Hey let's take the bus to Mott Mountain after school,” and I said “OK,” and even though I was Very Bad at it, I went again a few weeks later at Apple Mountain. Both of those hills are closed now. If I were growing up in Central Michigan now, would I have become a skier? What would I be if I wasn't one? How awful would that be?What we talked aboutBack from the dead; the West Michigan snowbelt; the power of the ski family; Caberfae; Pando's not for sale; when you decide to buy a lost ski area; how lost Norway was almost lost forever; the small business mindset; surprise bills; what a ski area looks like when it's sat idle for six years; piecing a sold-off snowmaking system back together; Norway's very unique lift fleet; glades; the trailmap; Norway's new logo; the Wild West of websites; the power of social media; where to even begin when you buy a ski area; the ups and downs of living at your ski area; shifting from renovation to operation; Norway's uneven history and why this time is different; is there enough room for Pine Mountain and Norway in such a small market?; why night skiing won't return on a regular basis this winter; send the school buses; it doesn't snow much but at least it stays cold; can Norway revitalize its legendary ski school?; and why Norway joined the Freedom Pass.  Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewHello Mr. Television Network Executive. Thank you for agreeing to hear my pitch. I understand I have 10 minutes with you, which is perfect, because what I'm proposing will take no fewer than five years, while simultaneously taking 10 years off both our lives. Because my show is called Who Wants to Own a Ski Area?The show works like this: contestants will navigate a series of logic puzzles, challenges, and obstacle courses. These will act as elimination rounds. We can base everyone at an abandoned ski resort, like in The Last of Us, where they will live while games materialize at random. Some examples:* It's 3 a.m. Everyone is sleeping. Alarms blare. A large structure has caught fire. The water has been cut off, but somehow you're standing in a knee-deep flood. Your firefighting arsenal consists of a bucket. You call the local volunteer fire department, which promises you they will “be along whenever Ed gits up here with the gay-rage door keys.” Whoever keeps the building from melting into a pile of ashes wins.* It's state inspection day. All machinery must be in working order. We present each contestant with a pile of sprockets, hoses, wires, clips, and metal parts of varying sizes and thickness. Their instructions are to rebuild this machine. We do not tell them what the machine is supposed to be. The good news is that the instruction manual is sitting right there. The bad news is that it's written in Polish. The pile is missing approximately seven to 20 percent of the machine's parts, without which the device may operate, but perhaps not in a way compatible with human life. Whoever's put-together machine leads to the fewest deaths advances to the next round.* The contestants are introduced to Big Jim. Big Jim has worked at the ski area since 1604. He has been through 45 ownership groups, knows everything about the mountain, and everyone on the mountain. Because of this, Big Jim knows you can't fire him lest you stoke a rebellion of labor and/or clientele. And he can tell you which pipes are where without you having to dig up half the mountain. But Big Jim keeps as much from getting done as he actually does. He resists the adoption of “fads” such as snowmaking, credit cards, and the internet. The challenge facing contestants is to get Big Jim to send a text message. He asks why the letters are arranged “all stupid” on the keyboard. The appearance of an emoji causes him to punch the phone several times and heave it into the woods.* Next we introduce the contestants to Fran and Freddy Filmore from Frankenmuth. The Filmores have been season passholders since the Lincoln Administration. They have nine kids in ski school, each of which has special dietary needs. Their phones are loaded with photos of problems: of liftlines, of dirt patches postholing trails, of an unsmiling parking attendant, of abandoned boot bags occupying cafeteria tables, of skis and snowboards and poles scattered across the snow rather than being placed on the racks that are right there for goodness sake. The Filmores want answers. The Filmores also want you to bring back Stray Cat Wednesdays, in which you could trade a stray cat for a lift ticket. But the Filmores are not actually concerned with solutions. No matter the quickness or efficacy of a remedy, they still “have concerns.” Surely you have 90 minutes to discuss this. Then the fire alarm goes off.* Next, the contestents will meet Hella Henry and his boys Donuts, Doznuts, Deeznuts, Jam Box, and 40 Ounce. HH and the Crushnutz Krew, as they call themselves, are among your most loyal customers. Though they are all under the age of 20, it is unclear how any of them could attend school or hold down a job, since they are at your hill for 10 to 12 hours per day. During that time, the crew typically completes three runs. They spend the rest of their time vaping, watching videos on their phones, and sitting six wide just below a blind lip in the terrain park. The first contestant to elicit a response from the Crushnutz Krew that is anything other than “that's chill” wins.The victor will win their very own ski area, complete with a several-thousand person Friends of [Insert Ski Area Name] group where 98 percent of the posts are complaints about the ski area. The ski center will be functional, but one popped bolt away from catastrophe in four dozen locations. The chairlifts will be made by a company that went out of business in 1912. The groomer will be towed by a yak. The baselodge will accommodate four percent of the skiers who show up on a busy day. The snowmaking “system” draws its water from a birdbath. Oh, and it's in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter, and they're going to have to find people to work there.Oh, you love it Mr. Television Network Executive? That's so amazing. Now I can quit my job and just watch the money pile up. What do I do for a living? Well, I run a ski area.Hoppe won the contest. And I wanted to wish him luck.What I got wrongI lumped Ski Brule in with Pine Mountain as ski areas that are near Norway. While only 20-ish minutes separate Pine and Norway, Brule is in fact more than an hour away.Why you should ski Norway MountainYou can ski every run on Norway Mountain in one visit. There's something satisfying in that. You can drive off at the end of the day and not feel like you missed anything.There are hundreds of ski areas in North America like this. Most of them manage, somehow, to stuff the full spectrum of ski experience into an area equal to one corner of one of Vail's 90 or whatever Legendary Back Bowls. There are easy runs and hard runs. Long runs and short runs. Narrow runs and wide runs. Runs under the lifts and runs twisting through the trees. Some sort of tree-skiing. Some sort of terrain park. A little windlip that isn't supposed to be a cornice but skis like one, 9-year-olds leaping off it one after the next and turning around to watch each other after they land. Sometimes there is powder. Sometimes there is ice. Sometimes the grooming is magnificent. Sometimes the snow really sucks. Over two to four hours and 20 to 30 chairlift rides, you can fully absorb what a ski area is and why it exists.This is an experience that is more difficult to replicate at our battleship resorts, with 200 runs scribbled over successive peaks like a medieval war map. I ski these resorts differently. Where are the blacks? Where are the trees? Where are the bumps? I go right for them and I don't bother with anything else. And that eats up three or four days even at a known-cruiser like Keystone. In a half-dozen trips into Little Cottonwood Canyon, I've skied a top-to-bottom groomer maybe twice. Because skiing groomers at Alta-Snowbird is like ordering pizza at a sushi restaurant. Like why did you even come here?But even after LCC fluff, when I've descended back to the terrestrial realm, I still like skiing the Norway Mountains of the land. Big mountains are wonderful, but they come with big hassle, big crowds, big traffic, big attitudes, big egos. At Norway you can pull practically up to the lifts and be skiing seven minutes later, after booting up and buying your lift ticket. You can ski right onto the lift and the guy in the Carhartt will nod at you and if you're just a little creative and thoughtful every run will feel distinct. And you can roll into the chalet and grab a pastie and bomb the whole mountain again after lunch.And it will all feel different on that second lap. When there are 25 runs instead of 250, you absorb them differently. The rush to see it all evaporates. You can linger with it, mingle with the mountain, talk to it in a way that's harder up top. It's all so awesome in its own way.Podcast NotesOn Pando Ski CenterI grew up about two hours from the now-lost Pando Ski Center, but I never skied there. When I did make it to that side of Michigan, I opted to ski Cannonsburg, the still-functioning multi-lift ski center seven minutes up the road. Of course, in the Storm Wandering Mode that is my default ski orientation nowadays, I would have simply hit both. But that's no longer possible, because Cannonsburg purchased Pando in 2015 and subsequently closed it. Probably forever.Hoppe and I discuss this a bit on the pod. He actually tried to buy the joint. Too many problems with it, he was told. So he bought some of the ski area's snowguns and other equipment. Better that at least something lives on.Pando didn't leave much behind. The only trailmap I can find is part of this Ski write-up from February 1977:Apparently Pando was a onetime snowboarding hotspot. Here's a circa 2013 video of a snowboarder doing snowboarderly stuff:On CannonsburgWhile statistically humble, with just 250 vertical feet, Cannonsburg is the closest skiing to metropolitan Grand Rapids, Michigan, population 1.08 million. That ensures that the parks-oriented bump is busy at all times:On CaberfaeOne of Hoppe's (and my) favorite ski areas is Caberfae. This was my go-to when I lived in Central Michigan, as it delivered both decent vert (485 feet), and an interesting trail network (the map undersells it):The Meyer family has owned and operated Caberfae for decades, and they constantly improve the place. GM Tim Meyer joined me on the pod a few years back to tell the story.On Norway's proximity to Pine MountainNorway sits just 23 minutes down US 2 from Pine Mountain. The two ski areas sport eerily similar profiles: both measure 500 vertical feet and run two double chairs and one triple. Both face the twin challenges of low snowfall (around 60 inches per season), and a relatively thin local population base (Iron Mountain's metro area is home to around 32,500 people). It's no great surprise that Norway struggled in previous iterations. Here's a look at Pine:On Big TupperI mention Big Tupper as a lost ski area that will have an extra hard time coming back since it's been stripped (I think completely), of snowmaking. This ski area isn't necessarily totally dead: the lifts are still standing, and the property is going to auction next month, but it will take tens of millions to get the place running again. It was at one time a fairly substantial operation, as this circa 1997 trailmap shows:On Sneller chairliftsNorway runs two Sneller double chairs. Only one other Sneller is still spinning, at Ski Sawmill, a short and remote Pennsylvania bump. Lift Blog catalogued the machine here. It wasn't spinning when I skied Sawmill a couple of years ago, but I did snag some photos:On Norway's new logoIn general, animals make good logos. Hoppe designed this one himself:On social mediaHoppe has done a nice job of updating Norway's rebuild progress on social media, mostly via the mountain's Facebook page. Here are links to a few other social accounts we discussed:* Skiers and Snowboarders of the Midwest is a big champion of ski areas of all sizes throughout the region. The Midwest Skiers group is pretty good too.* Magic Mountain, Vermont, an underdog for decades, finally dug itself out of the afterthoughts pile at least in part due to the strength of its Instagram and Twitter presence.* The formerly dumpy Holiday Mountain, New York, has meticulously documented its rebuild under new ownership on Instagram and Facebook.On NeighborsMy 17-year-old brain could not comprehend the notion that two ski areas operated across the street from – and independent of – one another. But there they were: Nub's Nob and Boyne Highlands (now The Highlands), each an opposite turn off Pleasantview Road.We turned right, to Nub's, because we were in high school and because we all made like $4.50 an hour and because Nub's probably had like 10-Cent Tuesdays or something.I've since skied both mountains many times, but the novelty has never faded. Having one of something so special as a ski area in your community is marvelous. Having two is like Dang who won the lottery? There are, of course, examples of this all over the country – Sugarbush/Mad River Glen, Stowe/Smugglers' Notch, Alta/Snowbird, Timberline/Meadows/Skibowl – and it's incredible how distinct each one's identity remains even with shared borders and, often, passes.On UP ski areasMichigan's Upper Peninsula is a very particular animal. Only three percent of the state's 10 million residents live north of the Mackinac (pronounced Mackinaw) Bridge. Lower Peninsula skiers are far more likely to visit Colorado or Vermont than their far-north in-state ski areas, which are a 10-plus hour drive from the more populous southern tiers. While Bohemia's ultra-cheap pass and rowdy terrain have somewhat upset that equation, the UP remains, for purposes of skiing and ski culture, essentially a separate state.My point is that it's worth organizing the state's ski areas in the way that they practically exist in skiers minds. So I've separated the UP from the Lower Peninsula. Since Michigan is also home to an outsized number of town ropetows, I've also split surface-lift-only operations into their own categories:On last winter being very bad with record-low skier visitsSkier visits were down in every region of the United States last winter, but they all but collapsed in the Midwest, with a 26.7 percent plunge, according to the annual Kottke Demographic Report. Michigan alone was down nearly a half million skier visits. Check out these numbers:For comparison, overall skier numbers dropped just six percent in the Northeast, and five percent in the Rockies.The Storm publishes year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 66/100 in 2024, and number 566 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The smell was overwhelming on that July day in 1968 as Monnie Bliss approached the cabin that his father Chauncey had built years earlier near the community of Good Hart, on the Lower Peninsula of Michigan's Northwest Coast. And the murders that ended up being discovered in the strange cabin in the woods would be a mystery that has yet to solved.Check out our updated website and sign up for our newsletter at AmericanHauntingsPodcast.comWant an episode every week, plus other awesome perks and discounts? Check out our Patreon pageFind out merch at AmericanHauntingsClothing.comFollow us on Twitter @AmerHauntsPod, @TroyTaylor13, @CodyBeckSTLFollow us on Instagram @AmericanHauntingsPodcast, @TroyTaylorgram, @CodyBeckSTLThis episode was written by Troy TaylorProduced and edited by Cody BeckOur Sponsors:* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com/* Check out undefined and use my code HAUNTINGS for a great deal: undefinedSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/american-hauntings-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Show Notes: https://wetflyswing.com/602 Presented By: FishHound Expeditions, Skwala, Waters West, Visit Helena, MT Sponsors: https://wetflyswing.com/sponsors In this episode of the Great Lakes Dude podcast, we're gonna chit-chat and take a journey into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with Capt. Brad Petzke, owner of Rivers North Guide Service. Yes, it's still Michigan. Once you cross that big, long Mackinac bridge and head north from the Lower Peninsula, it almost seems like another state. Once you cross it, things start to get a little more wilderness, a lot less towns and cities and villages, and just a lot of water and opportunities to explore.

Tonight's guest, Dwayne, was featured on Episode 409, and on that show, he told us about the Dogman encounter he had in 2012, while deer hunting in Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Well, this last January, he had another encounter and that's what he's going to be talking about on tonight's livestream episode of the show. He'll also be answering listener questions that are posted in the live chat. We hope you'll join us in the live chat and that you'll have plenty of questions for Dwayne.  Premium memberships are now available! If you'd like to be able to listen to the show without ads and have full access to premium content, please go to https://DogmanEncounters.com/Podcast to find out how to become a premium member.  If you'd like to help support the show, by buying your own Dogman Encounters t-shirt, sweatshirt, tank top, or coffee mug, please visit the Dogman Encounters Show Store, by going to https://Dogman-Encounters.MyShopify.com  If you've had a Dogman encounter and would like to speak with me about it, whether you'd like to keep your encounter confidential or be interviewed on a show, please go to https://DogmanEncounters.com and submit a report.  If you've had a Sasquatch sighting and would like to be a guest on My Bigfoot Sighting, please go to https://MyBigfootSighting.com and submit a report.I produce 3 other podcasts. Below, you'll find links to them.  My Bigfoot Sighting...  https://spreaker.page.link/xT7zh6zWsnCDaoVa7  Bigfoot Eyewitness Radio...  https://spreaker.page.link/WbtSccQm92TKBskT8  My Paranormal Experience https://www.spreaker.com/show/my-paranormal-experience  Thanks for listening!

In this episode of the Wildtalk Podcast, we talk to James Miller about all things habitat in the Southwest Lower Peninsula region of the state, fly away with a discussion about the American woodcock, answer a question about the existence of coywolves and we wrap up the episode with a chat about Michigan black bears. Pete Kailing also stops in to talk about hunting and trapping opportunities available in the month of March. Episode Hosts: Rachel Lincoln and Eric HilliardProducer/editor: Eric HilliardFor Pete's sakeHunting regulation summary bookletsAll things habitatState Game and Wildlife AreasAll things feathersAmerican woodcockAll things furAmerican black bearQuestions or comments about the show? Contact the DNR Wildlife Division at 517-284-9453 (WILD) or email dnr-wildlife@michigan.gov.

In this episode of the Wildtalk Podcast, we talk to Scott Eggeman about all things habitat in the Northern Lower Peninsula region of the state, fly away with a discussion about crows, and we wrap up the episode with a chat about otters. Pete Kailing also stops in to talk about hunting and trapping opportunities available in the month of February. Episode Hosts: Rachel Lincoln and Eric HilliardProducer/editor: Eric HilliardAll things habitatMichigan.gov/elkAll things feathersAmerican crowBird walk event registrationAll things furNorth American river otterQuestions or comments about the show? Contact the DNR Wildlife Division at 517-284-9453 (WILD) or email dnr-wildlife@michigan.gov.

RADM Dan May, USCG (ret.) Photo by Jeremy D'Entremont. Daniel R. May graduated with a degree in ocean engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, in the class of 1979. During his time as the ocean engineer for the Fifth Coast Guard District, Dan worked on lighthouse projects from Delaware Bay to the Carolinas. Dan eventually moved to Civil Engineering Unit Providence, Rhode Island, where he served as the project engineer for several major lighthouse projects including the relocation of Block Island Southeast Light, the first move of a major lighthouse structure in the United States. Dan retired as a rear admiral in 2013. He is the author of a new book published by the U.S. Lighthouse Society, called Preserving America's Lighthouses: Memoirs of a Coast Guard Ocean Engineer. Tawas Point Lighthouse during restoration. Tawas Point Lighthouse is located in Tawas Point State Park in the northeastern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. The State of Michigan acquired Tawas Point Light Station from the Coast Guard in 2002. Today, it's one of twelve sites that comprise the Michigan History Center. Laurie Perkins is the Southern Lower Peninsula Historian for the Michigan History Center and she also coordinates the keeper program at Tawas Point Lighthouse. In this interview, Laurie describes the recent restoration of the lighthouse and also the keepers program, which is returning after an absence of a few years.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 14. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 21. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoJim Vick, General Manager of Lutsen Mountains, MinnesotaRecorded onOctober 30, 2023About Lutsen MountainsClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Midwest Family Ski ResortsLocated in: Lutsen, MinnesotaYear founded: 1948Pass affiliations:* Legendary Gold Pass – unlimited access, no blackouts* Legendary Silver Pass – unlimited with 12 holiday and peak Saturday blackouts* Legendary Bronze Pass – unlimited weekdays with three Christmas week blackouts* Indy Pass – 2 days with 24 holiday and Saturday blackouts* Indy Plus Pass – 2 days with no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Chester Bowl (1:44), Loch Lomond (1:48), Spirit Mountain (1:54), Giants Ridge (1:57), Mt. Baldy (2:11)Base elevation: 800 feetSummit elevation: 1,688 feetVertical drop: 1,088 feet (825 feet lift-served)Skiable Acres: 1,000Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 95 (10% expert, 25% most difficult, 47% more difficult, 18% easiest)Lift count: 7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 2 high-speed six-packs, 3 double chairs, 1 carpet)View historic Lutsen Mountains trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himI often claim that Vail and Alterra have failed to appreciate Midwest skiing. I realize that this can be confusing. Vail Resorts owns 10 ski areas from Missouri to Ohio. Alterra's Ikon Pass includes a small but meaningful presence in Northern Michigan. What the hell am I talking about here?Lutsen, while a regional standout and outlier, illuminates each company's blind spots. In 2018, the newly formed Alterra Mountain Company looted the motley M.A.X. Pass roster for its best specimens, adding them to its Ikon Pass. Formed partly from the ashes of Intrawest, Alterra kept all of their own mountains and cherry-picked the best of Boyne and Powdr, leaving off Boyne's Michigan mountains, Brighton, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Cypress (which Ikon later added); and Powdr's Boreal, Lee Canyon, Pico, and Bachelor (Pico and Bachelor eventually made the team). Alterra also added Solitude and Crystal after purchasing them later in 2018, and, over time, Windham and Alyeska. Vail bought Triple Peaks (Crested Butte, Okemo, Sunapee), later that year, and added Resorts of the Canadian Rockies to its Epic Pass. But that left quite a few orphans, including Lutsen and sister mountain Granite Peak, which eventually joined the Indy Pass (which didn't debut until 2019).All of which is technocratic background to set up this question: what the hell was Alterra thinking? In Lutsen and Granite Peak, Alterra had, ready to snatch, two of the largest, most well-cared-for, most built-up resorts between Vermont and Colorado. Midwest Family Ski Resorts CEO Charles Skinner is one of the most aggressive and capable ski area operators anywhere. These mountains, with their 700-plus-foot vertical drops, high-speed lifts, endless glade networks, and varied terrain deliver a big-mountain experience that has more in common with a mid-sized New England ski area than anything within several hundred miles in any direction. It's like someone in a Colorado boardroom and a stack of spreadsheets didn't bother looking past the ZIP Codes when deciding what to keep and what to discard.This is one of the great miscalculations in the story of skiing's shift to multimountain pass hegemony. By overlooking Lutsen Mountains and Granite Peak in its earliest days, Alterra missed an opportunity to snatch enormous volumes of Ikon Pass sales across the Upper Midwest. Any Twin Cities skier (and there are a lot of them), would easily be able to calculate the value of an Ikon Pass that could deliver 10 or 14 days between Skinner's two resorts, and additional days on that mid-winter western run. By dismissing the region, Alterra also enabled the rise of the Indy Pass, now the only viable national multi-mountain pass product for the Midwestern skier outside of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. These sorts of regional destinations, while not as “iconic” as, say, Revelstoke, move passes; the sort of resort-hopping skier who is attracted to a multi-mountain pass is going to want to ski near home as much as they want to fly across the country.Which is a formula Vail Resorts, to its credit, figured out a long time ago. Which brings us back to those 10 Midwestern ski areas hanging off the Epic Pass attendance sheet. Vail has, indeed, grasped the utility of the Midwestern, city-adjacent day-ski area, and all 10 of its resorts fit neatly into that template: 75 chairlifts on 75 vertical feet with four trees seated within 10 miles of a city center. But here's what they missed: outside of school groups; Park Brahs who like to Park Out, Brah; and little kids, these ski areas hold little appeal even to Midwesterners. That they are busy beyond comprehension at all times underscores, rather than refutes, that point – something simulating a big-mountain experience, rather than a street riot, is what the frequent Midwest skier seeks.For that, you have to flee the cities. Go north, find something in the 400- to 600-foot vertical range, something with glades and nooks and natural snow. Places like Caberfae, Crystal Mountain, Nub's Nob, and Shanty Creek in Michigan; Cascade, Devil's Head, and Whitecap, Wisconsin; Giants Ridge and Spirit Mountain, Minnesota. Lutsen is the best of all of these, a sprawler with every kind of terrain flung across its hundreds of acres. A major ski area. A true resort. A Midwestern dream.Vick and I discuss the Ikon snub in the podcast. It's weird. And while Alterra, five years later, is clearly doing just fine, its early decision to deliberately exclude itself from one of the world's great ski regions is as mystifying a strategic choice as I've seen any ski company make. Vail, perhaps, understands the Midwest resort's true potential, but never found one it could close on – there aren't that many of them, and they aren't often for sale. Perhaps they dropped a blank check on Skinner's desk, and he promptly deposited it into the nearest trashcan.All of which is a long way of saying this: Lutsen is the best conventional ski area in the Midwest (monster ungroomed Mount Bohemia is going to hold more appeal for a certain sort of expert skier), and one of the most consistently excellent ski operations in America. Its existence ought to legitimize the region to national operators too bent on dismissing it. Someday, they will understand that. And after listening to this podcast, I hope that you will, too.What we talked aboutWhy Lutsen never makes snow in October; Minnesota as early-season operator; the new Raptor Express six-pack; why the Bridge double is intact but retiring from winter operations; why Lutsen removed the 10th Mountain triple; why so many Riblet chairs are still operating; why Moose Return trail will be closed indefinitely; potential new lower-mountain trails on Eagle Mountain; an updated season-opening plan; how lake-effect snow impacts the west side of Lake Superior; how the Raptor lift may impact potential May operations; fire destroys Papa Charlie's; how it could have been worse; rebuilding the restaurant; Lutsen's long evolution from backwater to regional leader and legit western alternative; the Skinner family's aggressive operating philosophy; the history of Lutsen's gondola, the only such machine in Midwest skiing; Lutsen's ambitious but stalled masterplan; potential Ullr and Mystery mountain chairlift upgrades; “the list of what skiers want is long”; why Lutsen switched to a multi-mountain season pass with Granite Peak and Snowriver; and “if we would have been invited into the Ikon at the start, we would have jumped on that.”Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewFor all my gushing above, Lutsen isn't perfect. While Granite Peak has planted three high-speed lifts on the bump in the past 20 years, Lutsen has still largely been reliant on a fleet of antique Riblets, plus a sixer that landed a decade ago and the Midwest's only gondola, a glimmering eight-passenger Doppelmayr machine installed in 2015. While a fixed-grip foundation isn't particularly abnormal for the Midwest, which is home to probably the largest collection of antique chairlifts on the planet, it's off-brand for burnished Midwest Family Ski Resorts.Enter, this year, Lutsen's second six-pack, Raptor Express, which replaces both the 10th Mountain triple (removed), and the Bridge double (demoted to summer-only use). This new lift, running approximately 600 vertical feet parallel to Bridge, will (sort of; more below), smooth out the janky connection from Moose back to Eagle. And while the loss of 10th Mountain will mean 300 vertical feet of rambling below the steep upper-mountain shots, Raptor is a welcome upgrade that will help Lutsen keep up with the Boynes.However, even as this summer moved the mountain ahead with the Raptor installation, a storm demolished a skier bridge over the river on Moose Return, carving a several-hundred-foot-wide, unbridgeable (at least in the short term), gap across the trail. Which means that skiers will have to connect back to Eagle via gondola, somewhat dampening Raptor's expected impact. That's too bad, and Vick and I talk extensively about what that means for skiers this coming winter.The final big timely piece of this interview is the abrupt cancellation of Lutsen's massive proposed terrain expansion, which would have more than doubled the ski area's size with new terrain on Moose and Eagle mountains. Here's what they were hoping to do with Moose:And Eagle:Over the summer, Lutsen withdrew the plan, and Superior National Forest Supervisor Thomas Hall recommended a “no action” alternative, citing “irreversible damage” to mature white cedar and sugar maple stands, displacement of backcountry skiers, negative impacts to the 300-mile-long Superior hiking trail, objections from Native American communities, and water-quality concerns. Lutsen had until Oct. 10 to file an objection to the decision, and they did. What happens now? we discuss that.Questions I wish I'd askedIt may have been worth getting into the difference between Lutsen's stated lift-served vertical (825 feet), and overall vertical (1,088 feet). But it wasn't really necessary, as I asked the same question of Midwest Family Ski Resorts CEO Charles Skinner two years ago. He explains the disparity at the 25:39 mark:What I got wrongI said that Boyne Mountain runs the Hemlock double chair instead of the Mountain Express six-pack for summer operations. That is not entirely true, as Mountain Express sometimes runs, as does the new Disciples 8 chair on the far side of the mountain's Sky Bridge.I referred to Midwest Family Ski Resorts CEO Charles Skinner as “Charles Skinner Jr.” He is in fact Charles Skinner IV.Why you should ski Lutsen MountainsOne of the most unexpected recurring messages I receive from Storm readers floats out of the West. Dedicated skiers of the big-mountain, big-snow kingdoms of the Rockies, they'd never thought much about skiing east of the Continental Divide. But now they're curious. All these profiles of New England girth and history, Midwest backwater bumps, and Great Lakes snowtrains have them angling for a quirky adventure, for novelty and, perhaps, a less-stressful version of skiing. These folks are a minority. Most Western skiers wear their big-mountain chauvinism as a badge of stupid pride. Which I understand. But they are missing a version of skiing that is heartier, grittier, and more human than the version that swarms from the western skies.So, to those few who peek east over the fortress walls and consider the great rolling beyond, I tell you this: go to Lutsen. If you're only going to ski the Midwest once, and only in a limited way, this is one of the few must-experience stops. Lutsen and Bohemia. Mix and match the rest. But these two are truly singular.To the rest of you, well: Midwest Family's stated goal is to beef up its resorts so that they're an acceptable substitute for a western vacation. Lutsen's website even hosts a page comparing the cost of a five-day trip there and to Breckenridge:Sure, that's slightly exaggerated, and yes, Breck crushes Lutsen in every on-mountain statistical category, from skiable acreage to vertical drop to average annual snowfall. But 800 vertical feet is about what an average skier can manage in one go anyway. And Lutsen really does give you a bigger-mountain feel than anything for a thousand miles in either direction (except, as always, the Bohemia exception). And when you board that gondy and swing up the cliffs toward Moose Mountain, you're going to wonder where, exactly, you've been transported to. Because it sure as hell doesn't look like Minnesota.Podcast NotesOn Midwest Family Ski ResortsMidwest Family Ski Resorts now owns four ski areas (Snowriver, Michigan is one resort with two side-by-side ski areas). Here's an overview:On the loss of Moose ReturnA small but significant change will disrupt skiing at Lutsen Mountains this winter: the destruction of the skier bridge at the bottom of the Moose Return trail that crosses the Poplar River, providing direct ski access from Moose to Eagle mountains. Vick details why this presents an unfixable obstacle in the podcast, but you can see that Lutsen removed the trail from its updated 2023-24 map:On the Stowe gondola I referencedI briefly referenced Stowe's gondola as a potential model for traversing the newly re-gapped Moose Return run. The resort is home to two gondolas – the 2,100-vertical-foot, 7,664-foot-long, eight-passenger Mansfield Gondola; and the 1,454-foot-long, six-passenger Over Easy Gondola, which moves between the Mansfield and Spruce bases. It is the latter that I'm referring to in the podcast: On Mt. FrontenacVick mentions that his first job was at Mt. Frontenac, a now-lost 420-vertical-foot ski area in Minnesota. Here was a circa 2000 trailmap:Apparently a local group purchased the ski area and converted it into a golf course. Boo.On the evolution of LutsenThe Skinners have been involved with Lutsen since the early 1980s. Here's a circa 1982 trailmap, which underscores the mountain's massive evolution over the decades:On the evolution of Granite PeakWhen Charles Skinner purchased Granite Peak, then known as Rib Mountain, it was a nubby little backwater, with neglected infrastructure and a miniscule footprint:And here it is today, a mile-wide broadside running three high-speed chairlifts:An absolutely stunning transformation.On Charles Skinner IIISkinner's 2021 Star Tribune obituary summarized his contributions to Lutsen and to skiing:Charles Mather Skinner III passed away on June 17th at the age of 87 in his new home in Red Wing, MN. …Charles was born in St. Louis, MO on August 30, 1933, to Eleanor Whiting Skinner and Charles Mather Skinner II. He grew up near Lake Harriet in Minneapolis where he loved racing sailboats during the summer and snow sliding adventures in the winter.At the age of 17, he joined the United States Navy and fought in the Korean War as a navigator aboard dive bombers. After his service, he returned home to Minnesota where he graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School, served on the law review, and began practicing law in Grand Rapids, MN.In 1962, he led the formation of Sugar Hills Ski and purchased Sugar Lake (Otis) Resort in Grand Rapids, MN. For 20 years, Charles pioneer-ed snowmaking inventions, collaborated with other Midwest ski area owners to build a golden age for Midwest ski areas, and advised ski areas across the U.S. including Aspen on snowmaking.In the 1970s, Scott Paper Company recruited Charles to manage recreational lands across New England, and later promoted him to become President of Sugarloaf Mountain ski area in Maine. In 1980, he bought, and significantly expanded, Lutsen Mountains in Lutsen, MN, which is now owned and operated by his children.He and his wife spent many happy years on North Captiva Island, Florida, where they owned and operated Barnacle Phil's Restaurant. An entrepreneur and risk-taker at heart, he never wanted to retire and was always looking for new business ventures.His work at Sugar Hills, Lutsen Mountains and North Captive Island helped local economics expand and thrive.He was a much-respected leader and inspiration to thousands of people over the years. Charles was incredibly intellectually curious and an avid reader, with a tremendous memory for facts and history.Unstoppable and unforgettable, he had a wonderful sense of humor and gave wise counsel to many. …On the number of ski areas on Forest Service landA huge number of U.S. ski areas operate on Forest Service land, with the majority seated in the West. A handful also sit in the Midwest and New England (Lutsen once sat partially on Forest Service land, but currently does not):On additional Midwest podcastsAs a native Midwesterner, I've made it a point to regularly feature the leaders of Midwest ski areas on the podcast. Dig into the archive:MICHIGANWISCONSINOHIOINDIANASOUTH DAKOTAThe Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 98/100 in 2023, and number 484 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Opening day for rifle season is November 15, and once again the Michigan DNR has banned baiting in hopes to curb cases of the lethal Chronic Wasting Disease among deer. On this Daily J, WWJ's Brian Fisher explores why officials say the ban is so important, and why some hunters are pushing back. (Credit: Getty Images)

Consumers Energy Empowers 6.7 Million Michigan Customers with Natural Gas and Electricity Across 68 Lower Peninsula Counties: Lauren Snyder Unpacks Their Role in Shaping Michigan's Future.Listen to Lauren Youngdahl Snyder as she discusses electric vehicles, renewable energy and efficiency with The Michigan Opportunity podcast!  Consumers Energy is an investor-owned utility that provides natural gas and electricity to 70% of Michiganders and serves customers in all 68 of the state's Lower Peninsula counties. Consumes Energy, a subsidiary of CMS Energy, was founded in 1886 and is currently headquartered in Jackson, Michigan. 

A little bit of Lansing love this week on Behind the Mitten, plus one last chance to get yourself out on the SCARE floor for Halloween.We caught up with our friend Tracy Padot, director of Lansing.org who explained that no matter whether you "Choose Lansing" or "Love Lansing", you are bound to have a fantastic time in the greater Lansing region. In fact, one of the biggest parties of the year will be happening in our capital city on November 17 when they host Silver Bells in the City, the kickoff to the holiday season. They typically have over 40,000 guests attend Silver Bells, coming to Lansing to see the lighted parade, the unveiling of the state holiday tree and an incredible fireworks display. A little more info on Silver Bells in the City from the website:From 5 to 9 p.m., visit the Silver Bells Village and start your holiday shopping! You can also get some refreshments and your commemorative Silver Bells ornament. The village is located on the 100 E. Block of Allegan Street between South Washington Square and Grand Avenue.Steps off at 6 p.m. and begins at the corner of Lenawee and S. Washington Sq. Grand Marshal is Lansing's own India Graham.More than 60 units and several high school marching bands will sparkle with thousands of lights as they make their way through the streets of downtown Lansing. The parade is a sight to behold, delighting people of every age.The participating high school marching bands will compete for the Best Illuminated Band awards during the parade.At approximately 7:25 p.m., Michigan's Official State Christmas Tree will be lit up! This year's tree is a beautiful 60-foot spruce from Onaway located in Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Vic Ruppert and his family donated the tree in honor of his late wife Shirley Ruppert. This is the first tree from Presque Isle County.And with a few last days to celebrate the Halloween holiday with a little bit of scary fun, we reconnected with Ed Terebus, owner and genius mastermind behind the award-winning, nationally known haunted house Erebus located in Pontiac. We discuss what it takes to put on a production of this size and professionalism, and how they'll start working on next year's house on November 1.Follow John and Amy:Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/behindthemittenTwitter at @BehindTheMittenInstagram at @BehindTheMitten

In this episode of the Wildtalk Podcast, we talk to Joe Robison about all things habitat in the Southeast Lower Peninsula of Michigan, fly away with eastern screech-owls as we talk all things feathers, and we discuss the odorous, striped skunk in our all things fur segment.Episode Hosts: Rachel Leightner and Eric HilliardProducer/editor: Eric HilliardAll things habitatMichigan.gov/WaterfowlMichigan.gov/WetlandWondersAll things feathersEastern screech-owl (All about birds)All things furStriped skunk (iNaturalist)Nuisance wildlife informationQuestions or comments about the show? Contact the DNR Wildlife Division at 517-284-9453 (WILD) or email dnr-wildlife@michigan.gov.

Matthew 18:21-35Then Peter came and said to him, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" And Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times."For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all of his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.' And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, 'Pay what you owe.' Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, 'Have patience with me and I will pay you.' But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt.When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?' And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart." One of the last official acts of my summer's sabbatical was to travel with my dad to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which may be another sermon for another day. On the way, we stopped for dinner near the top of the Lower Peninsula, at a place where we vacationed often as a family when I was a kid. We took my best friend, Dave, on as many of those family vacations as we did my own brother, and I was flooded with a ton of thoughts and feelings, a million emotions and memories, as my dad and I walked and talked and took a proverbial stroll down that Memory Lane.And I don't remember my friend Dave for very long without wrestling with and being reminded about the power and importance of forgiveness, like the kind Jesus is talking about in this morning's Gospel. And I'll come back to Dave, in a minute.This morning, Peter wants to know, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often must I forgive?" "Is once enough?" "Twice?" "Will seven times, do it?" And Jesus tells him, not so subtly, that he's not even close … that something like “seventy times seven” might do the trick – that he should forgive and forgive, and not quit forgiving.Now, I don't think Jesus is really concerned about the math of forgiveness, so much as he is about the aim and the quality of it. "What is true forgiveness … genuine forgiveness … real forgiveness?" “What does it mean to forgive someone – and mean it – sincerely – from your heart?” “And why is that what God asks of us?”These are hard questions because there are so many things for which forgiveness can be offered. There are so many feelings that have been hurt, wounds that have been inflicted, words that have been said, hearts that have been broken, that forgiveness seems to be needed in so many different ways – large and small and everywhere in between. So, true … genuine … real forgiveness may be one of those things that can only be known when you see it… or feel it… or give and receive it … for yourself.I think it's like tearing up a scorecard. I think it's a burden that's lifted. I think it's like fear that disappears. It can be a very real, physical pressure in your chest that's released. It's a peace that abides. I think that slave in this morning's story must have felt some of these things when his lord released him, forgave him his debt, don't you think?But it seems we need to be reminded, over and over again, that when it comes to forgiveness, it has as much to do – maybe more to do –with the forgiver as it does with the one who receives forgiveness. The forgiver – just as much as the one forgiven – also feels the pressure release, the burden lift, the relief come, the peace abide. And again, you may know that If you've ever seen it… or offered it… or experienced it for yourself ... for real.For me, one of the most profound struggles with the practice of forgiveness came when Dave, who I mentioned a minute ago, one of the best friends I'll ever have, died in a drunk driving accident, when we were 22 years old. He was in the passenger seat of a car full of mutual friends – and they, along with the driver, were the ones who had been drinking. The anger, frustration, regret and sadness that come along with a loss like that are impossible to anticipate. And I watched and felt it all as it consumed me, our friends, and Dave's family. And the easy target for all of that rage, blame, brokenness, and hardness of heart was Jason, our friend who was driving the car that night.It took some time – some much needed and well-deserved time – before forgiveness started to happen for those who withheld it. It took longer for some than for others. I'm not sure everyone has mustered it, yet, and I can't hold that against them. But once I began to let forgiveness win me over, it became clear to me that my anger and frustration, my regret and sadness, had more to do with my own connection to that night's events than it did with Jason's position in the driver's seat.It was hard to admit all of the reckless behavior and stupid choices that led up to the one that finally caught up with us. It was scary to know that any number of slightly different circumstances could have put any one of the rest of us in Dave's place – or Jason's. And, as unexpected dying tends to be, it was overwhelmingly sad to wonder about missed opportunities, lost potential, and to regret all the things you wish you would have said or done – or could still be doing.And those are the things that make true forgiveness hard to give and to receive. We do things like point fingers and place blame and cast judgment as a way of keeping our distance from the ugliness of sin or the difficulty of conflict or the hurt feelings and deep sadness of whatever and whoever needs forgiving.We hold onto grudges because they keep difficult conversations at arms' length. We keep score of wrongs because we can create winners and losers that way. We let our fear get the best of us because it comes more naturally, sometimes, than faith. Maybe we withhold forgiveness because we like to think it's a way to get even with or punish the ones who've harmed us. And all of that is the kind of prison and torture I think Jesus points to in this morning's parable. I don't think the torture that comes from refusing forgiveness – like that slave did with his friend this morning – has anything to do with some cosmic, eternal penalty that waits for us somewhere after we're dead and gone. I believe the torture of unforgiveness finds and afflicts us right where we live – here and now – on this side of heaven. And it afflicts those of us who withhold the gift, just as much as it does the ones we believe need our forgiveness. Have you ever let the hard work of unforgiveness keep you up at night? Let it impact your daily life? Harm your relationships? Have you ever let the anger and hatred of unforgiveness cause you stress and anxiety to the point that you can feel it in your body? Have you ever held an unforgiving grudge against someone you had to live, work or go to church with? Is there anything more awkward, painful or unholy than sharing space and breath and life with a person you can't forgive? It's a prison and a torture of its own kind which God calls us to unlock through the practice of forgiveness.And forgiveness doesn't always mean hugs and kisses and warm fuzzies along the way. It's never a sign of weakness or of giving in. It doesn't imply that another's wrongs were justified or acceptable. It doesn't even mean that relationships will always be restored on this side of heaven.When I decided to forgive Jason, the friend who was behind the wheel when Dave was killed, I got his address and wrote him a few letters in prison, trying to let him know as much. It's been 27 years and I've never heard back from him, even though he's out now, married with kids and all the rest. He's one of those people with no presence or profile on social media. He's never reconnected with any of our friends from back in the day, either, as far as I know. That's his prerogative and for which he must have good reasons I can only guess about.And what I realized a week or so ago during my walk down Memory Lane is that my forgiveness was never so much about Jason as it was about me … that I was changed – and blessed and better – by forgiving him, whether it meant anything to Jason or not. I felt free and unburdened from my anger, from my self-righteousness, from my judgment. And I found some comfort in a deep hope that our friend Dave, himself, could see and would understand the bigger picture of what happened the night he died.And I think this is God's desire for God's people: That we quit bearing burdens of anger, resentment, regret and remorse that torture and dismantle us from the inside, out. That we release ourselves from doing God's work of discerning what holy judgement looks like. That, instead, we keep our hearts and minds focused on practicing grace, offering mercy, making peace – and extending true, real, genuine forgiveness – the way it has first been shared with us, and is meant to be shared with the world – thanks to the forgiveness that is ours in Jesus Christ, and from whom it matters most, in the end, anyway.Amen

In this episode of the Wildtalk Podcast, we talk to Mike Parker about all things habitat in the Northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan, fly away with sharp-tailed grouse as we talk all things feathers, and we discuss the Ursus americanus in our all things fur segment.Episode Hosts: Rachel Leightner and Eric HilliardProducer/editor: Eric HilliardAll things habitatMichigan.gov/HuntingMichigan.gov/DeerAll things feathersSharp-tailed grouseAll things furBlack bearsNuisance wildlife informationQuestions or comments about the show? Contact the DNR Wildlife Division at 517-284-9453 (WILD) or email dnr-wildlife@michigan.gov.

#cryptid #dogman #bigfoot #Sasquatch #werewolf On Monday 8-28 at 9PM we have a guest from NADF Maine Gary discussing Dogman. In folklore, the Michigan Dogman was allegedly witnessed in 1887 in Wexford County, Michigan, United States. The creature is described as a seven-foot tall, blue-eyed, or amber-eyed bipedal canine-like animal with the torso of a man and a fearsome howl that sounds like a human scream. According to legends, the Michigan Dogman appears in a ten-year cycle that falls on years ending in. Sightings have been reported in several locations throughout Michigan, primarily in the northwestern quadrant of the Lower Peninsula. https://paranormalhub.com/grizzly-hunt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEaO5KXbefU&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/@grizzlyisonthehunt/streams --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/grizzly-onthehunt/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/grizzly-onthehunt/support

Show Notes: https://wetflyswing.com/481 Presented By: Mavrk Fly Fishing, Yellowstone Teton, Drifthook Fly Fishing, Togens Fly Shop Sponsors: https://wetflyswing.com/sponsors In today's episode, the Dude Jeff Liskay chats with one of the best shallow-water fly anglers, Dave Hurley. They connected because of their love for the freshwater Drum. They think it's a cool fish with its chicken feathers but interestingly enough, some people call it "trash fish". Now Dave joins our show today to talk about why these fish are great to target. Dave is a skinny water specialist that runs skinny water safari guide service. Dave roams the backwater of the Great Lakes based on the Lower Peninsula, Michigan where he pulls his way through the miles of skinny water flats, sight-fishing for a wide variety of warm water species out of his towee boat. Show Notes with Dave Hurley on Skinny Water Fishing 04:00 - Dave joined a community of fly fishermen who fished in the surf along the Pacific where they fished for Corbina, Surfperch, and Croaker species. Dave got really into fishing for Spotfin Croaker. 06:00 - Dave found out that a stonefly nymph pattern works great for Spotfin Croakers. 09:00 - Dave talks about getting his first boat. 17:50 - He talks about the time when he and his best friend fished sight fished for musky on the flats. 18:40 - His go-to is a 6-wt rod and occasional 7-wt. 19:30 - Dave now focuses on carp fishing and goes up to 10-wt. For leader, he goes up to 15-pound test, and sometimes 12 or 10-pound. 27:25 - Dave doesn't really pay attention to water temperatures. He and his team are mostly sight fishing. 35:55 - We talk about casting. "Your short game is just as important as your long game", Dave says. 39:25 - Dave's favorite line is the SA Bass Bug Fly Line. 42:25 - Dave talks about how he improvises when he ties his flies, tying them differently each time. He also talks about the common materials he uses. 47:40 - Jeff's go-to flies always have rubber. 49:00 - Dave talks about how being an artist affects his creativity in fishing. 51:00 - Dave talks about how he practices handling fish in a way that doesn't hurt the fish. And also talks about how he tries in his own little ways to protect the waters he fishes. Show Notes: https://wetflyswing.com/481

Bridge Michigan reported this week that fatal crash numbers remain high in post-pandemic Michigan, with safety advocates again citing risky driving behavior as the reason. On this week's Talking Michigan Transportation podcast, Bridge Michigan reporter Mike Wilkinson talks about his analysis of the data and what he found. In a second segment, Pamela Shadel Fischer, senior director of external engagement at the Washington, D.C.-based Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), offers her organization's perspective on the problem and how automated traffic enforcement could stem the tide. Wilkinson collected data that supports these troubling findings. He discovered that despite a decrease in overall driving during the pandemic, fatal crash rates have increased by 30 percent over that time frame, particularly in the northern half of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. The discussion begins with an exploration of worrying trends: an alarming rise in reckless driving and crashes, particularly in rural areas. This is due to several factors, including higher speeds, more risky behavior on the roads, and a concerning disparity in seatbelt usage between rural and urban areas. Shadel Fischer is among advocates who say policy makers should promote measures that take advantage of automated technology to detect speeding. She also cites provisions in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to allow for the use of the technology, what she terms "safety cameras."

Please click Subscribe/Follow and give us a 5-star rating and review.  Click here to go to our website. Click here to donate to the show. Click here for Jens Closet.  Second week in Hell With Nadine..for the start of Season 8! Thanks to Black Swamp Paranormal's Nadine for sharing more creepy and spooky tales from their ghost outings!  Michigan Dogman In folklore, the Michigan Dogman was allegedly witnessed in 1887 in Wexford County, Michigan, United States. The creature is described as a seven-foot tall, blue-eyed, or amber-eyed bipedal canine-like animal with the torso of a man and a fearsome howl that sounds like a human scream. According to legends, the Michigan Dogman appears in a ten-year cycle that falls on years ending in 7. Sightings have been reported in several locations throughout Michigan, primarily in the northwestern quadrant of the Lower Peninsula. In 1987, the legend of the Michigan Dogman gained popularity when disc jockey Steve Cook at WTCM-FM recorded a song about the creature and its reported sightings. History This creature was unknown to most of the modern world until very late in the twentieth century. It is said to have been stalking the area around the Manistee River since the days when the Odawa tribes lived there. Authentic sources for sightings made prior to 1987, however, have never been documented beyond Steve Cook's song, discussed below. The first alleged encounter of the Michigan Dogman occurred in 1887 in Wexford County, when two lumberjacks saw a creature that they described as having a man's body and a dog's head. In 1937 in Paris, Michigan, Robert Fortney was attacked by five wild dogs and said that one of the five walked on two legs. Reports of similar creatures also came from Allegan County in the 1950s, and in Manistee and Cross Village in 1967. Linda S. Godfrey, in her book The Beast of Bray Road, compares the Manistee sightings to a similar creature sighted in Wisconsin known as the Beast of Bray Road. Hell, Michigan Hell is an unincorporated community in Livingston County in the U.S. state of Michigan. As an unincorporated community, Hell has no defined boundaries or population statistics of its own. Located within Putnam Township, the community is centered along Patterson Lake Road about 15 miles (24 km) northwest of Ann Arbor and three miles (4.8 km) southwest of Pinckney. The community is served by the Pinckney post office with the 48169 ZIP Code. History Hell developed around a sawmill, gristmill, distillery and tavern. All four were operated by George Reeves, who moved to the area in the 1830s from the Catskill Mountains in New York. He purchased a sawmill on what is now known as Hell Creek in 1841. In addition to the sawmill, Reeves purchased 1,000 acres (400 ha) of land surrounding the mill. Reeves then built a gristmill on Hell Creek which was powered by water that was impounded by a small dam across the creek. Farmers in the area were quite successful in growing wheat and had an abundance of grain. Reeves opened a distillery to process the excess grain into whiskey. Reeves also opened a general store/tavern on his property. The tavern and distillery soon became a thriving business for Reeves. He built a ballroom on the second floor of the establishment and a sulky racetrack around his millpond. Reeves also sold his alcohol to nearby roadhouses and stores for as little as ten cents a gallon. His operation came under the scrutiny of the U.S. government in the years after the American Civil War. When tax collectors came to Hell to assess his operation, Reeves and his customers conspired to hide the whiskey by filling barrels and sinking them to the bottom of the millpond. When the government agents left the area, the barrels were hauled to the surface with ropes. As Reeves aged, he slowed his business ventures, closing the distillery and witnessing the burning of the gristmill. He died in 1877. Reeves' family sold the land to a group of investors from Detroit in 1924. The investors increased the size of the millpond by raising the level of the dam, creating what is now Hiland Lake. The area soon became a summer resort area, attracting visitors for swimming and fishing. Henry Ford considered building some manufacturing facilities in the area but decided against it.

Tonight's guest, Michael Bondie, had his Bigfoot sighting in the spring of 2012, when he was 16. He had gone fishing at a place on the river that his family's home was next to, in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, that day. Wanting to get an early start, Mike set out early that morning and when he got to the spot where he planned to fish, he couldn't help but be taken by how peaceful everything seemed. The birds were chirping, the sound of the water flowing by was relaxing and everything was so serene. After fishing there for a few hours, however, the serenity he felt came to an abrupt stop. Suddenly, Mike heard a loud splashing sound about 50 feet from where he was fishing. Little did he know, he was about to have an encounter with an 8 ½ to 9 foot tall Sasquatch! If you've had a Bigfoot sighting and would like to be a guest, on the show, please go to https://MyBigfootSighting.com and let us know. We'd love to hear from you. Premium memberships are now available! If you'd like to be able to listen to the show without ads and have full access to premium content, please go to https://MyBigfootSighting.com to find out how to become a premium member.If you'd like to help support the show, by buying your own My Bigfoot Sighting t-shirt, sweatshirt, or tank top, please visit the My Bigfoot Sighting Show Store Page, by going to...https://dogman-encounters.myshopify.com/collections/mens-my-bigfoot-sighting-collectionShow's theme song, "Banjo Music," courtesy Nathan BrumleyI produce 3 other podcasts that are available for listening on your favorite podcast app. If you haven't checked them out, already, here are links to them… Bigfoot Eyewitness Radio https://www.spreaker.com/show/bigfoot-eyewitness-radio_1 Dogman Encounters https://www.spreaker.com/show/dogman-encounters-radio_2 My Paranormal Experience https://www.spreaker.com/show/my-paranormal-experience Thanks for listening!This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5101987/advertisement

Located on the northern tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, Mackinaw City is a place with wonderful outdoor opportunities, a variety of hotel options, and out-of-this-world fudge! Sabrina Lieghio from the Mackinaw City Chamber of Tourism joins the podcast to talk about why you should add Mackinaw City to your list of places to visit. Show Notes ⬇️Published on 4/21/23Timecodes0:00 - Intro1:42 - Mackinaw City vs. Mackinac Island and How to Spell Them3:17 - The History of the Mighty Mac5:43 - Downtown Mackinaw City9:17 - The Food Scene in Mackinaw City11:32 - What Makes the Fudge in Mackinaw City so Delicious?13:28 - Range of Accommodation Options in Mackinaw City15:10 - What Visitors Can Find on Mackinac Island17:16 - Stay Connected with the Mackinaw City Chamber of Tourism and Destinations Beyond ExpectationsRead More About Mackinaw CityMackinaw City Visitor's GuideFollow the Mackinaw City Chamber of Tourism on FacebookExplore Group Experience to Learn how to Build your Travel TribeSupport the show

In this episode of the Wildtalk Podcast, we talk about habitat projects happening in Michigan's Northern Lower Peninsula, fly away with a discussion about spring wild turkey behavior, and have a high-flying discussion about little brown bats. Episode Hosts: Hannah Schauer and Rachel LeightnerProducer/editor: Eric HilliardAll things habitatMichigan elk hunting informationGood neighbor authorityAll things feathersNuisance wildlife informationMichigan turkey hunting information All things furMichigan bat informationRabies informationQuestions or comments about the show? Contact the DNR Wildlife Division at 517-284-9453 (WILD) or email dnr-wildlife@michigan.gov.

Dogman - A werewolf or werewolf-type creature first reported in 1887 in Wexford County, Michigan. Sightings have been reported in several locations throughout Michigan, primarily in the northwestern quadrant of the Lower Peninsula.  Discover more TERRIFYING podcasts at http://eeriecast.com/   Follow Carman Carrion!    https://www.facebook.com/carman.carrion.9/   https://www.instagram.com/carmancarrion/?hl=en   https://twitter.com/CarmanCarrion   Subscribe to Spotify! https://open.spotify.com/show/0uiX155WEJnN7QVRfo3aQY   Please Review Us on iTunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freaky-folklore/id1550361184   Music and sound effects used in the Freaky Folklore Podcast have or may have been provided/created by:  CO.AG: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcavSftXHgxLBWwLDm_bNvA Myuu: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiSKnkKCKAQVxMUWpZQobuQ Jinglepunks: https://jinglepunks.com/ Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Kevin MacLeod: http://incompetech.com/ Dark Music: https://soundcloud.com/darknessprevailspodcast Soundstripe: https://app.soundstripe.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 753, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: State Seals 1: This state's seal shows a man with a gun standing on the state's Lower Peninsula. Michigan. 2: Its state seal has a reverse side that displays the 6 flags that have flown over it. Texas. 3: The Goddess of Liberty and this great king adorn Hawaii's state seal. Kamehameha. 4: 8 leaves of this poi-producing plant are on Hawaii's seal. taro. 5: The sun rising over the mountains on its seal shows that it was the first state west of the Alleghenies. Ohio. Round 2. Category: Sports Firsts On The First 1: On January 1, 1935 Bucknell beat Miami 26-zip in the first playing of this bowl game. Orange Bowl. 2: On June 1, 1925, pinch hitting for Pee Wee Wanninger, he played his first of 2,130 games in a row. Lou Gehrig. 3: On February 1, 1970 Dave Balon pulled off his first one of these in his pro hockey career. Hat trick. 4: On April 1, 1990 he won the first tournament he played on the Senior PGA Tour by 4 strokes. Jack Nicklaus. 5: On March 1, 1941 Elmer Layden, once part of this legendary quartet, was named the first NFL commissioner. Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Round 3. Category: Dem Bugs 1: This insect, whose name is Spanish for "little fly", carries malaria, encephalitis and yellow fever. the mosquito. 2: Among bees, workers do all the work while their sole function is to mate with the queen. the drones. 3: Of a beetle, a spider or a grasshopper, the one that is not an insect. a spider. 4: An insect uses this appendage to smell and feel and in some instances to taste and hear. antennae. 5: These large bugs named for a monster are probably the fastest flying insects. dragonflies. Round 4. Category: Characters In Musicals 1: Sky Masterson. Guys and Dolls. 2: The forbidden love of Lun Tha and Tuptim inspires Anna to sing"Hello, Young Lovers" in this musical. King and I. 3: Lilli Vanessi,Lois Lane,"Taming of the Shrew" players. Kiss Me, Kate. 4: Lalume,the wazir of police,the Caliph of Baghdad. Kismet. 5: Lazar Wolf. Fiddler on the Roof. Round 5. Category: Where 1: To vacation in this Caribbean paradise, you may fly into Sangster Intl. Airport in Montego Bay. Jamaica. 2: She's in Copenhagen, on a rock in the harbor just east of Kastellet Fortress. The Little Mermaid. 3: In Portugal the area south of this river that bisects the country is much warmer than the area north of it. Tagus. 4: It's in Agra, India, on the banks of the Yamuna River between the Old Fort and the Protected Forest. the Taj Mahal. 5: In Paris, on 40 acres on the Seine, with a sculpture of slaves by Michelangelo. the Louvre. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia! Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/

In today's episode, we're talking to Camille Hanson, an ESL teacher and social media influencer who grew up in the U.P. - the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Buckle up! You're about to immersed in an adventure; one that includes snow, lake life, deer flies, girls hunting with bows and arrows and so much more. Learn from a local how you can take advantage of "The Mitten State."*****Michigan is the 10th largest state in the US by population, and there's quite a bit you should know about it. Michigan is located up in the Midwest, near Canada, and it has two main parts: The Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula. Most people recognize the shape of the Lower Peninsula; it looks like a mitten. That's why Michigan is sometimes referred to as "The Mitten State." College life in Michigan is a big thing. And like most states in the Midwest and South, they're crazy about American football. The state is also home to the automobile industry with General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler headquartered there. Some famous names from Michigan include: Madonna (the singer), Francis Ford Coppola (the director and screenwriter of "The Godfather"), and William Boeing, a pioneer in aviation and creator of the Boeing Company. Yep, they're all Michiganders.If you like fishing, hiking and greenery, Michigan is where it's at. 50% of the state is covered in forest, so it's lush and green. It's also home to over 10,000 lakes and 40,000 miles of rivers. Did I mention it touches all five of the Great Lakes? That's a lot of water, a lot of shore and a lot of trees. As a tourist, you might want to try the world-famous cherries from there, try a pasty – not a pastie – and a beer from one of the many local breweries. Your senses will be overwhelmed! *****Find Camille! You can check out Camille's work by visiting her website at Learn English With Camille. Premium Content: This episode is part of Season 3. By purchasing Season 3 transcripts, you'll be able to access the full episodes, the full PDF transcripts for episodes 101 - 150, an Mp3 download  and the premium podcast player to work on your pronunciation.  Get ALL PREMIUM CONTENT FOR SEASONS 1 - 3  (with 5 in-depth courses to improve your English,  includes all transcripts + mp3s)Get the Free E-Book: 101 American English Slang Words *****Stories and Strategies Podcast About Public Relations, Marketing, and Human CommunicationListen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

When Heather Young agrees to relocate with her boyfriend to Michigan's secluded Lower Peninsula, she has high hopes that the change of scenery will do them and their relationship good. But after a big relationship blowup, Heather reaches her breaking point; little does she know the worst is yet to come.For even more true crime, head to discovery+. Go to discoveryplus.com/deadlynightmares to start your 7 day free trial today. Terms apply. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Live—from the campus of Hillsdale College in beautiful Hillsdale Michigan— this is Scot Bertram in for Steve on the Steve Gruber Show for –Wednesday, December 21st 2022—   —Here are 3 big things you need to know—   One — The Supreme Court will hear arguments over President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan this February.  Biden earlier this year unveiled a plan to cancel up to 20-thousand dollars in student debt for tens of millions of borrowers.  Republican states filed a series of lawsuits to stop the policy from going into effect, arguing it's an overreach of executive authority.   Two—   A winter storm watch is in effect for the entire Upper Peninsula and most of the Lower Peninsula from tomorrow afternoon until Saturday evening. Wind gusts could reach 55 miles an hour and total snow accumulations are forecast to be between eight and 17 inches. Meteorologists are telling people to not travel anywhere Friday and Friday night unless it's an emergency.   And number three— Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will visit Washington, DC today, his first trip outside Ukraine since the Russian invasion started 300 days ago.  He'll meet with President Biden in the Oval Office, and will then travel to Capitol Hill where he'll give a prime-time address to a joint session of Congress.    

It's illegal to feed deer in the Lower Peninsula. Plus the start of our Yeti Hunt, and are the Lions for real? Like... for REAL real?

“There are a lot of dedicated men and women who keep the bridge going day to day, whether it's in the toll booths or working underneath it. As the engineer of the bridge, my job is really to maintain the Mackinac Bridge, both through our own in-house workers and contractors we hire to do bigger projects. Inspecting the bridge is a big part of what we do. I'm honored to have the role and join this esteemed group that maintains it.” Cavalieri says he's been just about everywhere on the bridge and never tires of the amazing views at the top of the bridge. “When you're going up one of the tunnels to the top, it's kind of like you're going through a submarine. Then suddenly when you come out through the top, it's like the whole world is around you. It's quite incredible. The Straits area is such a beautiful area, and there's no better view than on top of one of the towers overlooking it. It's the best job in the world.” Cavalieri describes his career path from MSU to the Mackinac Bridge Authority. And he talks about why he chose MSU for college and how his Spartan experience helped prepare him for this role. He came from a long line of Spartans, including his grandfather, who had to take a ferry to get to the Lower Peninsula and on to East Lansing. And Cole has three siblings who also attended MSU.  “MSU was helpful to me, both as a student and as a person by putting me out of my comfort zone. MSU opened the world for me. As a Yooper, my first class at MSU was in a lecture hall with more students than my high school had. I like the diversity and people at MSU. The course work was, of course, beneficial and made you work in teams.” His advice for today's students is to get real-world experience and interact more with your professors.   Cavalieri talks about some of his short- and long-term goals for the bridge and the challenges and opportunities involved in pursuing those goals. “The bridge is in good condition. The original designers and builders did a magnificent job. It's an incredible structure. And if it's not broken, don't fix it. It's mostly a lot of rehab that we have planned in the near future to keep it in the best condition it can be. We have a couple of contracted projects coming up. There are a few things we're working on just to get the bridge from fair condition back to good condition. “We have some bigger obstacles coming down the road, including a full deck replacement. Nothing lasts forever, and that's true of our infrastructure. The bridge is 65. So, in about 10 years, we'll be beginning that deck replacement project, and that will be a big undertaking. When we do get to that point, we'll not only be fixing it up but setting up the bridge for success for a long time. “The bridge speaks for itself as far as being the icon it is for Michigan. And I think in a lot of ways Michigan didn't become whole until November 1, 1957, when the Mackinac Bridge opened. I take my role very seriously as I approach this job. To me it's important to not only maintain the structure but to keep it going for a long time because it really is invaluable to Michiganders. “The Mackinac Bridge has been an important bridge in the history of civil engineering across the world, too. I often hear from other engineers from around the world as we do different studies. It's really revered. I'm really looking forward to working with the other members of the Mackinac Bridge Authority to bring the Mackinac Bridge into the next generation.” MSU Today airs Saturdays at 5 p.m. and Sundays at 5 a.m. on WKAR News/Talk and Sundays at 8 p.m. on 760 WJR. Find “MSU Today with Russ White” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your shows.

Talking about an epic journey this week with outdoor enthusiast Haley Andrus. We will find out what made her walk around the entire shoreline of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan in just under 3 months! What drives a person to do such monumental challenges? We will find out! Why? Always wanted to do an extended hike Thought of the idea while on the beach on Lake Michigan Grew up in the outdoors and got the outdoor bug in Jackson Hole Wyoming Training for hike Did extended backpacking in the winter before hike Started walking for distance before hike Planning the trip The mindset while walking meditations Music Podcasts etc..... Logistical Planning Exact route Camping stops Distance for each day The big send off Starting at the Ohio line Nervous The first day Walking through Detroit Walking on the beaches for the first time Reactions from people she ran into along the way Saginaw Bay area hike Raccoon encounter Making it to Mackinaw and seeing the Bridge Half way Emotional Going back to places you hiked through Physical changes along the way How food played a role as the trip progressed Losing weight Shoes wearing out along the trip Making food along the way and eating in restaurants  Hiking the west side of the state Ludington hiking The west side erosion and devastation was evident along Lake Michigan, how seeing that impacted her The final stretch and last 10 days The finish line! What is next Cost of the trip Talking about the gear  Carrying water on the hike Possible book? The big takeaway from the adventure

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Oct. 15. It dropped for free subscribers on Oct. 18. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoBen Doornbos, General Manager at Nub's Nob, MichiganRecorded onOctober 10, 2022About Nub's NobClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Fisher familyPass affiliations: Indy PassReciprocal pass partners: NoneLocated in: Harbor Springs, MichiganClosest neighboring ski areas: The Highlands (4 minutes), Mt. McSauba (35 minutes), Boyne Mountain (37 minutes), Otsego (55 minutes), Treetops (1 hour), Shanty Creek (1 hour, 9 minutes), Hanson Hills (1 hour, 22 minutes), Mt. Holiday (1 hour, 26 minutes), Hickory Hills (1 hour, 41 minutes), Missaukee Mountain (1 hour, 41 minutes), Snow Snake (1 hour, 58 minutes), The Homestead (2 hours, 11 minutes), Crystal (2 hours, 14 minutes), Caberfae (2 hours, 14 minutes)Base elevation: 911 feetSummit elevation: 1,338 feetVertical drop: 427 feetSkiable Acres: 248Average annual snowfall: 123 inchesTrail count: 53 (24% double-black, 49% black, 20% intermediate, 7% beginner)Lift count: 10 (3 fixed-grip quads, 4 triples, 1 double, 1 carpet, 1 ropetow - view Lift Blog's inventory of Nub's Nob's lift fleet)Uphill capacity: 17,075 skiers per hourWhy I interviewed himWe all have those places that made us skiers, that wrecked us or rescued us, that in our private worlds are synonymous with skiing itself. For me those places are Mott Mountain, Apple Mountain, Snow Snake, Caberfae, Boyne Mountain, and Searchmont. Without those places I am not a skier, or at least I am not the particular version of a skier that's writing this newsletter. These are, in order, the first, second, third, and fourth places I skied; the place I learned to thread bumps; and the place I learned to navigate little drops and off-piste terrain. The first two are dead, the others survive in various states of modernized. In my head they all stand available at any moment for viewing, a tattered Stu-flix, a vault of skinny-ski adventures crashing through 1990s stop-animation reels.But there's a seventh ski area in my mental vault: Nub's Nob. It's a funny name, perhaps jarring if this is your first time seeing it. I happen to think it's the best ski area name in America. It's simple, memorable, intriguing, evocative of what it is: a 427-foot locals' bump with an Alta-grade following of devoted locals.That's not the same thing as having Alta-grade skiing (who does besides Snowbird)? But consider this: across the street lies The Highlands, the Boyne-owned runner formerly known as Boyne Highlands. The Highlands is larger than Nub's. It has one high-speed lift and is dropping in another next year – a six-pack so fancy that it makes the iPhone 14 look like a block of aged Roquefort. Highlands' season pass costs a bit more than Nub's, but it comes with days at Big Sky, which is like buying a microwave and getting a free car as a thank-you gift.None of it matters. Well, it probably matters to some people. But Nub's is the opposite of the endangered indie. It may be the best ski area under 500 vertical feet in the country: a big, sprawling trail layout; numerous and redundant lifts; grooming that makes an Olympic skating rink look like a Tough Mudder course; glades everywhere; and, like any Midwest ski area with a stocked trophy cabinet, an absolute flamethrower of a terrain park. Nub's is that lost treasure of Midwest skiing, rare as a 200-grade Boone-and-Crockett trophy buck: the balanced mountain. Grooming, yes, of all kinds, but bumps always on Twilight Zone, and maybe also on Chute (like many Michigan ski areas, the runs stack side by side on the trailmap, creating half a dozen that you could tuck into Park City's pumphouse). Several times per decade the ski area punches new glades into the forest. And since Nub's has one of the world's best snowmaking systems, supplemented with a reliable train of lake-effect and an ability to ninja-dodge freeze-thaw cycles, the whole mountain opens in the early season and often stays filled to the edges into April.Bad people can ruin a great ski area, of course. I can stay salty for decades over unprovoked attitude from a liftie. But I've been skiing Nub's Nob for as long as I've been skiing and I've never encountered anything other than an Extreme Welcome. The lifties chitter-chatter as you load and Patrol lets you ski where you please and the bartenders are tolerant of pitchers ordered in bulk at 11 a.m.My first day at Nub's was one of the weirdest ski days of my life. It was my sixth day ever on skis and I was geared up in sweatpants and a discount-superstore winter coat of the sort that rips when you yank the zipper open too sternly. We arrived in the snowslammed evening with tennis ball-sized flakes drifting in the wind. I did not have goggles of course and scoffed at the notion. At age 17 I had lived all my life in snowy climes and had never once needed such decorative nonsense. In a catastrophic freefall down Valley or perhaps it was Scarface I understood at last that storm-skiing sans goggles was like swimming without water: painful and really quite impossible. In the baselodge I purchased the least-expensive pair of goggles I could find, which I believe cost $25, an astonishing sum for a bagboy earning $4.50 an hour at the local Meijer superstore.Nub's excused the error. The upside of place-based defeat is the clear path to redemption. In all phases of my ski life I have returned to Nub's and it has always had something useful to say, something I couldn't exactly find anywhere else. I still can't, and I needed to poke around in the machine a bit to try and decode the trance.What we talked aboutWhen snowmaking starts at Nub's Nob; the mountain's earliest and latest openings ever; “bottom line, the ski industry in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan doesn't exist without snowmaking”; why freeze-thaw isn't really a thing for Nub's; “if you can open, you should open”; the path from $8.25-an-hour rental tech to general manager; Marquette Mountain; Nub's incredible seasonal employee retention rate; Jim Bartlett, the ski area's legendary general manager; not breaking a good thing; becoming the boss of the people who taught you everything you know; how Nub's Nob got its name; whether Nub's will stay independent over the long term; “where skiers go”; going deep on the Green lift upgrade: why it won't be a high-speed lift, when it's coming, and whether it will be green; whether the ski area considered wiping out the front-side lifts in favor of a six-pack; the tug-of-war between Fixed-Grip Bro and Detach Bro; why Orange won't be a high-speed lift either; comparing a modern fixed-grip Skytrac chair to a 1978 Riblet lift; why the new lift won't have a carpet load; why lifties need to talk to skiers; the installation and maintenance cost of a fixed-grip versus a high-speed lift; why the new lift will be the same length but occupy a smaller footprint; whether the new lift will load and unload at the same spots as the current Green lift; whether Nub's will sell the chairs; the Blue chair Killer; why the Blue lift isn't coming back; the power of the ropetow and where we could see more on Nub's; long-term plans for the Purple and Orange lifts; “there's something special about riding a double chairlift”; regional differences in safety-bar culture; “I'd like to have a super-modern lift fleet”; whether a lift from the bottom of Pintail Peak to the top of Nub's Nob South would make sense; how Nub's continues to develop new terrain on essentially the same footprint; how to access Nub's endless glade stash; why Arena and Tower glades don't continue farther skier's left along their respective ridges; the glades always open in Northern Michigan; Nub's last big expansion opportunity and what kind of terrain sits in there; keeping the parks rad Brah; the return of the halfpipe; why Nub's doesn't build earthwork features; the importance of night-skiing; considering lights on Pintail Peak; the history and secrets behind the Nub's Nob snowgun; “you can fix everything with a pipe wrench” and why the ski area is happy with a low-tech snowgun arsenal; long-live the metal wicket ticket; “we always think of technology as making our lives better, but sometimes, it's making our lives worse”; the competitive and cooperative dynamic between Nub's Nob and The Highlands, which sit across the street from one another; why Nub's finally joined the Indy Pass; the ski-industry problem that Indy Pass is solving; why Nub's is rolling with 32 Indy Base Pass blackouts; looking out for the little ski areas down the street; and how much it hurt to finally push Nub's peak-day lift-ticket prices over $100.    Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewA lot of pretty obvious reasons: the new Green Chair, the resort's decision to at last join the Indy Pass, the obvious example of another thriving indie belying the whole Megapass-Killbot theory. But we booked this pod in May, weeks before the Indy announcement (which I knew was coming), and the chairlift upgrade (which I didn't). The simple fact is that I'd had Nub's Nob on my interview-the-GM list since Storm day one, and I finally reached out and we set everything up pretty quickly.This is a good time, however, to restate something that's core to this whole operation: this podcast is for everyone. And by “everyone,” I mean every ski area of any size. If it has a lift, I'm interested. For now, that means the United States, but I will fold Canada in soon enough. That will probably remain the focus over the long-term, but if you are running a ski area of any size anywhere on Planet Earth*, consider yourself relevant to The Storm Skiing Podcast.But from a practical, logistical point of view, I have tried very hard to balance the podcast across regions. This does not mean that I will guarantee an equal ratio of Western, Midwestern, and Northeast interviews (I haven't quite gotten to the Southeast yet; I will soon, but there are only a couple dozen ski areas down there, so pods focused in the southern states will likely always be infrequent). But I will promise a consistent flow of Midwest pods. It's where I came from, where I learned to ski, and it's one of the world's greatest and most vital ski regions.When the season's ski mags would drop each August in my early ski years, I would flip through slowly, hopefully, for any nugget of writing on Midwest ski areas. It was like searching for ice cream at a hardware store. No one cared. If a ski magazine was 200 pages, the West got 195, the East got five, and the Midwest got mentioned whenever a writer noted that Big Sky was owned by the same outfit that owned Boyne Mountain. It was a different, internet-less world, of course, but I am now in a position to create the sort of immersive ski area profiles that Teen Stu longed to see about my local bumps. These will keep landing in your inbox as long as The Storm does.You can view all past and future Storm Skiing Podcasts by clicking through below:*I will also consider ski areas on other planets.What I got wrongThe opening day of Michigan's deer-hunting season is a big deal. Like day-off-from-school big deal. And I don't mean parents pull their kids out while the non-hunters press on. I mean every Nov. 15 is a school holiday like Thanksgiving or Labor Day or Christmas. Our morning announcements each fall would warn us to watch out for sugarbeets – an enormous root crop stacked in clearings to bait deer – that had bounced off transport trucks on M-30. Deer hunting in Northern Michigan is a big deal.So, during a discussion about Nub's previous years' opening dates, I told Doornbos that it was pretty bold of him to open on the first day of deer-hunting season, after I thought he'd referenced a recent Nov. 15 opening. Doornbos rolled with it, but I realized while editing the pod that he had actually said Nov. 16. Oops.Why you should ski Nub's NobMichigan has 39 active ski areas, according to the National Ski Areas Association. This is the second-most of any state, behind New York, which sports 52. About two-thirds of Michigan's ski areas sit in the Lower Peninsula. This is a useful distinction: Lower Peninsula skiers rarely hit the Upper Peninsula (UP), and UP skiers rarely ski below the Mackinaw Bridge. Geography explains this disconnect: the UP's ski areas are mostly bunched in its western portion, far closer to Wisconsin than the population centers of Michigan. Marquette Mountain, the closest non-ropetow bump, is seven hours from Detroit airport, but fewer than five hours from Milwaukee. In that time, Southeast Michigan skiers can be at Keystone (with help from an airplane).That's all background. What I'm getting to is that the Lower Peninsula only has a half dozen or so well-equipped, substantially built-out ski areas with respectable vertical drops (relative to their neigboring hills): Nub's Nob, Caberfae, Crystal, Shanty Creek, Boyne Mountain, and The Highlands. Otsego Club, a longtime private joint, recently opened to the public, but its infrastructure is a bit creaky. So if you're planning a best-of-Michigan tour, these are the six to hit.But if you only have one day to ski Michigan before an asteroid crashes into the planet and wipes out life as we know it, pick Nub's. I'm not sure that it has the best terrain of those six – Highlands, I think, is equal in its sprawling videogame-ish dimensions. Nub's isn't the steepest – Boyne Mountain has the most consistent pitch along its extended main ridge. Nub's is probably also the least-resort-ish of the six, with little onsite lodging. But, like Caberfae, another family-owned bump that is on a constant crusade to enhance the skiing, Nub's is defined less by what I can easily point to and more by what's hard to describe. By that thing called atmosphere, a sort of sense of place that collectively descends upon all who ski there. It's not a thing you can order, like a lift, or something you can streamline, like parking. It's just something that is. You'll have to go and see for yourself.Podcast notes* I make the point several times that Nub's Nob is constantly upgrading. The ski area has collated an excellent timeline, starting with the ski area's 1957 founding. Skim this page and Nub's decades-long commitment to constant, mostly subtle but always impactful improvement is obvious. I wish all ski areas would create something like this.* A 2016 obituary for longtime owner Walter Fisher, who bought Nub's Nob from founder Dorie Sarnes in 1977 and owned it until he passed away (his family continues to own the ski area). An excerpt:Jim Bartlett — who joined Nub's that same year and now serves as its general manager — noted that the ski area has added significantly to its amenities since then, expanding from about a dozen runs to 53.“The business has grown almost continuously since Walter bought it in 1977,” said Bartlett, who described Fisher as “absolutely one of the most sincere, thoughtful, kind, classy men I've ever met.” …With neighboring Boyne Highlands Resort establishing itself as a ski area with extensive on-site lodging, Bartlett said Walter Fisher decided early in his Nub's involvement to pursue another niche — wanting the property to become "the best day ski area in the Midwest."Nub's would phase out its own limited lodging options so it could channel resources toward skiing amenities, grooming and snowmaking operations and food and beverage options. The ski area's offerings have since achieved regional and national recognition on numerous occasions.* Doornbos and I also talked extensively about Bartlett, who served as general manager from 1987 until handing the job off to Doornbos in 2017. An excerpt from this excellent profile by Kate Bassett:General Manager of Nub's Nob, Jim Bartlett, is a guy who has earned a nationwide reputation as a leader and champion of the old-school-cool Harbor Springs ski resort. But that's not the reason Jim Bartlett is a person whose story is worth telling.He's on top of the hill. He's at the bottom of the hill. He's in the maintenance garage. He's in the cafeteria. He's at a chairlift on-ramp. He's in the rental area. He's in the parking lot. He's everywhere. He's Nub's Nob's JB. …In his tenure at Nub's Nob, first as area manager and then as general manager, following the death of his mentor, legendary snow maker Jim Dilworth, Bartlett has turned 14 runs into 53, four chairlifts into nine, 15 patented snowmaking guns into 292, plus added a Pintail Peak Lodge, new locker room and so much more. The most impressive part? He's done it without sacrificing Nub's signature vibe, best described as a home away from home.Bartlett's an expert in snow making techniques. A public relations superstar. A guy who understands the importance of blending tradition with new technology. He's even learned how to make peace with the Midwest's occasionally uncooperative winter weather. In short, he's like a walking, talking master's class of how to run a resort that's focused 100 percent on skiing and riding.* We go deep on the Green lift upgrade, which Doornbos announced in an excellent video last month:* Nub's Nob is The Storm's fourth podcast focused explicitly on a Michigan ski area - I've also featured The Highlands, Boyne Mountain, and Caberfae:I should have another Michigan episode coming next week - and it's a good one. Listen to the end of the pod to find out who.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 112/100 in 2022, and number 358 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Talking about an epic journey this week with outdoor enthusiast Haley Andrus. We will find out what made her walk around the entire shoreline of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan in just under 3 months! What drives a person to do such monumental challenges? We will find out! Why? Always wanted to do an extended hike Thought of the idea while on the beach on Lake Michigan Grew up in the outdoors and got the outdoor bug in Jackson Hole Wyoming Training for hike Did extended backpacking in the winter before hike Started walking for distance before hike Planning the trip The mindset while walking meditations Music Podcasts etc..... Logistical Planning Exact route Camping stops Distance for each day The big send off Starting at the Ohio line Nervous The first day Walking through Detroit Walking on the beaches for the first time Reactions from people she ran into along the way Saginaw Bay area hike Raccoon encounter Making it to Mackinaw and seeing the Bridge Half way Emotional Going back to places you hiked through Physical changes along the way How food played a role as the trip progressed Losing weight Shoes wearing out along the trip Making food along the way and eating in restaurants  Hiking the west side of the state Ludington hiking The west side erosion and devastation was evident along Lake Michigan, how seeing that impacted her The final stretch and last 10 days The finish line! What is next Cost of the trip Talking about the gear  Carrying water on the hike Possible book? The big takeaway from the adventure

Today is Indigenous People's Day. However, this week also marks the 122nd anniversary of the day a group of white folks burned down a village on the northern tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, violently forcing the Cheboiganing Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians to flee for their lives. A memorial at the University of Michigan Museum of Art commemorates the homes that were lost that day at Burt Lake. Directly across from the memorial wall, two paintings depict portals into an imagined future - one where Indigenous land is reclaimed.  Andrea Carlson is the Ojibwe artist behind “Future Cache,” which will be on display at UMMA through June 2024. She joined the show to share her experience in implementing decolonization with institutions that so often fail to acknowledge Indigenous lives. GUEST: Andrea Carlson, painter of "Future Cache" from the Turtle Clan, descended from Grand Portage Ojibwe ___ Looking for more conversations from Stateside? Right this way. If you like what you hear on the pod, consider supporting our work. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Click here for Joe's new book Click here to save on high-end clothing in Jens's closet Click here for the book of the week In this episode Jen and Joe talk about some legendary haunted locations in their favorite haunted town in Michigan, St Ignace. This little town, just north of the famous Mackinac Bridge. This little seaside town is packed with tails of the paranormal, from ghostly figures that walk the streets to Native Americans in the shops. No one really knows the number of spirits that roam there, just that there have been thousands of sightings threw out the years. Joe and Jen talk about some of their favorite cases of hauntings, but there are many more to find.  St.Ignace was founded by Father Marquette in 1671, and was named for St. Ignatius of Loyola. St. Ignace has a rich Native American history and was once the bustling hub of 17th century fur trade. In the mid-1800s, the population swelled as logging and commercial fishing went into full swing. Today, the people of St. Ignace welcome visitors from all over the world to enjoy the natural beauty, alluring attractions, and friendliness of this uniquely wonderful vacation destination. Downtown St.IgnaceIn the early 1900s, the few cars traveling the Straits crossed on railroad ferries at a cost of $40.00 each! In 1923, the Michigan State Ferry Service was established to transport autos between St. Ignace and the Lower Peninsula at the more reasonable cost of $2.50. During its first year of operation, 10,351 vehicles made the 1 hour crossing. In 1956, with 5 ferries running, about 1 million vehicles were transported across the water. During summer weekends, holidays and hunting season, as many as 9,000 cars were ferried, bringing line-ups of several miles and waits of 6 – 12 hours. The Mackinac Bridge replaced the Ferry Service in 1957. In its first few months of operation, the Mackinac Bridge recorded 140,000 vehicle crossings. Today, the Mackinac Bridge provides safe crossings for more than 4.5 million vehicles annually. Joe Shortridge has written a book that will change your life. By changing how your first thoughts are in the morning will change how you live your life. Click on the link above to find out more. 

Hi everyone and welcome back to TT! We had a small hiatus but we are back and we have a lot to discuss this week. This episode was recorded a couple of weeks ago upon the announcement of Sebastian Vettel's retirement. The news of Fernando Alonso replacing him at Aston Martin had not been announced yet so we were unaware of that in the midst of this conversation. That said, we also discuss some big topics happening in Indy Car and NASCAR, and we finish the pod discussing Ron's 24 hour race at Nelson Ledges with the Wittnauer Motorsports team. Big thanks to Rechelle (Ron's wonderful and brilliant wife) for hanging out with us during the first half of the show and giving us some great opinions of her own. She is invited back on the pod any time she likes. Please give us a follow on IG @tormentingtarmac and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as this helps us grow and reach out to other car and driving fans. Enjoy the newest episode of Tormenting Tarmac and remember.....Enthusiasts never die!

Christian Historical Fiction Talk is listener supported. When you buy things through this site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Lainey of the Door IslandsTake a step back in time to Door County in the 1800s, a time when lighthouse keepers couldn't give up, or lives would be lost. A time when storms on the lakes were as dangerous as the storms in their souls. A time when the people of the islands had to be strong and courageous. A time for Lainey of the Door Islands to become the woman God wants her to be.For Lainey, life on tiny Pilot Island is more trouble than it's worth. Auntie Edith is always fussing at her and making her do chores, and Uncle Otis spends a lot of time manning the lighthouse. Each day, Lainey stares out at the Great Lakes, praying this will be the day that brings her parents home to her from their travels. Will she ever come to love the islands and their treacherous waters, which seem to only bring a lot of shipwrecks and heartache to the people who live on the islands? Will she ever be able to go home?With humor, faith, friendship, and love to guide her, will Lainey find the strength to weather her own storms? Lainey of the Door Islands will touch your heart and show you that even in what feels like the worst circumstances, God has a plan to prosper and not to harm.Get your copy of Lainey of the Door Islands.Addy of the Door Islands by Judy Du CharmWhen Addy and her sister Molly step off the Orphan Train Steamer in Ephraim, Wisconsin, no one waits for them. Hopes for a family that would treat them kindly while they worked for them are gone. Addy determines to find a job and care for her sister, but that presents problems she can't quite handle. Even though Mr. Captain offers to help the girls find a home, Addy is convinced no one will ever want them. She's just too much trouble and too impetuous. Besides, those pesky feelings of abandonment stalk her heart. As Addy and Molly get to know the kind and strong people of Door County and its isolated islands, perhaps they will actually find a place to call home. But will they ever learn about the family they lost?Get your copy of Addy of the Door Islands.About JudyI was a teacher for 22 years, retiring in June of 2012.. I grew up in the small lakeside town of Harrisville in the northern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, the youngest of four children. Following college, Michigan State University, I worked as an announcer at a Christian Radio Station near Lansing. I married Lee in 1975 and we lived in the Detroit suburbs of Berkley and Royal Oak until moving to Wisconsin's beautiful Door Peninsula in early 1984 with Bethany, age 5, and Christopher, age 3. It was a year or two later that I went back to school to obtain my teaching degree. I taught 5th grade my whole teaching career and loved it. Science was my area of specialty, teaching two or three 5th grade classes of science each year. Of course, reading, language, spelling, social studies, and math were part of my teaching as well. Each subject is unique in its own way.All the while I was growing up I enjoyed writing short stories and poems. As an adult I put together my own Bible Studies and taught other adults in small groups or Sunday School classes. The desire to write was always in me, but the time commitment never quite seemed feasible. A few years ago the desire grew stronger, and I felt it was becoming a calling from the Lord.Visit Judy's website.Become a Patreon and enjoy special perks and bonus content.

July 23, 2022 In 1890, the Lighthouse Board recommended a lighthouse at Forty Mile Point, on the northeast coast of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. The primary reason for the light was so that as mariners traveled along the western part of Lake Huron between Mackinaw Point and the Saint Clair River, they would never be out of viewing range of a lighthouse. The name of Forty Mile Point stems from the fact that its location is 40 miles southeast of Mackinaw Point. The light station began service in 1897, with a square tower centered on the lake-facing side of a duplex keepers' house. Forty Mile Point Light Station, Michigan. Photo by Jeremy D'Entremont. Pat Williams. Photo by Jeremy D'Entremont. The station was automated and de-staffed in 1969. Two years later, the property was deeded to Presque Isle County, except for the lighthouse building itself. Finally, in 1998, the lighthouse was transferred to the county. Since then, the county and the Forty Mile Point Lighthouse Society have been working to restore the entire site. The park is open year-round to the public. One apartment in the lighthouse is occupied by a full-time caretaker; the other apartment is now a nautical museum staffed by volunteers. Pat Williams is the vice president of the Forty Mile Point Lighthouse Society, and Eric Klein is the resident caretaker at the light station. Eric Klein and his wife, Lisa. Photo by Jeremy D'Entremont.

 To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on June 28. Free subscribers got it on July 1. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoJonathan M. Davis, General Manager of Perfect North, IndianaRecorded onJune 20, 2022About Perfect NorthClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Perfect FamilyPass affiliations: NoneLocated in: Lawrenceburg, IndianaClosest neighboring ski areas: Mad River, Ohio (2 hours, 18 minutes); Paoli Peaks, Indiana (2 hours, 39 minutes); Snow Trails (3 hours)Base elevation: 400 feetSummit elevation: 800 feetVertical drop: 400 feetSkiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 24 inchesTrail count: 22 (1 double-black, 3 black, 3 blue-black, 10 intermediate, 5 beginner)Lift count: 12 (2 quads, 3 triples, 5 carpets, 2 ropetows - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Perfect North’s lift fleet)About Timberline, West VirginiaWhile this podcast is not explicitly about Timberline, Jonathan had an important role in the ski area’s acquisition in 2019. His enthusiasm for Timberline is clear, the opportunity and the investment are enormous, and this conversation acts as a primer for what I hope will be a full Timberline podcast at some future point.Click here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Perfect FamilyPass affiliations: NoneLocated in: Davis, West VirginiaClosest neighboring ski areas: Canaan Valley (8 minutes); White Grass XC touring/backcountry center (11 minutes); Wisp, Maryland (1 hour, 15 minutes); Snowshoe, West Virginia (1 hour, 50 minutes); Bryce, Virginia (2 hours); Homestead, Virginia (2 hours); Massanutten, Virginia (2 hours, 21 minutes)Base elevation: 3,268 feetSummit elevation: 4,268 feetVertical drop: 1,000 feetSkiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 150 inchesTrail count: 20 (2 double-black, 3 black, 5 intermediate, 10 beginner)Lift count: 3 (1 high-speed six-pack, 1 fixed-grip quad, 1 carpet - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Timberline’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed himThere are two kinds of ski areas in the Midwest. The first are the big ones, out there somewhere in the woods. Where 10,000 years ago a glacier got ornery. Or, farther back in time, little mountains hove up out of the earth. They’re at least 400 feet tall and top out near 1,000. They’re not near anything and they don’t need to be. People will drive to get there. Often they sit in a snowbelt, with glades and bumps and hidden parts. Multiple peaks. A big lodge at the bottom. There are perhaps two dozen of these in the entire region, all of them in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Boyne, Nub’s Nob, Crystal, Caberfae, Bohemia, Powderhorn, Whitecap, Granite Peak, Spirit, Lutsen. This is not a complete list. I’m making a point here.The second kind of Midwest ski area is usually smaller. It claims 200 vertical feet and actually has 27. It has four chairlifts for every run. It has a parking lot that could swallow Lake George. It’s affordable. And it’s close. To something. Metro Detroit has four ski areas. Milwaukee has eight. Minneapolis has six. But pretty much any Lower Midwestern city of any size has at least one ski area in its orbit: Cleveland (Alpine Valley, Boston Mills, Brandywine), Columbus (Snow Trails, Mad River), St. Louis (Hidden Valley), Kansas City (Snow Creek), Des Moines (Seven Oaks), Chicago (Four Lakes, Villa Olivia), Omaha (Mt. Crescent).For Cincinnati, that ski area is Perfect North. It’s actually one of the larger city-adjacent ski areas in the region: 400 vertical feet on 100 acres (accurate numbers, as far as I can tell). Twelve lifts. Twenty-two trails. Indiana has 6.7 million residents and two ski areas. Some winter days, approximately half of them are skiing at Perfect North.I’m just kidding around about the numbers. What I’m trying to say is that urban Midwestern ski areas are terrific businesses. They’re small but handle unimaginable volume in short, intense seasons of 12-hour-plus days. Davis tells me in the podcast that the ski area hires 1,200 seasonal employees for winter. That is an almost incomprehensible number. Killington, the largest ski area in the east, 20 times the size of Perfect North, has around 1,600 wintertime employees.But that’s what it takes to keep the up-and-down moving. Perfect North was a sort of accidental ski area, born when a college student knocked on farmer Clyde Perfect’s door and said, “hey did you know your land is perfect for a ski area?” In almost snowless Indiana, this was quite a wild notion. Not that no one had tried. The state has nine lost ski areas. But Perfect North is one of only two that survived (the other is Vail-owned Paoli Peaks, which survives no thanks to the mothership). I don’t know enough about the ski areas that failed to say why they’re gone, but it’s obvious why Perfect North has succeeded: relentless investment by committed operators. Here’s an excerpt from a case study by SMI snowmakers:[Perfect North] employs 245 snowmaking machines and an infrastructure that pumps about 120 million gallons of water annually, giving the resort a 3-4 foot snowpack throughout the season. The system is so efficient that operators can start as many as 200 snowmakers in about an hour.At its modest start-up in 1980, Perfect North had only rope tows, T-bars and about a dozen snowmakers covering roughly seven acres. But the family-owned operation has expanded each year and now features five chair lifts and six surface lifts serving more than ten times the skiable terrain, as well as one of the largest tubing operations in the entire U.S. …“We knew early on that snowmaking was critical to a great experience on the hills. The snow is the reason people come; everything else is secondary. So we really focused on it right from the beginning, and we’ve enhanced our snowmaking capability every year,” said [Perfect North President Chip] Perfect.All of the snow guns now in use at Perfect North are manufactured by SMI, and every one is permanently mounted on a SnowTower™ (or pole-top unit). Most are the company’s signature PoleCat™ or Super PoleCat™ designs, with either hill air feed or onboard compressors. Unlike some resorts that boast 100% snowmaking on their trails, Perfect North runs enough machines to be able to make snow on virtually the entire skiing and tubing area at the same time.This is not one model of how to make a ski area work in the Lower Midwest – this is the only way to make a ski area work in the Lower Midwest. The region was a bit late to skiing. Perfect North didn’t open until 1980. Snowmaking had to really advance before such a thing as consistent skiing in Indiana was even conceivable. But being possible is not the same thing as being easy. There are only two ski areas in Indiana for a reason: it’s hard. Perfect North has mastered it anyway. And you’ll understand about two minutes into this conversation why this place is special.What we talked aboutA couple kids watching for the lights to flip on across the valley, announcing the opening of the ski season; Perfect North in the ‘80s; a place where jeans and “layered hunting gear” are common; ski area as machine; from bumping chairs to general manager; the pioneer days of 90s tech; moving into the online future without going bust; RFID; the surprising reason why Perfect North switched from metal wicket tickets to the plastic ziptie version; taking over a ski area in the unique historical moment that was spring 2020; staff PTSD from the Covid season; the power of resolving disputes through one-on-one talks; “we lost something in those two years with how we interact with people”; 1,200 people to run a 400-vertical-foot ski area; how Perfect North fully staffed up and offered an 89-hour-per-week schedule as Vail retreated and severely cut hours at its Indiana and Ohio ski areas; Perfect North would have faced “an absolute mutiny” had they pulled the Vail bait-and-switch of cutting operating hours after pass sales ended; how aggressive you have to be with snowmaking in the Lower Midwest; “the people of the Midwest are fiercely loyal”; reaction to Vail buying Peak Resorts; “I want Midwest skiing to succeed broadly”; Cincinnati as a ski town; skiing’s identity crisis; the amazing story behind Perfect North’s founding; the Perfect family’s commitment to annual reinvestment; remembering ski area founder Clyde Perfect, who passed away in 2020; you best keep those web cams active Son; snowmaking and Indiana; the importance of valleys; the importance of a committed owner; potential expansion; where the ski area could add trails within the existing footprint; terrain park culture in the Lower Midwest; the management and evolution of parks at Perfect North; potential chairlift upgrades and a theoretical priority order; where the ski area could use an additional chairlift; the potential for terrain park ropetows; coming updates to Jam Session’s ropetows; Perfect North’s amazing network of carpet lifts; the ski area’s massive tubing operation; why Perfect North purchased Timberline and how the purchase came together; why creditors rejected the first winner’s bid; West Virginia as a ski state; the reception to Timberline’s comeback; “it didn’t take us long to realize that the three lifts on site were unworkable”; how well Perfect North and Timberline work as a ski area network; “Timberline Mountain has got to stand on its own financially”; whether Perfect North could ever purchase more ski areas; “I hate to see ski areas wither up and die”; Perfect North’s diverse season pass suite; “what drives our guest’s visits is their availability”; and whether Timberline or Perfect North could join the Indy Pass.            Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewYou want to hear something funny? I often put out queries on Twitter or via email, asking people to tell me who they would most like to hear from on the podcast. Or sometimes people just write and say something like, “hey love the pod you should interview…” And the interview they’ve most often requested has been some combination of Timberline and Perfect North. I don’t really understand why. I mean, I think it’s an awesome story. I’ve yet to meet a ski area I wasn’t fascinated by, and this Midwest-buys-Mid-Atlantic storyline is especially compelling to me. But this one has, for whatever reason, resonated broadly. I’ve never once had someone ask me to track down the head of Telluride or Mammoth or Heavenly (I’d gladly talk to the leaders of any of the three), but the Perfect North/Timberline request has been hitting my inbox consistently for years.Well, it’s done. I’d still like to do a Timberline-first pod, but the basic story of the acquisition is there, and we spend about 15 minutes on the West Virginia ski area. Still, I was not just listening to the request line. I tracked down Davis for the same reason that I tracked down Snow Trails, Ohio’s Scott Crislip last month: these are the only two ski areas in Indiana or Ohio that functioned normally last season. And they are the only two ski areas in those states that are not owned by Vail.Paoli Peaks was open 28 hours per week, from Thursday through Sunday, with no night skiing on weekends. Perfect North was open 89 hours per week, with night skiing seven days per week. I found this fairly offensive, and WTIU Public TV in Indiana invited me on-air back in March to talk about it:How, exactly, did Vail get owned by two independent operators with a fraction of the institutional resources? That is the question that these two podcasts attempt to answer. Vail clearly misread the market in Ohio and Indiana. They did not make enough snow or hire enough people. They cut night skiing. In the Midwest. That’s like opening a steakhouse and cutting steak off the menu. Sorry, Guys, budget cuts. You can’t find steak at this steakhouse, but we have beef broth soup and canned greenbeans. And by the way, we’re only open for lunch. Like, how did they not know that? It may be the worst series of ski area operating decisions I’ve ever seen.I should probably just let this go. Now that I’ve said my piece via these two interviews, I probably will. I’ve made my point. But seriously Vail needs to look at what Perfect North and Snow Trails did this past season and do exactly that. And if they can’t, then, as Davis says in this interview, “if they don’t want Paoli and Mad River, we’ll take them.”Questions I wish I’d askedPerfect North has a really interesting pass perk for its highest-tiered pass: Perfect Season Pass holders can go direct to lift. That pass is $356. Gold passholders, who can ski up to eight hours per day, must pick up a lift ticket at the window each time they ski. That pass is $291. While the gold pass is not technically unlimited, eight hours per day seems more than sufficient. I’m ready to wrap it up after seven hours at Alta. I can’t imagine that eight hours wouldn’t be enough Indiana skiing. But I don’t think the ski area would bother with the two different passes if the market hadn’t told them there was a need, and I would have liked to have discussed the rationale behind this pass suite a bit more.What I got wrongI said on the podcast that Snow Trails was open “80-some hours per week.” The number was actually 79 hours. I also stated in the introduction that Perfect North was founded by “the Perfect family and a group of investors,” but it was the Perfect family alone.  Why you should ski Perfect NorthWe’ve been through this before, with Snow Trails, Mountain Creek, Paul Bunyan, Wachusett, and many more. If you live in Cincinnati and you are a skier, you have a choice to make: you can be the kind of skier who skis all the time, or you can be the kind of skier who skis five days per year at Whistler. I know dozens of people in New York like this. They ski at Breckenridge, they ski at Park City, they ski at Jackson Hole. But they don’t – they just couldn’t – ski Mountain Creek or Hunter or even Stowe. East Coast skiing is just so icy, they tell me. Well, sometimes. But it’s skiing. And whether you ski six days per year or 50 largely depends upon your approach to your local.If I lived in Cincinnati, I’d have a pass to Perfect North and I’d go there all the time. I would not be there for eight hours at a time. Ten runs is a perfectly good day of skiing at a small ski area. More if conditions are good or I’m having fun. Anything to get outside and make a few turns. Go, ride the lifts, get out. No need to overthink this. Any skiing is better than none at all.Most of Perfect North’s skiers, of course, are teenagers and families. And it’s perfect for both of these groups. But it doesn’t have to be for them alone. Ski areas are for everyone. Go visit.As far as Timberline goes, well, that’s a whole different thing. A thousand feet of vert and 150 inches of average annual snowfall shouldn’t take a lot of convincing for anyone anywhere within striking distance.Podcast NotesPerfect North founder Clyde Perfect passed away in 2020. Here is his obituary.I mentioned that Indiana had several lost ski areas. Here’s an inventory. My 1980 copy of The White Book of Ski Areas lists nine hills in Indiana. Perfect North isn’t one of them (Paoli Peaks, the state’s other extant ski area, is). Here’s a closer look at two of the more interesting ones (you can view more trailmaps on skimap.org):Nashville AlpsHere’s the 2001 trailmap for Nashville Alps, which had a 240-foot vertical drop. The ski area closed around 2002, and the lifts appear to be gone.If anyone knows why Nashville Alps failed, please let me know.Ski StarlightThe White Book pegs this one with an amazing 554 vertical feet, which would make it taller than any ski area in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The map shows trails running along little ridgelines separated by valleys, which would have made this a really interesting spot on the rare occasions it snowed enough to ski the trees.Google maps suggests that this trailmap more or less reflects geologic reality. Here’s a YouTube video from a few years back, when the ski area was apparently for sale. The lifts were still intact (though likely unusable):The White Book says that this place had a double-double and two J-bars in 1980. Just 20 minutes from Louisville, this seems like the kind of little Midwestern spot that could boom with the right operators. The cost to bring it online would likely be prohibitive, however. As with most things in U.S. America, it would be the permitting that would likely kill it in the crib.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 70/100 in 2022, and number 316 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

There are two interviews related to Michigan lighthouses in this episode, plus a special "Be a Lighthouse" segment for Father's Day, with co-host Sarah MacHugh interviewing her father about his company, Adaptive Design Hudson River. Old Mackinac Point Light Station, Michigan. Photo by Jeremy D'Entremont. The Straits of Mackinac, which connect Lake Michigan and Lake Huron and also mark the dividing line between Michigan's Upper and Lower peninsulas, were treacherous for mariners. The first lighthouse in the area was established in 1829. Mackinac Point, at the northern tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, was given a fog signal in 1890. A 50-foot-tall lighthouse was added to the station in 1892, built of cream city brick and attached to the keepers' house. Craig Wilson The construction of the Mackinac Bridge in 1957 rendered the lighthouse obsolete. The lighthouse property was purchased by the Mackinac Island State Park Commission in 1960, and it was incorporated into a state park. Today, the light station is open to the public from late spring to fall, with a maritime museum in the keepers' house. Craig Wilson is the chief curator for Mackinac State Historic Parks. Eagle Harbor Light Station, Michigan. Photo by Jeremy D'Entremont. Eagle Harbor Light is one of several light stations that guide mariners on Lake Superior across the northern edge of the Keweenaw Peninsula. The original lighthouse, built in 1851, was replaced in 1871 by the present red brick structure. In 1999, Congress transferred ownership of the Eagle Harbor Light Station to the Keweenaw County Historical Society. The U.S. Coast Guard continues to operate the light at the top of the tower as an active navigational aid. Karen Hintz Karen Hintz is the vice president of the Keweenaw County Historical Society.

We review Rory's exciting Sunday duel against JT in Canada, The LIV Tour has started and it kind of feels like a Member/Guest. The state championships for Boy's golf in the Lower Peninsula wrapped up this past weekend and the LPGA is Michigan this week for the Meijer LPGA Classic at Blythefield Country Club. Finally, It's US Open week at The Country Club!

We review Rory's exciting Sunday duel against JT in Canada, The LIV Tour has started and it kind of feels like a Member/Guest. The state championships for Boy's golf in the Lower Peninsula wrapped up this past weekend and the LPGA is Michigan this week for the Meijer LPGA Classic at Blythefield Country Club. Finally, It's US Open week at The Country Club!

Tonight's guest, Dwayne, has been tramping around in the woods his whole life, so he's got woods credentials a mile long. After spending so much time in the woods of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, he thought he'd seen every kind of animal that lived there. Well, on November 17th, 2012, he found out how wrong he was about that. You see, Dwayne was deer hunting, in a blind, he had put 25 feet up in a huge pine tree. He had cut off some of its branches, so he'd have a window to look out. He sat in that blind all day, up until around 6 PM, without anything out of the ordinary happening. Around that time, though, Dwayne heard something that sounded like a woman, with a deep voice, let out an extremely loud yell, followed by a deep growl. At 1st, he thought it must have been a really big bear vocalizing because it was hungry. Roughly 1 hour later, Dwayne saw a large figure moving out of the corner of his eye and when he looked to see what it was, he saw what he initially thought was a huge wolf. As soon as he laid eyes on it, the creature tilted its head back and started sniffing the air. Then, to Dwayne's horror, the huge creature looked right at the base of the tree he was in and traced its eyes up the tree until it was looking right at him, through the window he'd cut in the branches. Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, it stood up onto its back legs and started walking towards the tree he was in. When it made it to the base of the tree, it let out the most ungodly yell/howl Dwayne had ever heard in his life. Dwayne had tears in his eyes now and did the only thing he could think of, to try to protect himself. He reached for his rifle...What happened to Dwayne that day has traumatized him so much that he works the 3rd shift, so he can stay awake at night. After experiencing what Dwayne did, that day, I'm sure you'll understand why his 1st encounter has had such a profound effect on him.If you'd like to help support the show, by buying your own Dogman Encounters t-shirt, sweatshirt, tank top, or coffee mug, please visit the Dogman Encounters Show Store, by going to… https://Dogman-Encounters.MyShopify.com If you've had a Dogman encounter and would like to speak with me about it, whether you'd like to keep your encounter confidential or be interviewed on a show, please go to… https://DogmanEncounters.com and submit a report. If you've had a Sasquatch sighting and would like to be a guest on My Bigfoot Sighting, please go to… https://MyBigfootSighting.com and submit a report. I produce 3 other podcasts. Below, you'll find links to them.My Bigfoot Sighting... https://spreaker.page.link/xT7zh6zWsnCDaoVa7Bigfoot Eyewitness Radio... https://spreaker.page.link/WbtSccQm92TKBskT8My Paranormal Experience... https://youtube.com/channel/UCyxVu8_b4yxLHcZ1fNPmRkAThanks for listening!

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Starting in June, paid subscribers will receive podcasts three days before free subscribers.WhoTJ and Wendy Kerscher, Owners of Paul Bunyan Ski Hill, WisconsinRecorded onMay 23, 2022About Paul BunyanOwned by: TJ and Wendy KerscherLocated in: Lakewood, WisconsinClosest neighboring ski areas: Keyes Peak, Wisconsin (1 hours); Ski Brule, Michigan (1.25 hours); Camp 10, Wisconsin (1.25 hours); Granite Peak, Wisconsin (1.5 hours); Pine Mountain, Michigan (1.5 hours)Vertical drop: 150 feetAverage annual snowfall: 65 inchesTrail count: 6 (2 black, 2 intermediate, 2 beginner)Lift count: 3 (1 T-bar, 2 ropetows - view Lift Blog’s of inventory of Paul Bunyan’s lift fleet)Trailmap: Paul Bunyan has yet to create an updated trailmap. This overhead-oriented version created by skimap.com is the closest thing I could find, though TJ told me that the ropetow and tubing park - and associated trails - looker’s left on this map have not yet re-opened (he hopes to have them ready for the 2022-23 ski season, along with a top-to-bottom ropetow that runs parallel to the T-bar):This map, from 1993, shows the state of the ski area just before it closed, in 1995:This map, from 1980, is probably my favorite from an aesthetic point of view:Why I interviewed themIn 2016, a California businessman named Jeff Katofsky purchased the long-dormant Sugar Loaf ski area in northern Michigan. A real estate developer and minor league baseball team owner, he seemed to barely understand skiing, declaring shortly after taking possession of the property that he had visited Whistler “to get ideas.” Which is like visiting the Palace of Versailles to get ideas on how to decorate your hunting cabin. The next year, he stripped all five Hall* doubles from the hillside. “The ski hill presently has to basically be gutted because nothing on there can work,” he told the Glen Arbor Sun. “Whether we can put another ski hill together or not, we’re crunching a lot of numbers together to see if that works.”The Crunchinator came up with some pretty intense numbers. For Katofsky, skiing was a high-end pursuit, which could only be provided in an ultra-luxurious context. “Skiing is purely a financial question,” Katofsky told the Sun in 2018. “I have to take it seriously because I know it’s important to people. But I’m not doing this for charity. We’ll invest literally tens of millions of dollars in this. If skiing works financially, you’ll have it. If not, you won’t.”Skiing must not have worked financially. In December 2020, Katofsky sold the property to an anonymous buyer and disappeared, without comment, into the void.Katofsky, to be fair, was not trying to spend tens of millions of dollars to resuscitate a ski resort, explicitly. He intended to spend tens of millions to build a year-round spa-and-valet sort of place that had a little ski hill as an addendum. Something like Villa Roma in New York’s Catskills, which offers a minimalist ski experience but long ago mothballed an entire terrain pod.That’s a shame. Sugar Loaf was once one of the best ski areas in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, a nationally unsung ski mecca as nuts about this stupid snoskiing thing as anyplace that’s cold and remotely hilly. The front side was 500 feet of pure fall line, the backside woods and narrow lanes. The summit view was gorgeous. The vibe pure zest and zeal. No pretention here. The place was fabulous, as good as Boyne Mountain from a pure skiing point of view. I couldn’t believe it when the hill closed in 2000.I’m still miffed. I’m not alone: the 5,015-member Friends of Sugar Loaf Facebook group is an online watering hole for the nostalgic and the hopeful (though IT’S NOT HAPPENING Bro is an unfortunate omnipresent parasite as well). I tend to be It Could Happen Bro, certain that a minimalist version of skiing could be viable. Last year, I exchanged emails with Traverse City native, former Sugar Loaf ski patroller, and Waterville Valley general manager Tim Smith about the possibility of a minimalist version of Sugar Loaf resurfacing at some point:Stuart: I'm really curious about your point of view on Sugarloaf, since you've been in skiing so long and really understand what it takes to bring a mountain back to life, and you seem to have a knack for making things happen. How much would it take to bring a minimum level of skiing back to Sugarloaf? Like let's say you sent [Waterville Valley’s retiring] Sunnyside Triple there and strung it base to summit up Awful Awful and brought in some mobile snow guns - would that be enough? I'm probably over-simplifying it, but I feel like the current owner has it in his head that skiing needs to be uber luxurious before you sell a lift ticket. But you look at Mount Bohemia in the UP, and the guy basically opened the place with some yurts, a base lodge, and a lift.Tim: Your simplification is pretty spot on. Minimum infrastructure to get going again would be a new/used lift, say $2 million will cover that with installation. For snowmaking pipe/pond/pumps/electrical for the frontside (Round About, Nastar, Waful, k2 and Awful Awful) 25 acres or so (that’s twice the size of Waterville Valley’s high country) feed that with 2,000 gpm giving an acre foot of snow every 1.33 hours, so 33 hours at full blast to cover the area with a foot of snow. To blast that type of snow the area would need at least 20 guns but I would recommend 40 as maxing out requires extreme cold. That’s 500k in guns, 500k in pumping, $1.5M for pipe, hydrants, electrical (bit of a WAG as I don’t know what is still there for primary electrical). A steel building lodge like Crotched runs about $2.5 but a yurt village would be doable for a few 100k so let say $1M for now. Parking is still in OK shape but I think the thing that would kill the project is the demo of the old lodge, but the county or state may help as it is a public nuisance at this point, so let’s say the fire department does a controlled burn 🔥 All said and done on a shoe string $5M should get it up and running. But if it was me I would go all in as I think the area could support a higher end resort, just need the right money man 😎. This is off the top of my head, some day it would be fun to run these numbers down and see if something could really work.OK, aren’t we here to talk about Paul Bunyan? Indeed. Excuse the detour, but I had a point: In about nine months in 2020, TJ and Wendy Kerscher and their family accomplished what gazillionaire Katofsky couldn’t in four years. In the midst of the early Covid lockdowns, their bar and their figurine factory idled, the Kerschers looked out at the overgrown and long-abandoned ski hill in their backyard and got to work. TJ meticulously dismantled and reassembled the 1967 Hall T-bar and several ropetows that had been A-Teamed together from 1940s truck parts. With crews of chainsaw-wielding friends, they marched up the hillside and cleared 25 years of forest. They borrowed snowguns from idled Norway Mountain, Michigan; picked up a trio of used Snowcats from Granite Peak; worked with K2 to build a small fleet of rental gear. In February 2021, the ski area re-opened to ecstatic locals.“They filled this place,” Wendy Kerscher told me in the interview. “They filled the hill. We ran out of rentals. It was amazing.”The Katofskys and IT’S NOT HAPPENING Bros of the world would have taken one look at Paul Bunyan and came up with a thousand reasons why the place was inoperable. Too decrepit, too small, too remote, too tired, too knotted to a bygone era of skiing, when surface lifts and five turns top-to-bottom were good enough.I have little use for such people. The cynics and the you-can’ts, the ones who always tell you why not. I am searching for the TJ and Wendy Kerschers of the world, the optimists and the puzzle-solvers, the people who are too busy working to realize that what they’re doing is impossible.The way they did what no one else could do was to simply do it. No master plans. No consultants. No expensive crews. No engineers. Just chainsaws and shovels and some borrowed heavy equipment. A little assistance from the ski industry. It helped that TJ had enough mechanical acuity to rebuild the lifts himself. It was a lot of work, but the result was a ski hill summoned out of the grave by Midwest FTW grit-and-grind.“You never can count sweat equity,” TJ told me. “It was awesome. I would do it all over again five times. I don’t count the work at all. We just had so much fun with this project.”It’s too bad the Kerschers didn’t live in front of Sugar Loaf. Were the mountain’s Hall lifts – famously reliable machines – really beyond repair? Could a more restlessly optimistic soul like TJ have saved them? Someone who truly loved and understood skiing? I tend to think the answer is yes. And we’ve got a story to prove it, a ski area saved, improbably but truly: Paul Bunyan is back.*Props to Lift Blog for ID’ing these lifts for me.What we talked aboutThe Kerscher family story; the family’s various businesses; the origins of Paul Bunyan as a local nonprofit; when and why the Kerscher family purchased the hill; growing up in an entrepreneurial family; how you react when your father buys a ski area; running a mountain at age 18; why Paul Bunyan closed in the mid-90s; deciding to re-open the ski area after 25 years dormant; a silver lining in Covid; the state of Paul Bunyan’s lifts, trails, and snowmaking after two and a half decades idle; improvisational snowmaking and long-term plans for improvement; that DIY Midwestern grit; restoring the fantastic homemade ropetow network cobbled together with 1940s truck parts; restoring a 1960s Hall T-bar; a fortuitous call from a friendly neighboring ski area; which of the four classic ropetows have been brought back into service, and which are next; the status of the tubing operation; reviving the overgrown trail network – “we got some guys together with some chainsaws and started cutting”; where the ski area is adding runs this summer; options for the forthcoming terrain park; skiers are “really embracing” Paul Bunyan’s “old-school … hang-on-tight ropetows”; restoring the hill’s 1969 Tucker Sno-Cat and why those machines still beat modern groomers for certain tasks; the large ski area that helped Paul Bunyan modernize its grooming fleet with a deal on used machines; setting up a rental shop, ski school, and patrol from scratch; managing labor as a small ski area; insurance; approaching such a massive project day-by-day; how it felt to see the lifts spinning again; “every single weekend, we are sold out of ski equipment”; bringing back night skiing; whether Paul Bunyan could ever be a seven-day-per-week operation; optimism and attitude are everything; advice for aspiring saviors of lost ski areas; the generosity of the greater ski industry; and whether Paul Bunyan had considered the Indy Pass Allied Resorts program.   Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewI spend a lot of time shuffling through skiing’s online fringe. I am obsessed, for whatever reason, with completeness. This most obviously manifests itself through the Pass Tracker 5001, where I’ve been tracking U.S. America’s season pass prices for the past couple years. For hundreds of resorts, tracking down these numbers is a fairly simple exercise. Northstar – Epic Pass. Mammoth – Ikon Pass. And so on. But perhaps a quarter of the nation’s ski areas exist in a sort of steampunk half-world, online but without a formal website, a Facebook page usually, pointing skiers in a choppy, inconstant way toward their little hills, typically a neighborhood bump with a collection of Rube Goldberg surface lifts trundling up a few acres of clear-cut.I’ll frequently message these pages with queries about hours of operation or season pass prices. They almost never write back. So I was fairly surprised last month when a query to Paul Bunyan’s account produced a coherent response within hours. We exchanged a few messages and I invited them onto the podcast. So here we are.Believe it or not, it is typically more difficult to secure an interview with the operators of the Paul Bunyans of the world than the Steamboats or Beaver Creeks. The large ski areas have budgets, communications teams, marketing departments. The executives have talking points and media training. They expect me to knock on the door, and they’re usually willing to talk when I do. With the smaller places, it’s often difficult to determine who owns or manages the hill, and there’s rarely an obvious way to connect with them.So when I had the opportunity to talk to a family who had the audacity to say, “yeah we’re just going to re-open this ski hill with 60-year-old lifts on a minimal budget and by the way if you think this is impossible we’re just going to ignore you,” I couldn’t book it fast enough.Part of what makes skiing great is the raw adventure of a four-thousand-footer sprawling across a half dozen peaks with 35 lifts driving up and over cliffs and trees and elevator-shaft inclines. But a big part of what makes it interesting is that it’s not just that. That a network of hundreds of small-bore versions of this gigantic thing exist anywhere that cold weather and hills collide. If The Storm is after the full story of lift-served skiing, it must be not only aware of the world outside the Epkon flex palace, but immersed in it. There’s no better way to do that – and to bring you along with me – than to connect with operators like the Kerschers, whose story is one of pure love and passion, the one-turn-at-a-time kind of fun that so many in skiing have forgotten.Why you should ski Paul BunyanIf you live anywhere nearby, the answer to this question is obvious: because it’s there. In-between turns when you can’t make the drive over to Granite Peak. Because skiing can be your wintertime gym. Dip in, get your reps on, bounce. Don’t overthink it.For the rest of us – I live 1,100 miles away – the answer is more complicated. I acknowledge that only a handful of the most curious outsiders will ever deliberately visit the Midwest to ski. The ski media has ignored this region for its entire existence, focusing instead on two themes that invariably lead skiers north to New England or west to the Rockies: the ultra-rad or the ultra-luxe. Understandable. However, there exists a third narrative in skiing: discovery. I’ve spent the past two ski seasons in a state of perpetual ramble, bouncing from neighborhood bump to backwoods freeride to ridgeline 500-footer lodged at the top of America. It’s fun. You find little stashes, quirks, thrills. I almost never find crowds. Lift-served skiing is an impossibly rich world, dynamic and varied, funky and weird, curious and fascinating.Someday, I will roll through Wisconsin, and I’ll of course ski Cascade and Devil’s Head and La Crosse and Granite Peak and Whitecap. But I’ll also float through Paul Bunyan, ride the old T-bar, angle jet-fighter style toward one of the hill’s many ropetows and grab on mid-flight, as TJ so exuberantly suggests in our conversation. It won’t be Vail, but I won’t go in expecting that. You shouldn’t either. And what you’ll take away will be pretty cool: a mental snapshot of skiing stripped of all glam and pretense, of a snowsliding business defined by the activity itself, of a place homey and welcoming. That sort of ski-them-all completeness is not for everyone, I understand. But for those of us who adopt such a mentality, the rewards for going in on a Paul Bunyan lift ticket are enormous. More Paul BunyanCoverage of Paul Bunyan’s re-opening:Paul Bunyan Ski Hill to Reopen in Oconto County – Fox 11 Online, Nov. 30, 2020Lakewood Family Re-Opens Paul Bunyan Ski Hill – Spectrum News 1 – Feb. 9, 2021Dozens of Skiers Hit the Slopes at Paul Bunyan Ski Hill in Lakewood – Fox 11 Online, Dec. 26, 2021Paul Bunyan’s comeback is inspirational, but it’s an anomaly. The Midwest Lost Ski Areas Project has documented 374 lost ski areas across the 12-state region, including 97 in Wisconsin. Let’s hope there are more people like Wendy and TJ Kerscher out there, willing and able to take the low-budget path back to viability. You can follow along with updates on Paul Bunyan’s very active Facebook page:The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 58/100 in 2022, and number 304 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

 On this week's Talking Michigan Transportation podcast, conversations about an announcement by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of electric vehicle charging infrastructure installations at Michigan state parks. First, Trevor Pawl, Michigan's chief mobility officer, explains why several Michigan state agencies are collaborating with private industry to provide charging options along the Lake Michigan shore for travelers from in and out of state.The announcement follows last year's roll out by the governor of plans for a Lake Michigan Electric Vehicle Circuit.In his role with the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification, Pawl works hard to bring together private industry and government officials to find solutions to mobility challenges, including range anxiety.Pawl explains why Rivian, an electric vehicle maker and automotive technology company, under an operating agreement between Adopt a Charger and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, will be providing open-network, Level 2 Rivian Waypoints chargers at no cost to the state or taxpayers. He also underscores how identifying creative partnerships and opportunities can help with significant progress “in creating a safer, more equitable and environmentally conscious transportation future for all Michiganders.” Later, Ed Golder, director of communications at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, explains how the partnership will work. He also talks about why it makes sense, given the number of people who visit Michigan state parks each year. He says visits to the parks soared during the pandemic and officials expect the trend to continue.From the governor's news release on the announcement:From Warren Dunes State Park in the southwest corner of the Lower Peninsula, north along the Lake Michigan “gold coast” and additional points inland, an estimated total of 30 chargers are scheduled to be installed as part of the first phase of the project with the next installations beginning in summer and continuing through the year. “This project will not only benefit Michigan in the near term but will also pay dividends far into the future as we move toward a sustainable energy future,” DNR Director Dan Eichinger said. “From these EV charging stations, to installations of solar arrays that power fish hatcheries and other facilities, to building with mass timber and our innovative carbon sequestration development, we are working to improve the environment as we update our own portfolio.” “Today's announced partnership between the DNR and Adopt a Charger fits nicely with MDOT's goal to enhance connectivity," said Michigan Department of Transportation Director Paul C. Ajegba. "This also compliments the ongoing work by MDOT and our colleagues in other state departments to deliver on a vision for a Lake Michigan Electric Vehicle Circuit.”Podcast photo: Electric vehicle charging options being installed at a State Park along Lake Michigan. 

Chris and Greg are back to discuss the Lower Peninsula Employee Recreation Day on June 3 at the Royal Scot in Lansing, MI. Learn about the activities you can participate in and how to register in this episode of Field Days Podcast.

Lighting is the cause for a 2,700-acre wildfire in the northern Lower Peninsula, Michigan's liquor tax could be slashed for small distillers and what you need to know about the avian flu outbreak. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Corn-based ethanol may be worse for the climate than gasoline. New research launched to protect the Great Lakes includes work by Central Michigan University and a project in Saginaw Bay. Ice shanties in the northern Lower Peninsula must be removed by midnight, Tuesday, March 15.

The Storm Skiing Podcast is sponsored by Spot and Mountain Gazette - Listen to the podcast for discount codes on subscriptions and merch.WhoMike Chumbler, President and General Manager of The Highlands at Harbor Springs (formerly Boyne Highlands), MichiganRecorded onJanuary 24, 2022Why I interviewed himDespite the widespread skier habit of using “ski area,” “mountain,” and “ski resort” interchangeably, each of these descriptors has very distinct connotations. The Midwest has a lot of ski areas – 90 between Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin alone, according to the National Ski Areas Association. It has exactly one actual mountain – Mount Bohemia, 900 vertical feet of cliffs and glades spiraling off the northernmost tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But the region has very few true ski resorts – a place where one can expect lodging, dining, and an experience beyond lifts and turns. In fact, the Midwest’s one mountain is not even a resort – there’s not much at Bohemia beyond some yurts and a hot tub the size of Lake Michigan. And neither are most of the Midwest’s other ski areas. The average Midwest ski area has 10 chairlifts serving 10 runs on 200 vertical feet next to a K-Mart. If these are ski resorts, then the Playschool slide my 5-year-old keeps in our backyard is Disney World.It’s all very confusing. Beaming in from east or west, it can be hard to discern the differences between 500-foot bumps. How could one be so much different from another? How could any actually rise to the status of ski resort?Well, here’s Exhibit A of a true Midwestern ski resort, The Highlands at Harbor Springs:You won’t probably understand it until you get on the ground and ski, but the place rambles. That Interconnect lift is far longer than it appears on the map – a trick of aspect employed to spare our eyes the dead space. Riding up and over the knolls between the North Face and the main ski area is a delightful journey, one that seems to transport you to a different ski area altogether. You can spend the afternoon there, amble back. The main face is all skiable from the Heather Express, but there are plenty of hidden nooks, little glades, trails snaking through the trees. Highlands skis like an easy videogame, one where you’re unlikely to get eaten by a dragon but will probably find a secret stash of gems or a fire shield hidden in a forest. The ski area maintains a strong variety of terrain parks, with plenty of just-boosty enough mini-features for the non-radsters that want to ride with me. Taken together, these characteristics mute the 550-foot vertical drop. It may not be what you expect out of a ski resort, but it’s enough, it turns out, to make one anyway.And, this being Boyne, everything is well run. The grooming is unreasonably good, even following the nastiest refreezes. The lift fleet is older than color television, but they all seem to run fine – and most of them will be gone within the decade. Beyond the hill, there’s plenty of lodging and plenty to do. As you know, I care about nothing except the skiing, so I’ll let you explore that for yourself, but this is a true ski resort in a region of ski areas, and without the true, geographically defined mountain that typically acts as the foundation of the resort experience.This is the largest ski area in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, a frozen-solid ski-mad region that will take what it can get. When I began skiing as a teenager, I worked my way up to The Highlands, wanting to save the biggest experience for last. I’m glad I did. Arriving on a sub-zero January day in 1996, the place felt like the Midwest bigtime, like something I was finally ready for. Twenty-five years later, The Highlands is about to join its sister resort, Boyne Mountain, in the statement-making business of showcasing for the ski world just how outsized a Midwest ski experience can be. I wanted to lock into the folks making this happen right from the outset, to grab us all a front-row seat to the coming transformation.What we talked aboutChumbler’s evolution from golf intern to head of The Highlands whole ski and golf operation; the importance of golf to Boyne’s North American empire; The Highlands 2030 transformation plan; why the ski area changed its name from “Boyne Highlands” to “The Highlands at Harbor Springs”; the endless process of changing a ski-area name; the transition to RFID and whether we could ever see gates beyond the Heather Express; future snowmaking upgrades; Boyne’s VP of Snow surface and Design; which lifts the resort intends to upgrade first; how long it will take to upgrade or replace every lift on the mountain; whether the ski area will replace Heather, their newest lift; How The Highlands keeps its fleet of seven Riblets safe; which two Highlands lifts received new haulropes last summer; whether Highlands plans to replace Valley, the world’s first triple chair; where we could see potential trail expansions; why The Highlands began glading trails in the ‘90s and where we may see future tree runs; reflections on four years of the Ikon Pass; the popularity of Boyne’s gold pass sister resort benefits with season passholders; the relationship between Nub’s Nob and The Highlands and whether the two have ever discussed a joint ski pass; why Highlands typically wraps its season up several weeks prior to sister resort Boyne Mountain; thoughts on ski season number three of dealing with Covid; and why Highlands hasn’t struggled with the labor shortage striking the rest of the ski industry.     Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewWhen The Highlands 2030 transformational journey plan dropped in December, I was a little disappointed. The only concrete ski-related move was a questionable resort name change and a pre-announced move to RFID lift tickets. I was hoping for another eight-pack to follow similar recent announcements at Boyne’s Sunday River and Boyne Mountain. Or maybe a terrain expansion, or at least some concrete initial steps to begin upgrading The Highlands’ 900-year-old Riblet lift fleet.Instead there was a string of photos of spas and golf courses and hotel rooms. I understand that people like these things, but since I’m rather adamant about not being vacuumed into ski areas’ ancillary business ventures, I figured the best way to dig into the skiing parts of the plan was to get Mike on the phone and talk through it. It was the right move, and Chumbler – a golf guy in his heart – did a nice job outlining the resort’s snow-season lifts-and-turns future.Why you should ski The Highlands at Harbor SpringsThe Highlands is tucked into one of the most interesting corners of Michigan skiing. It sits less than eight miles off Lake Michigan, a bullseye in the hundreds-of-miles-long north-south snowbelt that cranks out an average of 140 inches per season. It’s the rare Michigan ski area that sits right next door to another Michigan ski area – independent and beloved Nub’s Nob. The resorts are not connected, but their proximity creates the sense of being part of a vast Midwest ski circus, a combined 18 chairlifts and 106 runs sprawling over 683 acres. If you want to understand Michigan skiing, spent a long weekend bouncing between these two. You’ll have a hard time having a bad time, and you’ll understand how a region that would seem to be naturally unsuited to host something so grandiose as a ski resort can do a pretty good job with it after all.Thoughts on the name changeAs soon as I noticed the parallel, I was obsessed. As a pre-internet teenager attempting to paste together the world of lift-served skiing via 10-year-old library books and tourism pamphlets and ski magazines and the White Book of Ski Areas, I discovered Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands, a pair of 3,000-plus footers puncturing the Colorado sky over that rough-and-tumble mining town. The whole thing was so evocative, so burnished with the patina of high adventure and bottomless snow in the American West, that I was desperate for some mirror in my Midwest-bound existence. I found it with Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands, the two Michigan big-timers whose names rhymed, spiritually, with those Western titans. Boyne is our Aspen, I thought. As a trick to promote the world around me into something it could never be, it actually worked fairly well. I would ski the Michigan big-time. And for years, that’s exactly how I framed it.Eventually I did ski Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands, and yeah those are not the same thing as Boyne’s Michigan bumps. But I continued to like the Boyne names anyway, as a subtle but ever-present reminder that the company had played the unlikely trick of turning small into big. Vail started with Vail and eventually bought its Midwest bumps. Boyne channeled the success of its Michigan mountains (and its scenic chairlift in Gatlinburg, Tennessee), into the purchase of flagship mountains all over the United States, most prominently Big Sky. Vail doesn’t own this. Neither does Alterra or Powdr Corp. Boyne, Michigan proud and the name still dripping from the masthead, is the steward of one of North America’s most audacious ski hills.Well that’s gone now, at least from The Highlands. “You’re reaching, Bro,” a reader might say, and I don’t disagree. Still, I liked the old name: Boyne Highlands. Simple and direct, an indication that you could expect the same quality as you’d find at Boyne Mountain, but with some differences that make Highlands its own unique brand. It was implied rather than said overtly, but in today’s stimuli-riddled landscape, perhaps that wasn’t enough.So it’s gone. More irksome, though, is the long addendum, “at Harbor Springs.” It’s just so much for a ski area name.“Where are you going skiing this weekend, Bro?”“The Highlands at Harbor Springs.”“Whoa dude, I asked where you were skiing, not for your life’s story.”There are plenty of terrible names in skiing. Many of them evolve from this urge to meet at the nexus of brand and geography. Pennsylvania’s Ski Big Bear at Masthope Mountain is among the worst of these. Sierra-at-Tahoe is another. The similarly named Northstar-at-Tahoe thankfully changed its name to simply “Northstar” (thank Vail for that one), 10 years back. Ski areas should have simple, evocative names. Jackson Hole. Alta. Snowbird. Vail. Stowe. Sugarbush. Ragged. Black. Thunder Ridge. Plattekill. Bristol. Powderhorn. Sunlight. The only three-word ski name I’ll allow is Mad River Glen because, well, it’s the legend, and it’s a damn good name.Boyne should have stopped the renaming project at “The Highlands.” That’s short. It’s cool. It evokes pastures and adventure and exploration. I still dislike that they ejected “Boyne” from the name, but I can live with it. The “at Harbor Springs” needs to go. It sounds like a parody-movie mega-project proposed by the evil developer, Ratkin VonSwellington IV, who is using eminent domain to level the Goonies neighborhood and built an exclusive country club for his Faberge-egg collecting pals. Or it sounds like a neighborhood of McMansions in exurban Atlanta. Or like a yacht club where the membership dues are paid in the form of ivory.Well, too late for all that. Changing out the name is going to be an obscenely involved project, and one Boyne is unlikely to backtrack on. Oh well, at least they’ll still have this bomber grooming:More Highlands at Harbor SpringsLift Blog’s inventory of The Highlands at Harbor Springs lift fleetHistoric Highlands at Harbor Springs trailmaps on skimap.org - they go as far back as 1963:Support The Storm by shopping at our partners: Patagonia | Helly Hansen | Rossignol | Salomon | Utah Skis | Berg’s Ski and Snowboard Shop | Peter Glenn | Kemper Snowboards | Gravity Coalition | Darn Tough | Skier's Peak | Hagan Ski Mountaineering | Moosejaw | Skis.com |The House | Telos Snowboards | Christy Sports | Evo | Hotels Combined | Black Diamond | Eastern Mountain Sports Subscribe at www.stormskiing.com

Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever biologists Kent Adams, Jim Inglis, Cody Grasser, and Ben Beaman for a conversation focused on the connection between the organization's wildlife habitat mission and clean water. Episode Highlights: • Adams starts the episode explaining how the organization's wildlife habitat efforts improve water quality in streams, rivers, lakes, and even oceans. Ultimately, Adams explains, it's the organization's ability to deliver water quality benefits that has made our wildlife habitat efforts relevant across the eastern United States. • Inglis, a PF employee for more than two decades, explains how Pheasants Forever chapters in Ohio linked the organization's wildlife habitat efforts to improved water quality in Lake Erie benefiting the walleye fishery during the late 1990s. • Grasser talks about the brand new 415-acre Mallett project in Ohio that will now be providing critical habitat for wildlife, water quality benefits to the public, and access to hunters. • St.Pierre and Beaman have fun reigniting their Upper Peninsula and Lower Peninsula jabs as fellow Michiganders.

Happy Sunday Sports fans!!!! Welcome back to LP sports where we give you the best of sports in the Lower Peninsula of MI. Join us for the 2nd official episode since launching LP Sports. Don't forget to share and like the episode! Go give our Facebook and Twitter a view to learn more bout our gaming side. Enjoy the little hot take in the begging of the episode! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/loudsports/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/loudsports/support

In his words: Detroit police chief on catching Crumbleys and building trust; Popular Corktown noodle spot Ima moving to former Gold Cash Gold space; 'Rock snot' reaches Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Why it could be bad news for trout; Michigan football's Aidan Hutchinson named 2021 Heisman Trophy finalist

Jeffy and Bridget Geer share their thru hike of Michigan's Shore to Shore Trail. The Michigan Shore-to-Shore Trail (also known as the Michigan Riding and Hiking Trail) is a 220-mile-long (350 km) trail that runs between Empire on Lake Michigan and Oscoda on Lake Huron across the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. It is open to horseback riders and hikers but not bicycles. The trail's western end is located within the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The trail, going from west to east, travels through the Boardman River valley and follows the Au Sable River for about 50 miles (80 km). The trail was developed by trail riders in 1962 and travels through mixed hardwood and conifer forests. Public campgrounds are located throughout the route. (taken from Wikipedia)More Trail Info: Huron-Manistee National Forest pageMichigan Trail Riders Association MapsConnect with Jeffy and Bridget:Instagram: @roguefootFacebook: Rogue FootConnect with Lori:Instagram: @thehikepodcastTwitter: @thehikepodcastFacebook: @thehikepodcastEmail: hikepodcast@gmail.com Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/thehikepodcast)

In this episode, Sharon explores the rich ecosystem of the state of Michigan. Known as the “Great Lakes State” Michigan is comprised of two peninsulas that are separated by the Straits of Mackinac, called the Lower Peninsula, and the Upper Peninsula (UP). Known for its fresh water and natural beauty, the state of Michigan is home to many of the nation's most beautiful parks, animals, coastlines, and lakes. Join Sharon to learn more about how Moose and Wolves cohabitate in Northern Michigan, why the UP belongs to Michigan despite sharing no border, how many ships have sunk in Lake Superior, and more. For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast

The Storm Skiing Podcast is sponsored by Mountain Gazette - Listen to the podcast for discount codes on subscriptions and merch.WhoEd Grice, General Manager of Boyne Mountain, Michigan and Kari Roder, the ski area’s Director of MarketingRecorded onOctober 12, 2021Why I interviewed himContext is everything in skiing. In much of America’s sprawling ski kingdom, Boyne Mountain would hardly register. In Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, it soars. And not just in the physical sense of its vertical drop and 60 trails. Culturally, it stands in for skiing itself, the place that non-skiers think of when they think of skiing. Up North, as everyone in Michigan calls it, is where you go to camp, to boat, to hunt, to canoe, to fish, to snowmobile, to ski. Growing up as a non-skier in a non-skiing family, I didn’t realize until I picked the sport up as a teenager that the state had any other ski areas at all, so ubiquitous were references to “goin’ to ski Boyne.”Once I did start skiing, I saved Boyne Mountain for last. It didn’t feel approachable in the way that Caberfae, Shanty Creek, and Sugarloaf did. It didn’t feel like a place you started. It felt like a place you arrived. Only when you were ready.I probably wasn’t ready the first time I skied Boyne, a mashed-potatoes sunny St. Patrick’s Day with rowdy drunken parties bursting from overloaded warming huts. I must have taken 100 runs off the Victor lift that day and fallen as many times, so stupefying were the springtime insta-moguls for a beginner on Elan skinny skis. But I kept coming back. The place doesn’t have the most interesting trail network and it’s typically the most expensive ski area in Michigan, but it has the intangibles of atmosphere and energy, and a commitment to push the season into May whenever the snowpack allows. Some of my most cherished ski memories are May afternoons at an empty Boyne, lapping the Mountain Express and winding down the bumps of Idiot’s Delight. Over and over in the endless 70-degree afternoon. It’s a place that means a lot to me, and it’s been at the top of my list for an interview since I launched The Storm two years ago. It was time to make it happen.What we talked aboutStarting out as a busboy at Boyne Mountain in the 1970s; learning to ski on a steep mountain in ill-fitting gear; working under Boyne Resorts’ legendary founder, Everett Kircher; the long road to general manager and getting fired multiple times along the way; working at family-owned Boyne; the mountain’s relaxed atmosphere; when and why the ski area began developing glades; new areas Boyne Mountain has been glading over the past summer; creating the Disciples Ridge expansion and how that changed Boyne Mountain; the ski area’s amazing collection of historically significant lifts, including the remains of the first chairlift in the world; how banana boats helped inspire the invention of the chairlift; the future of the Hemlock chair; what happened to the original Meadows chair, the world’s first quad, when the ski area replaced it in 2008; the backstory behind installing the Mountain Express, America’s first six-pack chair; the mountain’s legendary snowmaking capabilities; Boyne’s tradition of the long season; the ski area’s competition with Mount Bohemia to see who can stay open the latest; winning the race to open against Mount Holly; the mid-90s debauchery of St. Patrick’s Day on the mountain; Boyne 2030; RFID gates coming this season; the Midwest’s first eight-person chairlift; the fate of the existing Disciples triples; what may replace the Mountain Express, Victor, and Boyneland; where the current Meadows lift may move and what might replace it; the size and scale of the Skybridge and how people will access it; the Ikon Pass; and Boyne’s build-your-own-pass product and night and spring passes.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewBoyne 2030 is going to launch that place into a technological sphere that no other ski area in Michigan can touch (except, perhaps, sister resort Boyne Highlands, whose 2030 plan is on the horizon). Yes, there will be building upgrades, airport enhancements, golf course stuff, a giant pedestrian bridge/tourist attraction. But that’s the garnish on the plate, and we’re here to talk about the meat: RFID, snowmaking, and, crucially, an almost-complete modernization of the lift system. A final-state Boyne Mountain could host at least five modern high-speed Doppelmayr D-Line lifts: two eight-packs, a six-pack, and two quads. That would give the mountain one of the most updated lift fleets not just in the Midwest, but in America. When I skied Boyne Mountain two seasons ago, it still broiled with that old attitude and energy, but the infrastructure was starting to feel antique. Other than the high-speed sixer and the carpet-loaded Meadows lift, the place felt like a Riblet museum, one lift after the next poking up the incline. Not for long. This joint is being retrofitted for rocket fuel. Filler up and get the hell out of the way.Why you should ski Boyne MountainAt first glance, it doesn’t look like much. A big ridge, mostly clear-cut, chairlifts stacked south to north along US 131. But it’s quite the mountain. It’s steep, first of all. Only 500 feet, sure – but that doesn’t make the pitch any less intimidating. You can spend hours skiing from one end of the ridge to the other and back. The mountain has thinned glades and added some other little byways to vary the experience. And then, tucked away, tree-lined and meandering, is the Disciples Ridge section, a spiderweb of greens and blues that may be the most extensive and inviting beginner terrain in the state of Michigan. Before the ski area began building this pod in the late ‘90s, Boyne Mountain was a tough sell for families. Now it’s one of the most balanced and inviting ski areas in the region. The grooming is astonishingly good – Boyne may own Big Sky and Brighton, but this is ground zero of the company’s sprawling empire, and it’s the place where they mastered the arts of snowmaking and snow-care that they export to their other resorts.And you know what? It’s just a damn fun place to spend a day. If you ever find yourself in Michigan in the wintertime, hit this one up. Plus, they have some knockout terrain parks:Additional reading/videosLift Blog’s inventory of Boyne Mountain chairliftsHistoric Boyne Mountain trailmapsMore on Boyne 2030 (personally, I would have put the lift first, but they are very excited about this bridge):A little more about Boyne Mountain: Get on the email list at www.stormskiing.com

Kyle takes the reins and steers the ship this week. Mal's is on sobaticle and doesn't know how to spell sobaticle. Promise us you wont have a heart attack listening to this one.

The Storm Skiing Podcast is sponsored by Mountain Gazette - Listen to the podcast for discount codes on subscriptions and merch.An old-timey coziness defines Caberfae, but this is one of the most steadily evolving ski areas in America.WhoTim Meyer, Co-Owner and General Manager of Mountain Operations at Caberfae Peaks, MichiganRecorded onJuly 21, 2021Why I interviewed him In the part of my brain warehousing ski memories there are days and places that live forever. Many of those days are at Caberfae. When I first pulled up to the base area as a novice skier trained poorly at the single-lift bumps downstate I stood in dumbstruck awe of the place, its teeming peaks and lift network sprawling off into the woods. A dozen tumbling freefalls did not discourage me from its charms. Caberfae stood just 90 minutes from my house and I became a regular, returning on swirling weekends and quiet spring weeknights when I lapped empty chairs in long March sunsets after school. I moved away from Michigan long ago, but if I’m there in the winter Caberfae is the first place I go.It is a special place, quintessentially Midwestern and unusually aggressive in its deliberate decades-long evolution. Opened in the 1930s, the complex grew by the 1970s into what Chris Diamond described in his book Ski Inc. 2020 as “a sprawling series of hills served by 20-plus rope tows, five T-Bars and a chairlift, spanning some two miles from end-to-end.” A 1966 copy of America’s Ski Book describes Caberfae as being equipped with “six T-bars and sixteen rope tows on 270 vertical feet.” Here is the 1980 trailmap, which looks like it was spun out of the ditto machines that stamped out my early grade-school classwork sheets:Today, nearly everything on that trailmap has been permanently abandoned. In what Diamond calls “the most successful ‘ski-resort contraction’ in history,” Caberfae moved tons of earth from the bottom of two peaks to the top, boosting its vertical drop from 270 to 485 feet. “Their vertical expansion of two central peaks was accompanied by a horizontal contraction from the far-flung borders and the closing of a dozen-plus lifts, which they could never adequately cover with snowmaking,” Diamond writes. By the early 2000s, when Tim Meyer and his cousin Pete inherited the operation from their fathers, who’d had the vision to transform it, Caberfae looked like this:For context, the Shelter run far skier’s right on the 2004 map sits between the two chairlifts on the 1980 map. But they weren’t done yet. Today, Caberfae looks like this:The backcountry terrain, which is ungroomed and open only when natural snow allows, brought some of the old Caberfae back into the active resort footprint. They’re far from done: in the podcast, we talk about a massive project that will add a new lift and a third peak for the 2022-23 season, future development of the Backcountry, and more. “We try to do a little bit each year,” Meyer tells me in the podcast.I’ve been waiting 25 years to have this conversation. Caberfae may be the most constantly evolving ski resort in America. It’s like a mansion that the owners can’t stop renovating. How we went from a ropetow kingdom bereft of snowmaking to a modern resort forged out of vision, willpower, patience, grit, and determination that, four decades after the family acquired it, is still a work-in-progress, was a story I’d been waiting my entire skiing life to hear.What we talked aboutThe glory of the wild ropetow-laced and low-rise Caberfae of the early 1980s; lift relics still in the woods; why that terrain was abandoned and why it’s likely gone forever; growing up on the slopes of Caberfae and why Meyer lit out for Winter Park, Colorado - and what finally drew him back; running a ski area as a multi-generational family business; the kind of place where you’ll find the owner roaming the grounds in snowboots and clutching a walkie-talkie; who had the vision to transform Caberfae from an antique into a modern ski area; the incredible engineering feat of building two artificial peaks from Michigan clay and sand; improvisational construction; how the mountain stabilized the peaks; how building South Peak in the 1980s stabilized the business; the nearly 40-year-old South Peak triple is here to stay; why the ski area has changed the grade of select runs over the years; developing North Peak; why the ski area added a new triple to North Peak in 2016 and why it left the adjacent quad in service; the virtues of triple chairs; whether the ski area ever considered a six-pack for North Peak; the quirky I-75 run; why the ski area put a fence up between Smiling Irishman and Canyon; why the mountain re-opened part of the old Caberfae as an ungroomed natural-snow area; the old T-bar line hidden like a secret videogame level in the woods; the potential for chairlifts or terrain expansion in the Backcountry; why the ski area leaves its woods intact; the two retired Hall chairlifts sitting at the base of the ski area and whether they could ever come back into service, possibly as a single lift; the timeline for the third peak, what it will be called, and what kind of lift it will have; which lift is coming down to accommodate the expansion; the return of Bo Buck; the sentimental anguish of tearing the last ropetow out of the former king of the ropetows; why it could return one day; renovations on the Skyview Day Lodge; crockpots in the day lodge: “if you live in Michigan, you should have the opportunity to ski”; why Caberfae has never focused on terrain parks; going from almost zero snowmaking in the early 1980s to a modern fleet; why the mountain doesn’t push for the late spring close; how Caberfae went from selling seven golf season passes to nearly 400 and how they applied the philosophy to the $99 discounted ski season weekend or weekday pass; how that turbocharged the business; why the mountain raised the pass price to $149 last year after more than a decade at $99; the Indy Pass; why season passholders have to pick up a new metal wicket ticket each time they arrive at the ski area; the ski area’s unique lift ticket designs; why metal wickets are probably part of Caberfae indefinitely; the ski area’s colorful trailmap and when they’ll introduce a new one; why the ski area continued its relationship with Liftopia/Catalate after its troubles last year; how the 2020-21 Covid season went at Caberfae; and Covid adaptations that may stick around for future seasons. From the air, it’s easier to see how Caberfae has been scultped over the decades. Strategically placed trees make the place ski bigger than it looks. Photo courtesy of Indy Pass and Caberfae Peaks.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview I actually thought February 2020 was a great time for this interview, and that’s when we initially recorded it. But the audio was compromised, filled with a conversation-from-space crackle that I couldn’t scrub out. The Storm Skiing Podcast was just four months old at the time, and I hadn’t perfected the harder-than-you’d-think art of recording a two-way conversation. I kept thinking I could resolve the issue and delayed posting. Then Covid hit. By the time I’d admitted defeat, skiing seemed small and ski area operators were preoccupied with survival. By the time the 2020-21 season came around, I was embarrassed to go back to Meyer to ask him to re-do a thing he had already done. Finally, a couple weeks ago, I fired off a bashful email asking if I could have another hour of his time. Tim graciously and immediately agreed. This has been an eternal to-do list item and it is liberating to cross it off.Caberfae is the southern edge of big-time Midwest skiing. Going up the 2016 Doppelmayr triple chair on North Peak, which runs alongside a 1992 CTEC quad.Why you should ski CaberfaeCaberfae was an inaugural Indy Pass partner in the Midwest, a family-owned, family-centric Up North ski area where crockpots line the baselodge ledges and the lifties are not temp workers trucked in from the hinterlands but locals who return to their posts year after year. The place is absolute joy, no pretense, no arrogance, as down-home as Up North gets. As Meyer says in the podcast, their market is the recreational skier. That’s another way of saying it’s mostly absent of hotshots and speedsters and flippidy-doo parksters. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. This is a crowd that just loves skiing for the motion and the thrill of it, for the sensation of downhill freefall. I’ve never been to a happier ski area.The terrain is unique for the Midwest. The artificial hills create a sensation of above-treeline skiing that is otherwise absent between Sugarloaf and Loveland. At the same time, Caberfae has eschewed the Midwest urge to clear-cut its small hills to accommodate the downhill masses – trails thread through the forest on the lower mountain, especially on North Peak and off the Shelter Chair, and the wall of trees segregating the baselodge from the slopes create a sensation of rambling bigness unusual for the Lower Peninsula. Plus, wicket tickets:Photo courtesy of Indy Pass and Caberfae Peaks.There’s one more thing. Crossing into Michigan by land invariably takes you past signs welcoming you to “Pure Michigan.” The 13-year-old slogan extolls the state’s vast forests, lakes, rivers, and wildlife, but it has been commandeered by prideful Michiganders to evoke the tireless community DIY spirit of the people themselves. When I arrived in Manhattan nearly 20 years ago, the most difficult cultural adjustment was how reliant average New Yorkers were on paid labor for even mundane tasks. No one in Michigan – at least the community I grew up in in Michigan – pays anyone to do anything they can do themselves. Ever. The concept of hiring movers, for example, still confounds me, and I moved myself – at great hassle but little expense - at least 10 times within Manhattan before settling in Brooklyn five years ago. My point here is that Meyer and his family are Pure Michigan in that sense. When I say they engineered the most dramatic transformation of a lift-served ski area in the history of U.S. skiing over the course of four decades, I mean they engineered it. They drove the heavy equipment and they transformed glacial bumps into above-treeline peaks one shovel-load at a time and they cut the trees and reshaped the land and made the improbable inevitable. When I met Meyer on the slopes of Caberfae, he was walking across the base area in a snowsuit, carrying a crackling walkie-talkie. And you can tell in this interview, by the way he describes his sense of duty to the ski area and to his family, and maintains a crockpot-friendly Caberfae with ticket prices almost anyone can afford, that this guy and the people around him are Pure Michigan in the most elemental way. The Shelter Double is a 1967 Hall. Caberfae plans to replace the short lift with a brand-new Doppelmayr triple serving a new peak for the 2022-23 ski season, dramatically improving the experience of getting out of the base area. The old Hall will go into storage along with two others of the same vintage, possibly to be re-purposed at a later date.Additional resourcesThis 1949 trailmap distills the zany rambling chaos that once defined Caberfae and continues to animate its spirit:Even those intimately familiar with the modern Caberfae will have a hard time deciphering what they’re looking at in this 72-year-old depiction of the ski area.A few more items of interest:Lift Blog’s inventory of Caberfae liftsMore classic Caberfae trailmapsChris Diamond’s Ski Inc 2020 has a wonderful write-up of Caberfae (pgs. 128-132). The book is worth a full and repeated read for anyone interested in the modern lift-served skiing landscape.I wrote this story about a 5-year-old who hitched a ride on the Shelter Double with me a couple years ago.Another essay, this one documenting my inaugural ski season rambling over the Michigan flatlands as a teenager:I have no photographs documenting that season. Not one. But I remember the sequence of days perfectly, the huge snowy canvas of Up North rolling out before me as I traversed the supergrid of state highways and interstates, one by one ticking off the lift-served areas that we all presumptuously called mountains but were barely hills, the largest of them 550 vertical feet from top to bottom.To me they may as well have been Vail. After a return to single-chairlift Snow Snake, I stood in dumbfounded amazement at the base of Caberfae, four or five chairlifts sprawling across its two humped peaks poking like a giant snowy camel from the flatlands outside of Cadillac. I descended them like an inept paratrooper dropped at velocity over a decline, my gear twirling apart from me in acrobatic freefall with each concussive wipeout. Get on the email list at www.stormskiing.com

Chris Holman catches up with Matt Alagna, Director of Sales, Treetops Resort, Gaylord, MI, to discuss why you and your business associates should “Come to Treetops for your Meeting or Group getaway” Treetops -- the destination for your post-COVID meetings and conferences. Tell us about your meeting spaces? Gaylord is centralized especially for meetings when Upper and Lower Peninsula participants from Michigan are involved lodging and meeting space packages The natural advantage of the resort's outside recreation opportunities, whether it's golf, hiking, or winter sports how to book meetings with Treetops?

A chat with Matt and Ryan of Cruthu as well as fans Korey, Brandon, Daniel, Paul, Matt, Erik, and Matt. We started out with the fans who span the globe to discover how they found Cruthu. We learn the origin behind the name of the band as well as their latest album Athrú Crutha and how to pronounce it. We explore the craftsmanship behind Cruthu’s music. Finally, we explore what everyone is listening to these days and the mysteries of pineapple.How The Fans Discovered CruthuWe kicked off this episode by asking the fans how they discovered Cruthu. Paul saw them at PJ’s Lager House where they opened for Spirit Adrift. He was glad he got there early as he loved the doom metal Sabbath vibe. Matt C has known Ryan (vocals for Cruthu) since high school and has known Ryan’s wife Misty (who joined the call with Ryan) since 7th grade. Regardless of timeline, Matt was enthralled after the first listen of Cruthu comparing the experience to his first listen to Metallica’s Master Of Puppets.Erik heard the rough demos of the first Cruthu album (The Angle of Eternity) and was blown away. The experience still resonates with him today. Matt C added that he enjoys the storytelling aspect of Cruthu’s music. It is as if he is sitting around a campfire and hearing the story told.Brandon discovered Cruthu at FuzzFest in Ann Arbor at the legendary Blind Pig. While all the bands were great, Cruthu’s doomy vibe captured his attention. He has been following the band ever since. Matt H has been a friend of Matt F (drummer for Cruthu) for some time. He felt he couldn’t really top the descriptions by Matt C or Erik, but agrees that the music of Cruthu speaks for itself.Daniel called in from Chile. A friend of his asked him if he had heard of Cruthu as he knew that Daniel loved doom metal bands. It was love at first listen for Daniel. For him, the music is powerful doom with great blues roots. Daniel particularly enjoys the vocal phrasing and melodies. He thought it was fantastic that Cruthu released their latest album (Athrú Crutha) during the pandemic.Athrú Crutha and Song WritingRyan kindly guided me through the pronunciation of the title of the latest Cruthu album called Athrú Crutha. Like the band’s name, the album title is gaelic and means “to transform into” in a supernatural form. This dovetails nicely with the first track as well as the overall theme of the album. By the way, Cruthu roughly means creation or to create.We talked a bit about the evolution of the music of Cruthu. From the initial demos with Matt and Dan (guitar) through the addition of Ryan on vocals and Derek on bass. While their first album The Angle of Eternity is great, you can clearly hear a more cohesive sound on the new album.We explored the songwriting process of Cruthu. This typically involves riffs from Dan that are shaped by the rest of the band into the final version of the songs. The lyrical content is developed after the music is created. In some cases, Ryan has existing lyrics that fit perfectly with a melody. In other cases, inspiration comes in an avalanche. This is how the lyrics to “Crown of Horns” were born.Paul was curious if Athrú Crutha is a concept album. Ryan explained that it isn’t a concept album in the true sense. However, it is thematic where story ideas within songs can extend into the others. Recording the AlbumErik wanted to know where the latest Cruthu album had been recorded. Ryan indicated that it was recorded at Dan’s home in Lansing. The house is an older home with lots of natural wood that provides for a dynamic sound environment.The recording engineer is George Szegedy who worked with Cruthu on the first album. George has also worked on the recordings of Ryan and his wife Misty’s other band Seritas. They recorded on tape to capture the continuous waveform of their music via analog signal.Taking Cruthu on the RoadDaniel posed the question of taking Cruthu on the road. Not just to North America, but whether the band would consider some of the bigger doom festivals in Europe such as Hammer Of Doom Festival or Doom Over Vienna. Cruthu had been working on plans to play Hammer Of Doom, however all plans are currently on hold given the pandemic.In addition, Daniel was interested in what Cruthu thinks of doom metal in South America. Ryan feels the doom scene in Latin America is very strong. Daniel mentioned it would be cool to have Cruthu play some shows with King Heavy and Apostle of Solitude. Let’s hope that in the near future we can see this happen.More on TouringSomething we learned while talking is that the members of Cruthu are spread out across the Lower Peninsula of Michigan from Petoskey (up in the northern lower) to Lansing, Saginaw, and Grand Rapids. To some extent this has limited the band to doing just a few small strings of shows. Matt F mentioned that Cruthu really hasn’t gotten into the van to do any true turing. Ryan added that they haven’t yet done a Black Flag run which brought many laughs.Paul continued that he didn’t really see Cruthu as a van band. He felt they should really be using a stagecoach or carriage for that old world Transylvania feel. Matt C quipped that they would have to keep the Stonehenge monuments to a minimum.Cosmic HorrorAs we talked more about songwriting, Ryan relayed that in the band Seritas the lyrics are personal. With Cruthu, the lyrics are complete fiction. Matt F added that their first singer had written more personal lyrics and he always felt that the H.P. Lovecraft themes of cosmic horror would be a great direction to take. When Ryan joined the band, he jumped on this notion.New Music and First AlbumsWhile talking about how we all have found music to be our savior while we deal with the pandemic, the topics of what everyone is listening to and their first album popped up. Matt C has been enjoying the new Mr. Bungle album.Matt F has been listening to Ryan’s new side project (Ubuntu). His first album was Eye of the Tiger by Survivor. Misty added her first album was Freeze Frame by J Geils. Matt C’s first album was Weird Al’s Polka Party. Paul’s first tape was Europe’s The Final Countdown. Korey has been listening to the new Pallbearer. His first album was actually the entire collection of Led Zeppelin that he snagged from his cousin. The Go Go’s Beauty and the Beat was Erik’s first album. Brandon started out with System of a Down Steal This Album. However, lately he is fascinated with Bill Fisher’s solo album called Mass Hypnosis and the Dark Triad. Matt H is really missing live shows and remembers the Offspring as his first album.Side Projects - Ubuntu and BudahasAs we talked about new music and what everyone is listening to, Matt F mentioned that he, Erik and Matt H had been in a band called Budahas. After several years, they will be releasing their album Explore via bandcamp. As mentioned earlier, Ryan has a side project of eclectic ambient music called Ubuntu who recently released their album called Jupiter.Pineapple Anyone?A classic wrap-up on Fans With Bands is the great debate of pineapple or no pineapple on pizza. Matt C is firmly on the no F pizza: No Fruit, No Feta, No Fish, and No Fungus. Matt F is not a fan of pineapple. Ryan and Misty are more traditionalists with pizza, however they did experiment with pineapple and it wasn’t too bad. Paul went to Michigan State and during his years of experimentation at school he dabbled with pineapple. Now that he has kids, he has left pineapple behind. Erik is straight up no pizza. Instead he’ll go for tacos and throw on pineapple just for fun. Brandon doesn’t really like pineapple, but he loves pizza enough to suffer the pineapple if that is all that is available. Korey is one of the few pineapple fans on this episode as Matt H gives pineapple the down vote. Dig into the stories, laughs, and much more in this episode of Fans With Bands with Cruthu. We hope you enjoy it!  Subscribe to Fans With Bands on your favorite podcast service such as Apple, Google, Youtube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, Amazon Music or Stitcher.  Be sure to rate the show and please send us feedback. We would love to hear from you. Check out Cruthu musicFollow Cruthu on Facebook and Youtube You can also follow Fans With Bands on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and InstagramFor samplings of music by artists featured on Fans With Bands, drop by our playlist on SpotifySupport the podcast!!

The Radio Free Flint Camper Truck Tour Podcast continues with a visit to the mighty Mackinac Bridge. With a total span of approximately 5 miles, the Mackinac Bridge connects the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan uniting the communities of Mackinaw City and St. Ignace, Michigan. ... The engeneering of the Mackinac Bridge was designed to accommodate the high winds, temperature changes and constant changes of weight. Mackinaw City is a village on the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Mackinac Bridge crosses the Straits of Mackinac to the Upper Peninsula. Colonial Michilimackinac is a reconstructed 18th-century fort and fur-trading post. Founded in 1889, Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse has restored quarters and views from the top. Wilderness State Park includes stretches of Lake Michigan shoreline, trails and campsites. This podcast can be heard at https://www.radiofreeflint.media  #TravelMichigan #TruckCamper #MackinawCity #MackinacBridge --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/radiofreeflint/message

The Birdies & Bourbon team had a blast chatting with Pete Kelbel on the PGA Tour, Justin Thomas, golf in Michigan and more. Pete Kelbel is a 3rd generation professional golfer, following in the footsteps of his grandfather and father, both of whom had distinguished careers as teaching professionals. From a very early age, Pete accompanied his dad to Harbor Point Golf Club where he would help out around the course with jobs such as picking up balls from the range and washing golf clubs. After a spell as a caddy, Pete started playing with ‘sawed-off’ clubs and by the age of 14 shot his first even-par round. Pete joined the Professional ranks whilst still at college and successfully completed his PGA Apprenticeship. Initially based in South Florida an opportunity arose at Walloon Lake Country Club in Petoskey, Michigan. After several years going back and forth between Florida and Michigan, Pete finally settled in Michigan and has now been the professional at Walloon Lake for just over 30 years. In addition to his full diary as a Teaching Professional, Pete is very passionate about junior golf and coaches both the girls and boys teams at Harbor Springs High School, taking great pride in their performances at school and then at college. Pete also writes for WomensGolf.com in which he analyses the swings of the top LPGA players. Walloon Lake Country Club Walloon Lake, located just to the South West of the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan in the United States, has a long and rich history. The Walloon Lake Country Club was established in 1904 with an initial 9 hole configuration. In 1925 the golf course was expanded to 18 holes after the purchase of adjoining land. In 1990, after finally securing approval from the members, the golf course expanded once again. Today, the 18 hole course provides an excellent test of golf with well-tended fairways and fast greens, with terrific views of Walloon Lake and the surrounding countryside. A regular visitor to the Club is the 8-time major winner Tom Watson, who as a youngster used to play at the club when his family spent the summer months at Walloon Lake. The Watson Cup, the annual invitational golf tournament at Walloon Lake, is named in his honor. In addition to the golf course, the Walloon Lake Country Club also offers: Professional Golf Lessons with Pete Kelbel Professional Tennis Tuition and 4 tennis courts A varied activity program for children including swimming and sailing Information from golfingherald.com. Please check Pete out online on instagram @petekelbelgolf Thank you for taking the time listen to the Birdies & Bourbon Show for all things PGA Tour, golf, gear, bourbon and mixology. Dan & Cal aim to bring you entertaining and informative episodes weekly. Please help spread the word on the podcast and tell a friend about the show. You can also help by leaving an 5-Star iTunes review. We love to hear the feedback and support! Cheers. Follow on Twitter & Instagram ( @birdies_bourbon )

Steve Dawes is a new UAW Regional Director and shares labor's goals and aspirations for the future.  He also shares his path to leadership in the UAW.  His work in Flint, Michigan has been vital to the area as the Michigan manufacturing workforce has been downsized in the era of globalization.  His work in the region which manufactures the America's best selling trucks is critical to the members and the people of Michigan. Steve Dawes was elected UAW Region 1D director Feb. 13, 2020, at a special regional convention. He had served as an assistant director since June 16, 2010, when he was appointed to the position at the union’s 35th Constitutional Convention in Detroit by President Bob King. Region 1D covers 73 Michigan counties and UAW members in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the central, western and northern portions of the Lower Peninsula. Dawes began his career in 1978 at the Flint Truck Assembly Plant as a spot welder, a job he worked until he was hired on as an apprentice toolmaker at AC Spark Plug in 1984. He was a dedicated member of UAW Local 651 and was elected as a Skilled Trades Committeeperson in 1989.  In 1999, he was elected UAW Local 651 vice president, and as a delegate to the UAW Constitutional Convention. Shortly into his term of vice president, Dawes took over as UAW Local 651 president. He was re-elected as president in 2002. In 2004, he was appointed to the Region 1C International staff by UAW President Ron Gettelfinger at the request of Region 1C Director Bob Roth. He was assigned as a servicing representative in the Flint and Lansing areas. Since, he has played a major role in the development, construction and upkeep of the Sit-Down Memorial located at the Flint office. #FlintMichigan #UAW, #UAWRegion 1D, #LaborDay  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/radiofreeflint/message

Geographically, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is only connected to the Lower Peninsula by a bridge. With Wisconsin, it shares more than 200 miles of border. So why isn’t the UP part of Wisconsin? It’s a question on many people’s minds and WHYsconsin’s most-asked question.

PARANORMAL OR NOT?

CRYPTIDS 101

Today on Stateside, restaurants in the Upper Peninsula and the northern Lower Peninsula were allowed to open for sit down dining. We spoke with two restaurateurs; one who opened and one who stuck to take-out orders. Plus, how one high school senior is preparing for his future amid uncertainty.

Mornings on the Mall  Thursday, May 21, 2020 Hosts; Vince Coglianese and Mary Walter Executive Producer: Heather Hunter Guests: Liz Sheld, Cal Thomas, Erik Kiilunen, Tom Fitton and Shelley Luther SHOW RUNDOWN: 5 AM HOUR: 5-A/B/C -- 5:05 AM - NEW VIRUS GUIDANCE: CDC now says coronavirus ‘does not spread easily’ on surfaces. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says the coronavirus “does not spread easily” through touching surfaces or objects. In early March, the federal health agency was warning that it “may be possible” to pass on the virus from contaminated surfaces, according to Fox News. Its guidelines now include a section on ways the virus doesn’t easily spread — including from touching surfaces or objects. “It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes,” the CDC webpage states. “This is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, but we are still learning more about this virus.” Other ways the virus doesn’t easily spread is from animals to people or people to animals, the CDC’s updated webpage states. AND LAST MONTH... FDA says there is no evidence groceries can transmit coronavirus Your groceries apparently can’t transmit the coronavirus. There’s no evidence to suggest that COVID-19 can spread through food, or what it’s wrapped in, Dr. Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, said Thursday. “We have no evidence that the virus, the Covid-19 virus, is transmitted by food or by food packaging,” Hahn said during a CNN town hall. [...] As for disinfecting your groceries, that may also be overkill, according to the FDA. VIRUS AND SMIMMING POOLS: ‘No Evidence’ That Coronavirus Spreads In Swimming Pools, According To CDC. As temperatures inch upward and Memorial Day quickly approaches, pools across the country remain closed due to coronavirus restrictions. Many are likely concerned about going for a swim, citing the possibility that coronavirus could be spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), however, says that there is “no evidence” that the virus can be spread to people through pool water, hot tubs, spas, or water play areas, as long as social-distancing measures are taken. “Proper operation and maintenance (including disinfection with chlorine and bromine) of these facilities should inactivate the virus in the water,” the CDC online guideline says. Individuals, pool owners and operators should still take the steps to ensure that the virus isn’t spread, including following local and state guidelines that determine whether pools can reopen. 5-D/E -- LATEST RUSSIA COLLUSION NEWS: CHUCK ROSS: FBI Offered To Pay Christopher Steele ‘Significantly’ To Dig Up Dirt On Michael Flynn. An FBI offer to pay former British spy Christopher Steele to collect intelligence on Michael Flynn in the weeks before the 2016 election has been one of the more overlooked revelations in a Justice Department inspector general’s report released in December. The reference to the FBI proposal, which was made in an Oct. 3, 2016, meeting in an unidentified European city, has received virtually no press attention. But it might have new significance following the recent release of government documents that show that Steele peddled an unfounded rumor that Flynn had an extramarital affair with a Russian woman in the United Kingdom. WAPO: Michael Flynn’s name was never masked in FBI document on his communications with Russian ambassador. But in the FBI report about the communications between the two men, Flynn’s name was never redacted, former U.S. officials said. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) announced this week that he wants to subpoena witnesses over the unmasking of Flynn, as part of a larger effort to unearth information about the FBI’s investigation of Trump campaign officials. On Tuesday, he sent a letter to acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell asking why a declassified list of Obama administration officials who had made requests that revealed Flynn’s name in intelligence documents “did not contain a record showing who unmasked” Flynn’s identity in relation to “his phone call with” the Russian diplomat, Sergey Kislyak. Rice penned Inauguration Day email at White House counsel’s direction. On Jan. 20, 2017, the day of President Trump’s inauguration, Rice penned a memo to herself documenting a Jan. 5 meeting with Obama and others, during which he provided guidance on how law enforcement should address Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race. Parts of the email had been released previously, but the full unredacted email was declassified and made public this week. At the meeting, she, Obama, former FBI Director James Comey and other intelligence officials discussed her successor Michael Flynn’s communications with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Rice spokeswoman Erin Pelton told Fox News on Wednesday that Rice documented the contents of that meeting at the direction of Obama’s White House counsel, Neil Eggleston. UNDERCOVER HUBER with a new theory about leaks from MUELLER'S TEAM to flip TRUMP TEAM LAWYERS AGAINST THEIR OWN CLIENTS... Somebody faked that the Crossfire Hurricane team had a FISA on Paul Manafort & "leaked" this to CNN. And the culprits may have been the Special Counsel's Office, trying to influence D.C's Chief Judge into allowing the SCO to pierce Manafort's Attorney/Client privilege. (THREAD) NYT: Supreme Court Blocks Release of Full Mueller Report for Now. WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily blocked the release of parts of the report prepared by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. The court’s order, concerning a request by the House Judiciary Committee for grand jury materials that the Justice Department had blacked out from the report provided to Congress, could mean that the full report would not be made available before the 2020 election. The Supreme Court’s brief order gave no reasons for blocking an appeals court ruling ordering the release of the full report while the justices considered whether to hear the case. It ordered the Justice Department to file a petition seeking review by June 1. There were no noted dissents. The House told the justices that it sought information about whether President Trump had obstructed justice, a topic on which Mr. Mueller failed to reach a conclusion. MICHAEL COHEN TO BE RELEASED EARLY FROM JAIL: President Trump's longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen will be released from federal prison today and is expected to serve the remainder of his sentence at home. Cohen has been serving a federal prison sentence at FCI Otisville in New York after pleading guilty to numerous charges, including campaign finance fraud and lying to Congress. Cohen will be released on furlough with the expectation that he will transition to home confinement for the remainder of his sentence. 6 AM HOUR 6-A -- 6:05 AM -- INTERVIEW - LIZ SHELD - Senior Editor, American Greatness -- discuss yesterday's "Karens" in the media and the "coronavirus Karens" Mika Melts Down, Goes Full 'Karen': Brzezinski Demands Twitter Erase 'Sick, Disgusting' President Trump from Its Platform...  Mika Brzezinski @morningmika: .@twitter need to know why trump is not banned? 9:16 AM - May 20, 2020 Mika Brzezinski @morningmika: I will be reaching out to head of twitter about their policies being violated every day by President Tump. Hope my call is taken. Please retweet if you agree 9:17 AM - May 20, 2020 Video: Mika being a Karen on Morning Joe: https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1263238165650800640 CORONAVIRUS KARENS: This woman outside of a grocery store is being called a Karen. She was freaking out in her car. Is she a Karen?  https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1263208102951743488 A SUPER ANNOYING KAREN: This lady went out to video shame everyone who dared to have fun in the sun at the beach. Is she being a Karen?  https://twitter.com/robbystarbuck/status/1262173200479379456 ABOUT KARENS: Karen is a slang term that is used to typify a person perceived to be entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is considered appropriate or necessary. One of the most common Karen stereotypes is that of a white middle-aged woman, typically American, who displays aggressive behavior when she is obstructed from getting her way; such women are often depicted as demanding to "speak to the manager" and sometimes have a variation of the bob cut. The origins of Karen as an Internet meme predominately date back to an anonymous Reddit user.  (Wikipedia link) 6-B/C - VOTING NEWS: MICHIGAN MAIL IN BALLOTS: President Trump threatened to hold back federal funding from two election battleground states that are making it easier to vote by mail during the pandemic. He later backed away somewhat from that threat but stuck with his claim that widespread voting by mail promotes "a lot of illegality." Trump targeted Michigan and Nevada on Wednesday. At first he claimed Michigan was sending out more than 7 million mail-in ballots, but after criticism he corrected that to say mail-in ballot "applications." Federal judge rules in favor of mail-in ballots in Texas, says 'lack of immunity' for COVID-19 a physical condition. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said Tuesday that his office would appeal a federal court’s preliminary injunction that allows all registered voters in the state to apply to vote by mail while the country fights the coronavirus pandemic. “The district court’s opinion ignores the evidence and disregards well-established law,” the Texas Republican said in a statement, according to the Texas Tribune. "We will seek an immediate review by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals." The paper pointed out that the Lone Star State’s current election law only grants permission for those over 65, who have a disability or plan to be abroad at the time of the vote to apply for a mail-in ballot. Democrats are largely in favor of the voting alternative while Republicans have been critical of the option due to the risk of voter fraud. Judge Fred Biery, a district court judge in San Antonio, sided Tuesday with the state’s Democratic party. "The Court finds such fear and anxiety is inextricably intertwined with voters' physical health. Such apprehension will limit citizens' rights to cast their votes in person. The Court also finds that lack of immunity from COVID-19 is indeed a physical condition," he wrote. (Fox News link) Montgomery County Council calls on Maryland's State Board of Elections to hold emergency meeting to protect voting rights. Council expresses concerns over the distribution of ballots for Maryland’s June 2 primary election ROCKVILLE, Md., May 20, 2020—Montgomery County Councilmembers sent a letter to the Maryland State Board of Elections expressing their frustration and concern about the distribution of ballots for Maryland’s June 2 primary election. Many registered voters in Montgomery County have reported that they have not received their ballots and have reached out to the Council to voice their concerns. All Councilmembers signed the letter. “It is extremely concerning, this close to the June 2nd Maryland primary election, that there are widespread issues in delivering the appropriate absentee ballot to voters,” said Council Vice President Tom Hucker. “This is unacceptable and is increasing public anxiety and eroding confidence in our elections. The State Board of Elections needs to act immediately to ensure voters a fair and timely primary and general election. We are sending this letter to get more information on this situation and to work with the State Board on this crucial issue.” The Council has requested the Maryland State Board of Elections hold an emergency meeting to address urgent issues relating to the primary election including the timely distribution of ballots to all voters in their preferred language and to ensure that Maryland will administer the 2020 primary and general elections securely and effectively. “The Maryland State Board of Elections must do everything within its power to ensure that by perception and in reality, the coming elections are seen to be fair and just,” said Councilmember Nancy Navarro, who chairs the Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee. “The issues that threaten to disenfranchise voters in our county and region must be resolved as soon as possible.” (MoCo Govt link)  More Montgomery County ballots being mailed to deceased, non-residents. A few weeks after a man described how his deceased mother was shown to have voted in Montgomery County elections for a decade after her death, another case of an illegal ballot being issued has come to light. Attorney Robin Ficker, a Republican candidate for Maryland governor, reports that his son was mailed a ballot to his old Montgomery County address. Problem: Ficker's son hasn't lived in Montgomery County for 12 years. And as a "live" ballot, it could be illegally filled out and mailed back by someone else. "Election fraud?" Ficker asked in a Facebook post showing the improperly-mailed ballot. "How many of these ballots are being mailed by someone else?" Ficker isn't the only one asking questions.  A watchdog group, Judicial Watch, has successfully sued to receive the voter registration information of all Montgomery County voters, after it found there are more names registered to vote than there are eligible voters in the county. In 2018, anomalous voting results were seen at dozens of precincts across Montgomery County in the County Council At-Large race, if not others. The voter universe in that election also increased by about 100,000 voters in only four years since 2014. Local media outlets have not challenged County officials about either issue so far. Leaving ineligible names on the voter rolls is a key source of voter fraud. Anyone who has the names of deceased or non-resident voters can walk into the appropriate polling place, claim to be that person and provide the few details asked for by judges, and cast a ballot illegally using one of those many names. In this year's by-mail elections, these illegal ballots will be mailed out and ripe for the picking by any organized voter fraud operation, further underlining the urgency in cleaning up Montgomery County's dirty voter rolls. (Robert Dyer blog link)  Flashback in April: Judicial Watch Victory: Federal Court Orders Maryland to Release Complete Voter Registration Records. (Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced that a federal court ordered the State of Maryland to produce the voter list for Montgomery County that includes the registered voters’ date of birth. This court ruling is the latest in a series of victories for Judicial Watch in its lawsuit filed July 18, 2017, against Montgomery County and the Maryland State Boards of Elections under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). Judicial Watch filed suit for the Maryland voter list data after uncovering that there were more registered voters in Montgomery County than citizens over the age of 18 who could legally register (Judicial Watch vs. Linda H. Lamone, et al. (No. 1:17-cv-02006)). Ruling in Judicial Watch’s favor, Judge Hollander said: "Judicial Watch need not demonstrate its need for birth date information in order to facilitate its effort to ensure that the voter rolls are properly maintained. Nevertheless, it has put forward reasonable justifications for requiring birth date information, including using birth dates to find duplicate registrations and searching for voters who remain on the rolls despite “improbable” age." In order to avoid turning over the dates of birth for Maryland voters, the Maryland Administrator of Elections, Linda Lamone, directed her staff to remove date of birth as a field on the voter registration application. Judge Hollander ruled that Lamone could not do this, saying: "Because full voter birth dates appear on completed voter registration applications, the Administrator may not bypass the Act by unilaterally revising the Application." In August 2019, Judge Hollander ruled in Judicial Watch’s favor in the same case, ordering the State of Maryland to produce voter list data for Montgomery County. Judicial Watch is the national leader in enforcing the National Voters Registration Act. (Judicial Watch link)  6-D - 6:35 AM --  INTERVIEW - CAL THOMAS - Syndicated columnist and author of new book "America's Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers . . . and the Future of the United States" CAL'S LATEST COLUMN: ‘Snake oil’ cures: Trump should not promote hydroxychloroquine  The name calling between Trump and Pelosi. So unseemly. Win on issues and debate them not who is crazy and who is morbidly obese. 6-E - LOCAL NEWS UPDATE: VIRGINIA / MARYLAND: Ralph Northam: No 'particular timeline' for Northern Virginia to begin first phase of reopening. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said that leaders in Northern Virginia were “following the data” in determining not to move into Phase 1 of the reopening plan with the rest of the state. The city of Alexandria and Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties, which make up most of Northern Virginia and all border either the District of Columbia or Maryland, have the state’s worst coronavirus case numbers. Local leaders told Mr. Northam in a letter that they weren’t ready to enter Phase 1 of reopening until at least May 29. “We haven’t set any particular timeline,” the Democratic governor said. “We will continue to follow that daily. We will be in communication with those (local) leaders, and when they are comfortable, and when the data supports a movement into Phase 1, we will do so.” Arlington County cancels summer camps for 2020. ARLINGTON, Va. - As the novel coronavirus lingers in the Northern Virginia region heading into late fall, Arlington County announced on Wednesday that it is canceling all summer camps for the season. In a statement from the county, officials said the decision was difficult to make. They noted that the camps could not be held with “proper social distancing and appropriate cleaning protocols or other safety measures,” and the county was not confident that it could safely host a camp session. Officials noted there too many variables needed to be accounted for ultimately. “We recognize how important camps are to our residents, and we are truly saddened to have to cancel for the summer. Ultimately, it is the best decision for the safety and health of our community. We will continue to explore opportunities to provide programs and services as national, state and local guidelines allow. We appreciate your patience as we work through this difficult time,” said Parks & Recreation Director Jane Rudolph. Anyone who was registered for an Arlington County Department of Parks and Recreation camp will receive a full refund. Anyone who signed up for a camp with a county contractor should reach out to the contractor directly for information regarding refunds. (Fox5DC link) Montgomery officials say county may start to reopen within a week. Maryland’s most populous county said Wednesday that it may lift some social distancing restrictions within the next week, another tentative step toward reopening the Washington region as the rates of novel coronavirus infections and deaths show signs of slowing. “We are moving in the right direction,” Travis Gayles, head of Montgomery County’s health department, said about plans to join other parts of the state in partially lifting restrictions on gatherings and nonessential businesses. (Washington Post link)  6-F -- Tom Brady blasted for releasing 'immunity' supplement during pandemic. Tom Brady launched a new “immunity” multivitamin supplement this week — and critics quickly tackled the quarterback for the timing of the release during the coronavirus pandemic. Brady, 42, newly signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, announced the release of the “immunity blend supplement,” called Protect, through his company, TB12 Sports, on social media Monday. “Over the years, I’ve learned how important it is to be proactive in taking care of my own body,” Brady said in a video posted to Instagram. “I’m really proud to announce this amazing new product from TB12 that will provide you guys exactly what you need to stay healthy, strong and resilient for whatever comes your way.” It is sold as a 30-day supply, or 60 tablets, for $45, according to the TB12 website. Critics bashed him on Twitter for the not-so-coincidental timing of the release — and for capitalizing on people’s fears amid the pandemic. In Brady’s new home state, nearly 47,000 coronavirus cases and over 2,000 related deaths have been reported, according to the Florida Department of Health. “Oh Tom this is so disappointing,” Julia Offord Pearman tweeted. “The marketing of this product is clearly playing on people’s fears over Covid and a belief that the immune system just needs a boost to recover from it. If it’s an athlete recovery supplement say that, don’t play up to people’s fears about Covid.”“What does your product ‘PROTECT’ us from Tom?” said a person with the handle @katherine_jj6. “Does it protect the millions out of work from being duped to pay a ridiculous amount of money for this? This is a new low for you and [business partner] Alex [Guerrero].” “The reason Tom Brady doesn’t have coronavirus isn’t an immune boosting supplement, it’s because he’s obscenely rich and can isolate unlike delivery drivers, cleaners, meat workers, grocery store workers, nurses and doctors,” wrote Dr. Kate Gregorevic, who identified herself as a geriatrician. “Using this crisis to enrich himself is disgusting.” But TB12 CEO Johns Burns told Yahoo! Sports that “now more than ever, it’s important to have daily support for a healthy immune response as our bodies are subject to constant stressors that deplete its resources.” Brady’s company touts the drug for “supporting natural killer cells” and “replenishing antibodies post-exercise,” helping to “activate your immune system and counter stress-induced immune suppression,” according to a product description. (NY Post link) 7 AM HOUR 7-A -- 7:05 AM - Interview - Erik Kiilunen - organizer of Michigan Take Yourself to Work Day (May 21) Kiilunen, a Michigan business man is leading the effort to make May 21 "Take Yourself to Work Day." He has billboards all over Michigan with the message "All Business is Essential."   Businessman Calls for Peaceful Economic Disobedience in Response to Unconstitutional COVID-19 Lockdown. Ahmeek, MI—As reported by the Associated Press, Erik Kiilunen, business owner, entrepreneur, and founder of All Business is Essential, is calling for peaceful economic disobedience against un-constitutional executive orders which have deprived American citizens of their right to attend to their businesses, their livelihoods, and their jobs. Erik Kiilunen is “encouraging business owners of all sizes to engage in Economic Disobedience" by opening their place of business regardless of "executive orders as Michigan and the USA need commerce. Without it, the poverty created by their absence will cause far greater suffering than anything that COVID-19 will ever lead to now. I’ve opened my business as an example to others.” Over the course of a few days, Mr. Kiilunen's  GoFundMe page has already amassed tens of thousands in contributions from other Americans who support Mr. Kiilunen's message of economic freedom.   As his billboards start to spring up in Grand Rapids, Detroit, and Howell, as well as across the country, Mr. Kiilunen asserts that this is only the beginning. In what is poised to be one of the most fundamentally American uprisings in US history, All Business is Essential is ready to take on anti-constitutional decrees . "All business is essential, and the government, and state governors, do not have the legal authority to pick and choose who has the right to work and feed their families, and who doesn’t....Ask a single mother running a hair salon and using the profits generated to care for her special needs child if her business is essential," says Mr. Kiilunen. 7-B/C -- LATEST ON PELOSI: Speaker Pelosi on President Trump: “It's like a child who comes in with mud on their pants...He comes in with doggy doo on his shoes and everybody who works with him has that on their shoes, too, for a very long time to come." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) expressed confidence Wednesday that the coronavirus stimulus package approved last week will garner enough public backing to force Republicans and the Trump administration to the negotiating table. The $3 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act would provide funds to local and state government, hazard pay for health care workers and another round of direct cash payments to tens of millions of Americans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the package has “no chance” of passing. Pelosi touts $3.6B vote-by-mail bill, now called ‘Voting at Home,’ after Trump warnings to Michigan, Nevada, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday night touted a $3.6 billion vote-by-mail proposal – which she rechristened “Voting at Home” – adding that the bill also would help bolster the U.S. Postal Service. Pelosi talked about the legislation during an appearance on MSNBC just hours after President Trump warned the states of Michigan and Nevada against implementing absentee-ballot and vote-by-mail plans, arguing the proposals were illegal and could potentially facilitate voter fraud. In both cases, the president threatened to withhold federal dollars from the states if they went ahead with their plans. The legality of using mail ballots is already the basis of a lawsuit in Texas, in which a federal judge sided with Democrats in allowing the forms to be sent out to voters. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton immediately announced his office was appealing the ruling to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Meantime, Trump has repeatedly criticized the Postal Service, calling it a “joke” and claiming it undercharges online retail giants such as Amazon. The president has said he will not support any bailout legislation for the Postal Service if the organization does not raise its service rates to generate more revenue. But in an interview on MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Pelosi stressed that the Democrats’ proposal was aimed at making voting and shopping more convenient and safe for Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic – allowing them to perform both tasks at home without exposing themselves to risk of contracting the virus. “We’re now calling it ‘Voting at Home’ because that’s really what it’s all about -- enabling people to vote at home,” Pelosi told host Lawrence O’Donnell. (Fox News link) Trump expresses opposition to extending unemployment benefits enacted in response to pandemic. President Trump on Tuesday privately expressed opposition to extending a weekly $600 boost in unemployment insurance for laid-off workers affected by the coronavirus pandemic, according to three officials familiar with his remarks during a closed-door lunch with Republican senators on Capitol Hill. The increased unemployment benefits — paid by the federal government but administered through individual states — were enacted this year as part of a broader $2 trillion relief package passed by Congress. The boost expires this summer, and House Democrats have proposed extending the aid through January 2021. (Washington Post link) 7-D/E  -- 7:35 AM - INTERVIEW - TOM FITTON - President of Judicial Watch Montgomery County Council calls on Maryland's State Board of Elections to hold emergency meeting to protect voting rights. Council expresses concerns over the distribution of ballots for Maryland’s June 2 primary election ROCKVILLE, Md., May 20, 2020—Montgomery County Councilmembers sent a letter to the Maryland State Board of Elections expressing their frustration and concern about the distribution of ballots for Maryland’s June 2 primary election. Many registered voters in Montgomery County have reported that they have not received their ballots and have reached out to the Council to voice their concerns. All Councilmembers signed the letter. “It is extremely concerning, this close to the June 2nd Maryland primary election, that there are widespread issues in delivering the appropriate absentee ballot to voters,” said Council Vice President Tom Hucker. “This is unacceptable and is increasing public anxiety and eroding confidence in our elections. The State Board of Elections needs to act immediately to ensure voters a fair and timely primary and general election. We are sending this letter to get more information on this situation and to work with the State Board on this crucial issue.” The Council has requested the Maryland State Board of Elections hold an emergency meeting to address urgent issues relating to the primary election including the timely distribution of ballots to all voters in their preferred language and to ensure that Maryland will administer the 2020 primary and general elections securely and effectively. “The Maryland State Board of Elections must do everything within its power to ensure that by perception and in reality, the coming elections are seen to be fair and just,” said Councilmember Nancy Navarro, who chairs the Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee. “The issues that threaten to disenfranchise voters in our county and region must be resolved as soon as possible.” (MoCo Govt link)  More Montgomery County ballots being mailed to deceased, non-residents. A few weeks after a man described how his deceased mother was shown to have voted in Montgomery County elections for a decade after her death, another case of an illegal ballot being issued has come to light. Attorney Robin Ficker, a Republican candidate for Maryland governor, reports that his son was mailed a ballot to his old Montgomery County address. Problem: Ficker's son hasn't lived in Montgomery County for 12 years. And as a "live" ballot, it could be illegally filled out and mailed back by someone else. "Election fraud?" Ficker asked in a Facebook post showing the improperly-mailed ballot. "How many of these ballots are being mailed by someone else?" Ficker isn't the only one asking questions.  A watchdog group, Judicial Watch, has successfully sued to receive the voter registration information of all Montgomery County voters, after it found there are more names registered to vote than there are eligible voters in the county. In 2018, anomalous voting results were seen at dozens of precincts across Montgomery County in the County Council At-Large race, if not others. The voter universe in that election also increased by about 100,000 voters in only four years since 2014. Local media outlets have not challenged County officials about either issue so far. Leaving ineligible names on the voter rolls is a key source of voter fraud. Anyone who has the names of deceased or non-resident voters can walk into the appropriate polling place, claim to be that person and provide the few details asked for by judges, and cast a ballot illegally using one of those many names. In this year's by-mail elections, these illegal ballots will be mailed out and ripe for the picking by any organized voter fraud operation, further underlining the urgency in cleaning up Montgomery County's dirty voter rolls. (Robert Dyer blog link)  Flashback in April: Judicial Watch Victory: Federal Court Orders Maryland to Release Complete Voter Registration Records. (Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced that a federal court ordered the State of Maryland to produce the voter list for Montgomery County that includes the registered voters’ date of birth. This court ruling is the latest in a series of victories for Judicial Watch in its lawsuit filed July 18, 2017, against Montgomery County and the Maryland State Boards of Elections under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). Judicial Watch filed suit for the Maryland voter list data after uncovering that there were more registered voters in Montgomery County than citizens over the age of 18 who could legally register (Judicial Watch vs. Linda H. Lamone, et al. (No. 1:17-cv-02006)). Ruling in Judicial Watch’s favor, Judge Hollander said: "Judicial Watch need not demonstrate its need for birth date information in order to facilitate its effort to ensure that the voter rolls are properly maintained. Nevertheless, it has put forward reasonable justifications for requiring birth date information, including using birth dates to find duplicate registrations and searching for voters who remain on the rolls despite “improbable” age." In order to avoid turning over the dates of birth for Maryland voters, the Maryland Administrator of Elections, Linda Lamone, directed her staff to remove date of birth as a field on the voter registration application. Judge Hollander ruled that Lamone could not do this, saying: "Because full voter birth dates appear on completed voter registration applications, the Administrator may not bypass the Act by unilaterally revising the Application." In August 2019, Judge Hollander ruled in Judicial Watch’s favor in the same case, ordering the State of Maryland to produce voter list data for Montgomery County. Judicial Watch is the national leader in enforcing the National Voters Registration Act. (Judicial Watch link)  8 AM HOUR 8-A -- 8:05 AM - CHRIS CUOMO AND HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE: Flashback: CNN’s Cuomo Mocks Trump Over Hydroxychloroquine — A Version Of It Was Included In His Own COVID-19 Treatment. CNN anchor Chris Cuomo mocked President Donald Trump on Monday for announcing that he had been taking anti-malarial drugs as a preventative treatment for coronavirus even though he had also used a version of the drug in his own COVID-19 treatment regimen. In a late Monday tweet after Trump’s announcement, Cuomo responded to a video of Florida police breaking up a block party by saying “No worries. They can just take some chloroquine.” Cuomo also said in the opening of Monday’s Cuomo Prime Time that “the president knows that Hydroxychloroquine is not supported by science. He knows it has been flagged by people in his own administration” and called it a distraction from “his lack of a plan or real solutions.” Cuomo had been using a version of the anti-malarial drug in his own treatment for coronavirus, according to posts about his treatment protocol written by his wife, Cristina, in her wellness magazine “The Purist.” (Daily Caller link) Kayleigh McEnany Rips CNN’s Chris Cuomo For Taking ‘Less Safe Version’ Of Hydroxychloroquine. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called out CNN anchor Chris Cuomo Wednesday for mocking President Donald Trump for taking hydroxychloroquine after Cuomo took a less safe version of the drug for his coronavirus treatment. “You had Chris Cuomo saying the president knows that hydroxychloroquine is not supported by science, he knows it has been flagged by his own people and he’s using it,” McEnany said at Wednesday’s White House press briefing. “Cuomo mocked the president for this” but “it turns out that Chris Cuomo took a less safe version of it called quinine, which the FDA removed from the market in 2006 because it had serious side effects, including death. So really interesting to have that criticism of the president.” ( Daily Caller link) From Chris Cuomo's wife's blog:  I enlisted Dr. Linda Lancaster, who put my husband on a path of natural remedies to strengthen his immune system—and now mine–and it’s working for us. (Blog link)  CRAZY LECTURE FROM the "Doctor" (Dr. Linda Lancaster) that Chris Cuomo's wife was getting coronavirus treatment advice from (that included bathing in bleach...) LAST NIGHT: Chris Cuomo teases brother Andrew Cuomo with giant test swab. Chris Cuomo teases brother Andrew with a prop of a giant test swab. CNN's Chris Cuomo jokes with his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, about the size of his nose. On May 17, the governor was tested for Covid-19 on live television to encourage others to get tested. CNN's Chris Cuomo does prop comedy with NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo, fails to ask about nursing-home controversy.CNN anchor Chris Cuomo again did not address the growing nursing-home controversy in his latest interview with his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and instead performed some prop comedy on Wednesday night. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, recently reversed a March 25 order that forced nursing homes to accept patients who tested positive for coronavirus, despite testing deficiencies for both residents and staff. Cuomo signed an executive order on May 11 stopping hospitals from sending infected patients back to nursing homes and ramping up testing for staff. 8-B/C  -- FL GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS SLAPS THE MEDIA: Fla. Gov. DeSantis Scorches Media For Dire Florida Predictions: ‘Hell, We’re 8 Weeks Away From That’. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis unloaded on members of the media Wednesday over their extremely grim predictions for his state, saying that the media “waxed poetically for weeks and weeks” about how bad Florida would look. “Our data is available, our data is transparent, in fact Dr. Birx has talked multiple times about how Florida has the absolute best data, so any insinuation otherwise is just typical partisan narrative trying to be spun,” DeSantis said. “And part of the reason is because you got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York: wait two weeks Florida’s going to be next, just like Italy, wait two weeks.” “Well hell, we’re eight weeks away from that, and it hasn’t happened. Not only do we have a lower death rate–well we have way lower deaths generally–we have a lower death rate than the Acela Corridor, DC, everyone up there,” the governor continued. Where Does Ron DeSantis Go to Get His Apology? (By RICH LOWRY/NATIONAL REVIEW) - The Florida governor explains a COVID-19 strategy that has gotten bad press and favorable results. A couple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decided that Governor Ron DeSantis was a public menace who was going to get Floridians killed with his lax response to the coronavirus crisis. In an interview with National Review, DeSantis says he was surprised at “how knee-jerk” the hostile coverage was, but he “also knew that none of these people knew anything about Florida at all, so I didn’t care what they were saying.” The conventional wisdom has begun to change about Florida, as the disaster so widely predicted hasn’t materialized. It’s worth delving into the state’s response — as described by DeSantis and a couple of members of his team — because it is the opposite of the media narrative of a Trump-friendly governor disregarding the facts to pursue a reckless agenda. DeSantis and his team have followed the science closely from the beginning, which is why they forged a nuanced approach, but one that focused like a laser on the most vulnerable population, those in nursing homes. An irony of the national coverage of the coronavirus crisis is that at the same time DeSantis was being made into a villain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being elevated as a hero, even though the DeSantis approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo. Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19-positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle. The media didn’t exactly have their eyes on the ball. “The day that the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th,” DeSantis recalls, “which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach, and it was this big deal. That same day is when we signed the executive order to, one, ban visitation in the nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.” DeSantis is bemused by the obsession with Florida’s beaches. When they opened in Jacksonville, it was a big national story, usually relayed with a dire tone. “Jacksonville has almost no COVID activity outside of a nursing-home context,” he says. “Their hospitalizations are down, ICU down since the beaches opened a month ago. And yet, nobody talks about it. It’s just like, ‘Okay, we just move on to the next target.’” 8-D -- 8:35 AM -- INTERVIEW - SHELLEY LUTHER - formerly jailed Dallas salon owner TX SALON OWNER WENT TO MICHIGAN ON MONDAY TO HELP A BARBER REBELLING AGAINST WHITMER’S LOCKDOWN: Dallas salon owner who was jailed over coronavirus rules travels to Michigan to support defiant barber. A Texas salon owner who was sent to jail for opening her business during the coronavirus outbreak called Michigan's governor a "tyrant" on Monday as she stood next to a barber whose license was suspended for cutting hair.  "Gretchen, the state of Michigan will vote you out," Shelley Luther declared, referring to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Luther traveled to Owosso, a small Michigan town, to express support for Karl Manke. The 77-year-old barber reopened his shop for more than a week before state regulators suspended his license. Luther, the owner of Salon a la Mode in Dallas, was sentenced to a week in jail for flouting public health orders intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus. She was released less than 48 hours later when Gov. Greg Abbott dropped jail as a possible punishment for violations. "Why does your governor think that it's OK to open up for marijuana, liquor sales?" said Luther, whose boyfriend grew up an hour away in Frankenmuth. "Can't you get an abortion? But you cannot get your hair cut. What is wrong? "Stop being a tyrant," Luther said of the governor. "Open up. You don't get this control. We control you. We have the power." Whitmer has defended the business restrictions as an important way to stop the virus. She relented a bit Monday by announcing plans to reopen bars and restaurants Friday in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula, which haven't been hit as hard as the rest of Michigan. (CBS News) ‘Operation Haircut’: Michigan Barbers Defy Lockdown, Offer Haircuts On Capitol Lawn. Anti-lockdown protesters gathered in Lansing on the lawn of the Michigan state capitol Wednesday to get a haircut. With barbershops and salons closed indefinitely due to the state’s coronavirus lockdown, barbers are scheduled to cut hair on the capitol lawn for three hours Wednesday afternoon. The protest, called “operation haircut,” was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, and is the latest example of Michiganders clashing with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has enacted some of the strictest coronavirus restrictions in the nation. The Michigan Department of State Police threatened to issue citations to those giving or receiving haircuts. “All individuals engaging in haircuts are being educated on the law. Those who do not comply will be cited for disorderly conduct,” the department tweeted. (Daily Caller link) LAST WEEK: Michigan Barber Has Licenses Suspended After Defying Shutdown Orders. State officials said Karl Manke’s decision to reopen his shop during the coronavirus pandemic jeopardized public health and safety. A Michigan barber who reopened his shop in defiance of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s orders had his business and professional licenses suspended, the latest step in his escalating battle with the state. The barber, Karl Manke, 77, who has been cutting hair in Owosso, Mich., for almost 60 years, likened Michigan under Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat, to “a police state.” He said he planned to keep cutting hair, despite the suspension of his licenses. “I’m not closing up; I’m not caving in to this,” he said on Wednesday, adding: “I’m not a rabble-rouser and I’m not a scofflaw. I’m a small-town barber. I just want to make my living.” Mr. Manke is just one of the latest business owners to defy orders to keep their doors closed to help slow the spread of the coronavirus. (NY Times link)   ======================================================================= Mornings on the Mall Podcast - 2020-5-21 [00:00:00] 4:59 am - Mornings on the Mall [01:00:16] 6:00 am - Mornings on the Mall [02:00:26] 7:00 am - Mornings on the Mall [03:00:35] 8:00 am - Mornings on the Mall

8:35 AM -- INTERVIEW - SHELLEY LUTHER - formerly jailed Dallas salon owner TX SALON OWNER WENT TO MICHIGAN ON MONDAY TO HELP A BARBER REBELLING AGAINST WHITMER’S LOCKDOWN: Dallas salon owner who was jailed over coronavirus rules travels to Michigan to support defiant barber. A Texas salon owner who was sent to jail for opening her business during the coronavirus outbreak called Michigan's governor a "tyrant" on Monday as she stood next to a barber whose license was suspended for cutting hair.  "Gretchen, the state of Michigan will vote you out," Shelley Luther declared, referring to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Luther traveled to Owosso, a small Michigan town, to express support for Karl Manke. The 77-year-old barber reopened his shop for more than a week before state regulators suspended his license. Luther, the owner of Salon a la Mode in Dallas, was sentenced to a week in jail for flouting public health orders intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus. She was released less than 48 hours later when Gov. Greg Abbott dropped jail as a possible punishment for violations. "Why does your governor think that it's OK to open up for marijuana, liquor sales?" said Luther, whose boyfriend grew up an hour away in Frankenmuth. "Can't you get an abortion? But you cannot get your hair cut. What is wrong? "Stop being a tyrant," Luther said of the governor. "Open up. You don't get this control. We control you. We have the power." Whitmer has defended the business restrictions as an important way to stop the virus. She relented a bit Monday by announcing plans to reopen bars and restaurants Friday in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula, which haven't been hit as hard as the rest of Michigan. (CBS News) ‘Operation Haircut’: Michigan Barbers Defy Lockdown, Offer Haircuts On Capitol Lawn. Anti-lockdown protesters gathered in Lansing on the lawn of the Michigan state capitol Wednesday to get a haircut. With barbershops and salons closed indefinitely due to the state’s coronavirus lockdown, barbers are scheduled to cut hair on the capitol lawn for three hours Wednesday afternoon. The protest, called “operation haircut,” was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, and is the latest example of Michiganders clashing with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has enacted some of the strictest coronavirus restrictions in the nation. The Michigan Department of State Police threatened to issue citations to those giving or receiving haircuts. “All individuals engaging in haircuts are being educated on the law. Those who do not comply will be cited for disorderly conduct,” the department tweeted. (Daily Caller link) LAST WEEK: Michigan Barber Has Licenses Suspended After Defying Shutdown Orders. State officials said Karl Manke’s decision to reopen his shop during the coronavirus pandemic jeopardized public health and safety. A Michigan barber who reopened his shop in defiance of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s orders had his business and professional licenses suspended, the latest step in his escalating battle with the state. The barber, Karl Manke, 77, who has been cutting hair in Owosso, Mich., for almost 60 years, likened Michigan under Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat, to “a police state.” He said he planned to keep cutting hair, despite the suspension of his licenses. “I’m not closing up; I’m not caving in to this,” he said on Wednesday, adding: “I’m not a rabble-rouser and I’m not a scofflaw. I’m a small-town barber. I just want to make my living.” Mr. Manke is just one of the latest business owners to defy orders to keep their doors closed to help slow the spread of the coronavirus. (NY Times link)  

Hashtag 59's Season 3 Podcast is 50 Episodes long and each episode will provide SIX outdoor adventures in each of the US's 50 states. We are doing these episodes in ABC Order of the states and episode twenty-two is Michigan. The goal is to give you ideas and opportunities to experience outdoor adventure anywhere and everywhere in the United States of America. Here's our list for Michigan: 1. Sleeping Bear Dunes + Traverse City: Stretching 35 miles along the northwest coast of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakefront encompasses 50,000 acres of unique “Third Coast” terrain, including the evocative dunes after which the park was named. Traverse City is known for its Cherry Festival, which happens each July, but it’s one of the best small towns in Michigan. Bring your bike and take a ride through the TART trail, stop by one of its many breweries and chow down at Little Fleet. 2. Visit Mackinac Island - the only city that has banned cars. The island’s population of about 500 permanent residents and an additional 14,500 or so seasonal visitors gets around almost exclusively by foot, bicycle, or horse. The entire 3.8 square-mile island is a designated National Historic Landmark and over 80 percent is preserved as Mackinac Island State Park, where visitors can enjoy Mackinac’s natural scenic beauty through over 70 miles of hiking and biking trails. 3. Isle Royale National Park 4. Turnip Rock Kayaking Trip on Lake Huron 5. Visit Copper Harbor Michigan & Fort Wilkins State Park. Population 100! 6. Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary is host to over 200 shipwrecks. Snorkle, scuba drive, or canoe there! Thanks for listening to Season 3 of our podcast featuring all 50 US States and some of each state's unique and hopefully lesser known to you Outdoor Adventures. This episode featured the state of Michigan. Subscribe to our podcast if you enjoy what you hear and if you feel so inclined to leave a review we would be grateful. Check out www.Hashtag59.com for our old podcast seasons, hundreds of blogs, & outdoor events/team outings info.

Solid waste in Michigan landfills increased in 2019. March 15 is the deadline to remove fishing shanties from lakes in the northern Lower Peninsula.

Around 10,000 years ago the last Ice Age giants became extinct, leaving only their remains to let us know they were once here. One of the most commonly found remains belongs to a creature that looked like a hairy elephant, I'm talking of course about the mastodon. These large creatures bones can be found across the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, including in West Michigan were several remains have been uncovered. Join with us as we tell the story of two of these mastodons discoveries. Grand Rapids Public Museum Link https://grpmcollections.org/Detail/objects/183970 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/patrick-horn/support

I'm from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Jason Jonas is from the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. See, back home I would probably call him a troll. It's a little dig we Yoopers throw at people who live below Michigan's Mackinac Bridge.. But not in Arizona, in AZ it's all MI. haha This was a really fun podcast. Jason got to Arizona in a similar way as myself, on the back of creating really high quality video content. He now owns Visionary Creative Studios in Scottsdale, and will make you famous! Follow him on IG: @iamjasonjonas ....... ThoughtSound Project Newsletter: http://bit.ly/thoughtsoundproject This is the secret sauce. ....... Storytelling has easily been the #1 thing that has led to everything good in my life. My career, my family, my desire for more, all of it came on the back of the art of storytelling. But how do we communicate our stories with people in a way that gets them to feel an emotional connection to our story? How do we build community? Click here to get my FREE Perfect Storytelling Formula: bit.ly/perfectstorytellingformula Included in the PSF is the full worksheet that breaks the whole things down and now I added a FREE 40 minute coaching Masterclass that goes over exactly how to use it to achieve absolutely any goal you may have in your life. Grab that free download and I’ll add you to the Email Squad where I send out all my best content, storytelling and marketing tips, and more! It’s basically the dopest Newsletter you’ll ever subscribe to! ……. PS. Now that you’re here, make sure to him me on social media! Here are the best places to get involved in this amazing community we’re building! Instagram: www.instagram.com/holleratjake/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/jsyreini LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/holleratjake/ Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…ct/id1206972959 Don’t forget to join the FREE ThoughtSound Project Secret Society Facebook Group here: www.facebook.com/groups/thoughtso…ctsecretsociety/ . . . . FREE CLICKFUNNELS! Want more sales? More clients? Want to actually sell your stuff? (no matter your product or service! I'm using ClickFunnels for EVERYTHING. I think it's absolutely perfect if you're starting a personal brand, real estate empire, or even selling, well, anything! So I want to give you a free taste of the power of ClickFunnels here: bit.ly/tspclickfunnels ...... As you SHOULD know...I have the best email newsletter of ALL TIME. Want to shoot out your own emails to THOUSANDS of subscribers all at once? Get 50% off Flodesk here: flodesk.com/c/SYREINIFAMILY

The Storm Skiing Podcast #6 | Download this episode on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn,and Pocket Casts | Read the full overview at skiing.substack.com.Who: Stephen Kircher, Boyne Resorts President and CEO Why I interviewed him: Because it’s worth remembering, in our hey-let’s-cash-out-and-sell-grandpa’s-ropetow-to-Vail-or-Alterra moment, that not only are family-owned mountains still a dogged and powerful presence in North American skiing, but one of the big four ski companies is itself family owned. The story of how the Kircher family built and sustained one of the world’s great ski empires over the past seven decades offers sound lessons in resilience, evolution, and the power of continuous, gradual change. There is no reason why a 500-vertical-foot ski hill lodged in the remote North of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula should have spawned a nine-resort, coast-to-coast mountain kingdom, but relentless innovation in chairlift configurations, snowmaking technology, grooming, and basic business operations did exactly that. With this operating philosophy, Boyne has weathered every financial crash, snow drought, on-mountain fad, and swing in consumer tastes for more than 70 years, and now stands as a low-key driver of ski industry innovation, a model of sustainable business in a rough industry, and a load-bearing wall of the Ikon Pass’ 41-resort network. How Boyne did this and continues to do it is a story I wanted to hear.What we talked about: Why Boyne leased a bunch of its mountains and then bought them back last year, in addition to four others; the sense of stewardship Stephen feels in running a business that his father built into a giant; how Boyne flipped the script and became the David that devoured Goliaths; the importance of the humble Gatlinburg Sky Lift – a scenic triple chair crawling up Crockett Mountain in Tennessee – in funding the Kircher’s empire-building; you won’t believe the western mountains Boyne passed on buying when it bought Big Sky in the ‘70s; Everett Kircher as a swashbuckling pioneer-pilot scouting the company’s growth via airborne adventures; how Boyne avoided the mistakes of both American Skiing Company and Intrawest; what they learned from refugees of those companies that now run important parts of Boyne; how Les Otten’s vision teed up key industry developments; the Max Pass; keeping the Max band together when Alterra formed; why there’s no Boyne pass; Ikon growing pains at Big Sky; how Air B&B is scrambling the human and business ecosystems of mountain towns; why Boyne welcomes Vail to the Northeast and how the company has benefitted every single time Vail has devoured a nearby mountain, including Canyons and Whistler; why even rich people hate Vail; how Boyne is, um, blowing everyone away in the snowmaking game; how Boyne eliminated boilerplate in the Midwest and why Stephen thinks they can do the same in the Northeast; add water bars to that endangered species list; how Boyne can get away with waiting until it’s 22 degrees to blow snow in most cases and why they do that; Sunday River versus Killington and the annual race to first in the Northeast; why you may one day see Sugarloaf enter that race; Sunday River’s plans to build a ninth mountain and the resort’s ongoing glading, snowmaking improvements, and lift upgrades; what Boyne did with $460 million; no they won’t buy more resorts, but maybe they’d manage one if the right partner came along; why they built Brackett Basin at Sugarloaf as a giant glade and guess what we might see a T-bar back there one day; why we’ll never see another top-to-bottom gondola on Sugarloaf; what we might see instead; Stephen skis all over the world and you will want to hear where his top five ski days over the past several years have been; Boyne’s decades-long leadership in chairlift innovation; why high-speed quads are on the verge of elimination; what the new high-speed lift standard will be; we’ll see more eight-packs where they make sense; the massive footprint of the Ramcharger 8; Big Sky’s 2025 development plan; the planned replacement of the Big Sky tram and yes it will have a bigger box Things that may be slightly outdated because we recorded this a while ago: Stephen and I talked at the end of August, so the company’s plans to replace Loon’s Kancamagus detachable quad with the continent’s second eight-seater had not yet become public. When I asked him if Ramcharger 8 was a one-off or if we can expect more of these, he said we could, but did not specify where, which is understandable because these things can be held up for any number of permitting or contract reasons. Question I wish I’d asked: So many. I had a whole line of questioning about Loon, and we never touched it. We could have spent another hour each on Sunday River or Sugarloaf or Big Sky and gotten into the specifics of the lift upgrades and terrain expansions he touched on. I really wanted to ask about the now-dead Wasatch Interconnect and Boyne’s part in that negotiation via Brighton. Boyne had just days before our interview announced a broad implementation of RFID after being one of the last notable bastions of my beloved wicket tickets, and we intended to discuss this and just didn’t have time. The Boyne empire is so vast and his knowledge so deep that I could probably interview Stephen for an hour every week for the rest of the season and never run out of things to talk about. But when you can get an hour with a guy like that, you have to pick the most important things and even then the conversation takes unmapped roads and there’s just a lot that has to be left for next time.What I got wrong: I said early on that Boyne didn’t “answer to investors” like Alterra, but clearly the company does have investors, as even a cursory search of its credit history will show. The company also didn’t “buy back” all of the mountains that it had been leasing from Oz Real Estate last year – it had owned some of them previously and purchased four of them for the first time. I also said that KSL and Intrawest “merged” to form Alterra, but KSL and Henry Crown, which owns Aspen, actually jointly purchased Intrawest and, after buying Mammoth and Deer Valley, formed Alterra, which both companies jointly own (this is not the first time I’ve flubbed this, and the convoluted and many-layered ownership structure is getting annoying enough to talk about that I wish the company would just go public so I can stop having to research this every time I mention it). Also I don’t know where I read that another Sugarloaf gondola was imminent, but Stephen made it clear that this was never going to happen.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview: Because the more its larger cousins eat the ski world, the more important it will be to have Boyne as a relatively impervious counterweight that can keep Alterra honest. I don’t know if Alterra needs Boyne more or if it’s the other way around, but one has lasted a whole hell of a long time without the other, and if I’m making last-man-standing bets among the big four of Powdr, Vail, Alterra, and Boyne, I’m choosing Boyne, and I don’t have to think very hard about it. Plus they will keep pushing technology and terrain expansion and every other part of the skier experience in a way that will force their peers to do the same, and that’s good for all of us that love this sport.Why you should go there: Because if you like rad mountains, they have them. Sunday River and Sugarloaf are not only the two best mountains in Maine, they are inarguably top 10 in the region. The somewhat awkwardly named Summit at Snoqualmie in Washington State is actually a cobbled together collective of four separate ski areas, one of which is the unquestionably rad Alpental. Cypress provides a nice, less frantic alternative to Whistler. Boyne Mountain and Highlands are two of the best kept and most diverse mountains in Michigan, and probably the top two if you remove Mt. Bohemia, which is sort of a freak occurrence in the state, like those videos of Kyrie Irving decked out as 70-year-old Uncle Drew and dunking on playground bozos. And of course Big Sky is one of those reasons you keep skiing after you wear out the local nub and the mountains all around you start to look small and you daydream about the West and make lists during work meetings of places you must visit and honestly it’s one of the only places that won’t get you laughed off of the internet when it’s used to fill in the blank in this question, “So, I’m thinking about a trip to Jackson Hole or __________* and I’m wondering which you’d recommend?”* Examples of mob-acceptable alternatives to Big Sky include but are not limited to Squaw Valley, Snowbird, or Whistler. Examples of mountains that will invite howling ridicule include Park City, Heavenly, or Keystone - all fine mountains (and I’m not picking on Vail), but not in the League of Radness with Jackson Hole. Don’t get mad - I didn’t make these rules. I’m just telling you what they are.The Storm Skiing Podcast is on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Pocket Casts. The Storm Skiing Journal publishes podcasts and other editorial content throughout the ski season. To receive new posts as soon as they   are published, sign up for The Storm Skiing Journal Newsletter at skiing.substack.com. Follow The Storm Skiing Journal on Facebook and Twitter.Check out previous podcasts: Killington GM Mike Solimano | Plattekill owners Danielle and Laszlo Vajtay| New England Lost Ski Areas Project Founder Jeremy Davis | Magic Mountain President Geoff Hatheway | Lift Blog Founder Peter Landsman Get on the email list at www.stormskiing.com