North Shore Morning

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has hundreds of miles of beautiful beaches. Seemingly pristine and still very wild, the North Shore of Lake Michigan is a wilderness destination. But in 2007 George Desort, a filmmaker and photographer, stumbled upon a cataclysmic event. He saw something you’d never expect to see in such a beautiful place.

This is the full report on the bird & fish die-offs in the lower Great Lakes.

Joe Paulik has been writing music since he was 12. He moved to Cook County in 1982 when he was 20 years old and began performing in the area a few years later. He recently performed in Grand Marais with his partner in life and song Jessie Nicholson and multi-instrumentalist Al Oikari. Cathy Quinn was there and brings us this edition of the Local Music Project.

The second annual Birch Grove Foundation boot hockey tournament will be held at Birch Grove School in Tofte on Friday, Feb. 17 starting at 4:30. This event was a big hit last winter and is back by popular demand. The teams are filled for this year, but if you stop by to a spectator there will be a lot of laughter, followed by a bonfire and pizza available for purchase.

Patty Nordahl, Director of the Birch Grove Foundation, recently won a prestigious award from the Minnesota Department of Human Services. DHS Commissioner Lucinda Jesson honored professionals and organizations from across the state on January 20th, citing their outstanding contributions to human services program clients. Eleven individuals and organizations were recipients of the DHS Commissioner’s Circle of Excellence Awards. Patty was recognized for her work with Cooperation Station in Grand Marais and her efforts in developing the Parent Aware child care rating system. She also advised DHS on its federal Child Care Development Fund Plan and serves on the Governor’s Early Learning Council. Congratulations Patty!

If you thought you missed Birch Grove Community Lunch this week, you have another chance to make it, because the wrong date was publicized for the event. The Community lunch is held the second Tuesday of the month, which falls on February 14th. So mark your calendars and drop by Birch Grove in Tofte for a delicious meal and congenial company.

The Birch Grove Senior Lunch is held the next day, on Wednesday, Feb. 15 and David Abazs from Round River Farms in Finland will there to talk about Community Supported Agriculture and the possibility of having a drop off point in Tofte for his produce next summer. I’ve heard David speak and he is a really interesting guy. Anyone who is a full time farmer in Finland, Minnesota has to be pretty determined.

The next Senior Lunch on February 29th will have an interesting speaker too. Bonnie Brost is a registered dietician with Essentia Health-St. Mary’s Heart and Vascular Center. She’ll be giving her popular presentation titled “Sugar: The Sweet and the Sour.” There will also be free blood pressure and glucose checks before lunch.

Finally, in Birch Grove News this week, the Early Childhood Coalition is having a Fun Day at Birch Grove on Saturday, February 11th from 10 until 1 for families with children under school age and their siblings. There will be skating and gym will be set up with inflatable bouncers and other activities.

As always, you can contact Patty Nordahl at 663-7977 for more information about all the activities at Birch Grove.

The North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum in Tofte has scheduled another installment of "Voices from the Fishing Life." Tofte native, Dale Tormondsen, Lake Superior commercial fisherman, former Cook County School Superintendent and all around good guy, will be at the North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum in Tofte on Saturday, Feb. 18 at 2PM to talk about his experiences fishing the big lake. Admission is free and all are welcomed. Call 663-7050 or www.commercialfishingmuseum.org for additional info.

It was fun to hear the live coverage of the Cook County High School Invitational cross-country ski meet on WTIP last week. Announcer Buck Benson and color commentator Jonathon Rova did a great job. I usually volunteer at the meet as a starter, but I had to miss it this year due to having a terrible cold. WTIP also broadcast live video of the meet in cooperation with Boreal Access, as they have been doing with some other high school sports events recently. Station manager Deb Benedict says that there will be more live video broadcasts of all sorts of events as broadband internet service becomes available in Cook County over the next couple of years. I find the cross country ski meet to be particularly heartening to watch because you can look across the stadium and see hundreds of happy, physically fit teenagers all enthusiastically participating in a healthy event. It makes the future look bright.

After ducking the various cold viruses that are rampaging through the county, I finally got caught a couple of days ago, which explains why I’m singing bass in the choir today.

It is time once again for the political parties in Minnesota to hold their precinct caucuses. Your election precinct is basically your general neighborhood and is the smallest part of governmental geography. Caucus is just a fancy word for get-together. I imagine that all of Minnesota’s political parties hold caucuses, but here in Cook County, as far as I know, only the Republican and Democratic parties caucus. You can attend whichever caucus you like with no requirement that you have previously voted for, or been a registered member of, the party.

There are two main purposes for caucuses. The first is to introduce resolutions that propose additions or deletions in the party’s platform. The platform is a published document that lists the official position of the party on a wide variety of issues. Frankly, the platform documents are rarely read, but they do serve to stake out the basic philosophy of the party. The platform is used to guide the actions of elected officials, although they are not bound by the positions. Think of it as providing advice from the people to the government at all levels.

The second purpose is to select delegates that will go forward in the process in which candidates run for office under the flag of the party. At the local and county levels, candidates rarely seek party endorsement, but at the state and national level most candidates are endorsed by a party and will cooperate with others elected from their party if they get into office. If you support a certain candidate for a particular office, you can work to get yourself elected as a delegate to a series of meetings known as party conventions, that progress from the local level, through a couple of regional levels, finally to the state convention – and if you’re really ambitious – on to the national convention. Candidates for office organize their supporters to become delegates, because the delegates eventually vote to endorse, or give the party’s official blessing, to a single candidate. The party then provides the endorsed candidate with resources – money, advertising, volunteers and voter databases that help get them elected.

This year, as you know, unless you live under a rock, the Republicans are working to nominate a candidate to stand for the presidency of the United States. At the precinct caucuses, a straw poll will be conducted to see which candidates are most popular with local Republicans. The straw poll is non-binding, but is kind of fun, nonetheless.

On the Democratic side, there is a lively race for a congressional candidate to run against our current congressperson, Republican Representative Chip Cravaack. Three strong candidates are in the running so far and all three will be trying to line up delegates to support their efforts to eventually run against Mr. Cravaack in the general election in November.

When all is said and done, the caucuses are really an important part of our democracy. If you choose to spend the time, you can play an important role in how government works and who represents your interests in the process.

In Cook County, all the precinct caucuses are held in Grand Marais starting at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7. The Democrats meet at the Arrowhead Center for the Arts, which is located next to Cook County High School. The Republicans meet at the log 4-H building next to the Community Center.

Local blogger, Stanley Tull, reports having a bobcat living under his deck at his house near Murmur Creek. It was just a year ago that we had a bobcat under our deck. After a few days of constant barking by our highly agitated terriers, we live-trapped the beautiful cat and relocated it to an even more remote location just for the sake of some peace and quiet. The YouTube video that we posted of the cat’s release went viral in a modest way, mostly because people apparently enjoyed hearing – and making fun of - our strong Minnesota accents. It continues to rack up views although not at the same rate as last winter. Just search “Sawbill bobcat” on YouTube if you want to see it.

It is certainly good news that the wolf population in Minnesota has recovered to the point where it no longer requires special federal protection. I’m distressed, however, to see some legislators already whipping up the old prejudices and fears about wolves for their own political gain. Wolf management is a very complex and intricate issue, with many, many stakeholders and dozens of competing interests. I would urge the legislature to listen carefully to the professional wildlife biologists both within and outside the Department of Natural Resources. Everyone will be better served in the long run by a carefully considered, scientifically-based plan that balances all the interests.

A few weeks ago, my daughter Clare and I found a freshly shed moose antler while grooming the ski trail here at Sawbill. It is always fun to find an antler, but especially now when the moose population is at low ebb. A found antler, especially one that is recently shed, always tells an interesting story. This antler was large, but not huge – suggesting a mature bull moose, but not a giant. The base, where it attached to the head, was still bloody, so it hadn’t been long since the owner lost it. One paddle on the antler had been broken off, but the broken edge had healed over. I can picture this moose crashing headlong into a larger rival and regretting it later. My favorite thing about newly shed antlers is their smell. As the moose wanders through the forest, it drags its antlers through the brush and low tree branches, packing the little crenulations along its leading edge with rich mixture of sap, bark and leaf material. If you scratch and sniff, you get a heady whiff of the entire forest in aggregate. Balsam, mixed with birch, mixed with hazel, mixed with spruce and so on. There is just the faintest undertone of bull moose smell present too, leading Clare and I to hatch a scheme to bottle the smell and market it as men’s cologne. We thought up some names, but they mostly too tasteless to repeat on the radio, so I leave that to your imagination.

Speaking of the ski trail, I don’t want to be seen as gloating, but there is really a pretty decent snow covering up here at the end of the Sawbill Trail. As I speak, there is 17 inches of snow on the ground. Our little 7K cross-country ski trail is in perfect shape. I only mention this because people on the North Shore are amazed to hear that there is so much snow so close by. The Sawbill ski trail isn’t marked in any way, so if you come up, or send someone up to ski, just go to the bitter end of the Sawbill Trail, step over the snow bank and you will see the trail. It’s a loop, so you can go either way and it will bring you back to the same spot 7 kilometers later. It is a narrow trail, groomed for classic style skiing and is suitable for beginners.

There is a fun thing going on every Monday night at Papa Charlie’s nightclub at Lutsen Mountains. Every Monday, at least through the middle of March, they are presenting some of Minnesota’s best songwriters in an intimate, mostly acoustic session between 8 and 10 p.m. The shows so far have been excellent and the acts that are coming are top notch. The crowd is much smaller than the typical weekend crowd and much more local. For the local folks who work in tourism, Monday night is much more of a weekend night than Friday or Saturday and it gets you home early enough to get a good night’s sleep if you do have to work on Tuesday morning.
I’m thrilled to see the announcement of a new cell phone tower at Taconite Harbor in Schroeder. I know some people don’t like them, but cell phones have become an important and useful tool worldwide – and it’s high time we had decent coverage in the West End. I hope the new Tofte tower won’t be far behind.

Winter in the north woods, mellow as it has been, is already a month old and whizzing by fast. The minutes between sunup and sundown are gradually increasing to the point where we are having about nine hours of daylight.

If that isn’t giving us enough notice about things to come, folks are already getting those spring seed and plant catalogs. And, the Farmer’s Almanac says it’s time to start planning spring veggie and flower gardens.

The season we had all hoped for along the Gunflint seems as though it will be a non-entity. Spring is not far from peeking around the corner and we are running out of wintertime opportunities. I know one of those green thumb gals in the area who I can almost bet is getting those seedling pots and grow lights lined up.

The scourge, of a border country winter that hasn’t been, reflects a territory so moisture starved it’s scary. As we went into the cold time, the area was already choking in drought. We always bank on some hefty amounts of frozen moisture to fill things back up come spring but, unless there is a huge turnaround, that’s not going to happen.

I for one am deeply concerned about the danger of more wildfire tragedy when what little snow we do have dries up come April and May. I’ve already heard of some unattended campfires flaring up down in the burn area of Pagami Creek where there is little to no snow. The rest of the Arrowhead wilderness is about to become just as vulnerable.

When the coming season of brown and dry replaces white, one would hope that timely burning bans will not be left to chance by governing agencies. With our ever changing, unpredictable climate, history over the past half dozen years has shown that just when agencies assumed conditions were tolerable for campfires and burning, they really weren’t; the proof is in the forest.

Temps did fall enough to do a little ice enhancement on Gunflint Lake. Hard water improvements came in the nick of time for our trout opener. My friend down the road indicates that the thickness ranges from near a foot right near his shore to about five or six inches 100 yards out to where he set up his trout camp. This says nothing to other areas further out and where there is rushing water beneath.

Come last Saturday morning, a few brave souls screamed by Wildersmith on their snow machines headed for their usual trout hangouts. I must say that they used common sense and stayed quite close to the shoreline. To my knowledge there have been no plops through the ice around here. By the way, what few catching reports I’ve heard indicate the action is slow to moderate depending upon the locale and possibly skill.

Molly Hoffman, our well-known Cook County avian expert and WTIP volunteer, came to my rescue after last week’s scribing on unusual birds coming into the mid-trail area. She shared with me that the whitish redpoll I mentioned was most likely a hoary redpoll. Guess the ghostly looking birds are often seen dining with their true red cousins.

The other bird of mention, which I thought was a lady pine grosbeak, was in fact an immature male pine grosbeak. Guess the adolescent males can have the bright yellow-red plumage that gives them a bright feathering appearance, somewhat parrot-like. As they mature, their orangeish quills eventually give way to the brilliant rosy pink to which we are accustomed.

The pack is still in our neighborhood as they practiced their winter song for the trout fishing neighbors last Saturday night. Then come morning the Smiths did some tracking of a threesome that came out onto Mile O Pine. The trio was side by side and went further than we eventually cared to follow--what an adventure. One of the three had imprints in the snow larger that the palm of my hand.

On MLK day I got word from my ice fishing friend that a huge wolf was observed coming out of the woods along our Wildersmith shore. Trudging icebound to the northeast, I suppose it was on survey detail for another venison dinner.

It seems tragic that these marvelous warriors of our wilderness are going to be put in peril once again at the hands of the trap ‘em/shoot ‘em up human race as they come off endangered species listing.

We supposedly civilized folk just can’t leave the many aspects of our natural world well enough alone. One would think that the people of Minnesota would know better than to let a hunting season happen for this revered historical component of our natural resources.

Keep on hangin’ on, and savor a peaceful forest moment.

Airdate: January 20, 2012

Photo courtesy of Omar Runolfsson via Flickr.

Invasive species are one of the biggest issues facing Lake Superior. The most important invasive species to the lake to date is the sea lamprey. It changed everything. It wiped out the lake trout population in the other Great Lakes, and came close to doing the same in Lake Superior. In this edition of the Lake Superior Project, we take a closer look at this invader, and the impact that it had on the lake and the people who live around it.

This project is funded in part by the Coastal Zone Management Act, by NOAA’s Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management, in cooperation with Minnesota’s Lake Superior Coastal Program.

Sounds by Peter Elvin.

In this edition of Anishinaabe Way, photographer Travis Novitsky discusses his love of photography,  his influences, his favorite subjects, the process he uses to achieve his amazing results, and the role photography plays in his life on the Grand Portage reservation in far northern Minnesota.
 

Minneapolis based hip-hop artist Dessa wrapped up a nation-wide tour at Papa Charlie's in Lutsen on Jan. 14. Chris Hoglund had a chance to visit with Dessa backstage before her show. Chris is a Grand Marais native who is currently a senior at the Perpich Center for the Arts Education in Golden Valley.

Check out this sweet slideshow shot by Stephan Hoglund set to Dessa's "Mineshaft". 

Last year, I really only made one New Year’s resolution. I resolved to throw out less food. Sure, plenty of petrified limes and lettuce slime escaped my best intentions, but by performing “fridge triage” on a regular basis, I was able to save plenty of food and associated food dollars from going the way of the compost bucket.

It seemed like a resolution worthy of carrying into this New Year too. In fact, one of the easiest ways to lead a greener life is to keep things from turning green in the fridge. But like most New Year’s resolutions, my resolve faced stiff adversity as I rounded the corner into 2012.

The holiday season gives us an excuse to buy all sorts of food items we would never buy any other time of the year. By early January, some unusual items had set up residence in my fridge…namely, a package of lefse and a paper-wrapped portion of smoked fish.

You won’t find lefse or smoked fish in my fridge on a regular basis because I don’t like them. While I’m sure both items were enjoyed by others during the holidays, now I was left with the leftovers. I didn’t want to throw them away, but I knew for a fact I wasn’t going to nosh on either item as a snack anytime soon. What could I do with them to make them appetizing enough to get them eaten?

Meanwhile, we’d also reached the point in the winter where I start to wonder what exactly I’m going to do with those canned goods I put up back when the days were long and the sun was warm. Sure, the pickled jalapenos sounded like a good idea in August when we were up to our ears with the spicy peppers, but I don’t have any recipes that actually call for pickled jalapenos. My mind rambled as I turned over the half pint can of jalapenos in my palm. You know what lefse looks a lot like, I thought: tortillas.

Bam. Smoked fish lefse enchiladas were born.

It was sacrilege, I knew. Most persons of Scandinavian descent who I know think ketchup is spicy. And here I was, about to take two profoundly Scandinavian items south of the border. I’d figured I’d take the fish, shred it and sauté it up with some onions, jalapenos, cumin, and chili powder, then roll the mixture up in the lefse. A white sauce, what I suppose people who aren’t Midwestern might call a Béchamel, would hold it all together. After it came out of the oven, I’d smother it with chopped tomatoes and avocados and a liberal dose of salsa verde.

As I chopped, sauteed, and whisked, things smelled promising. Still, I fretted after I popped the entrée in the oven. I wondered what I could whip up quickly for dinner if the dish turned out to be absolutely awful. On the first bite, we found a smoky, creamy concoction. The lefse “tortillas” made for a fluffy, subtle binder. It was actually really good. I relaxed as Andy went back for seconds. The enchiladas received the true mark of culinary success at our house the next morning when the leftovers were all eaten for breakfast.

Whatever your own New Year’s resolutions are this year, may you find them inspiring and rewarding. More importantly, may they make you thankful for the things you already have and allow you to see things in a new light.

Airdate: January 18, 2012

Photo courtesy of Kelly Bailey via Flickr.