North Shore Morning

North Shore Morning host, Brian Neil talks with Michelle Schroeder about "How to Keep From Doing Stupid 'stuff' on the Trail" or "Backpacking 101".

Michelle is the owner of Backpack The Trails LLC and recently presented at the Midwest Mountaineering Outdoor Expo in Minneapolis.

Michelle will be doing monthly interviews on WTIP's North Shore Morning.

North Shore Morning host, Dennis Waldrop, talks with Lindsey Gau and Carly Puch from the Violence Prevention Center about Mental Health Awareness Month and the intersection of  mental health and sexual violence.

Superior Reviews - Lin Salisbury

Lin Salisbury is a bibliophile and commentator on WTIP.  
In this edition Lin reviews Minnesota author, Allen Eskens' book, “The Shadows We Hide”.
 
Lin also does in-depth interviews with authors.  Her “Superior Reads” feature can be heard on the Fourth-Thursday of each month at 7 pm and again the following Saturday at 6 am.
 

North Shore Morning host, Jana Berka talks with Cook County Community YMCA Branch Executive Director, Emily Marshall for this week's update.

North Shore Morning host, Jana Berka talks with Sawtooth Mountain Clinic's Community Health Specialist, Hartley Acero about this month's Topic of the Month, "Positive Psychology:  The study of what makes life worth living".

Superior National Forest Update – May 2, 2019.

Hi, this is Steve Robertsen, interpretation and education specialist on the Superior National Forest, with the first National Forest Update of May!  We have to take our signs of spring where we find them, because with the recent snowfall, it’s not very spring-y out there.

We’ll deal with that depressing winter stuff first.  As you can imagine, the recent snow, rain, and infamous ‘wintry mix’ has not been kind to our road system.  For the past several editions of this radio spot, we’ve been highlighting soft roads, frost boils, bad shoulders, and icy patches.  All that still applies.  It is not great driving out there.  The driving during our Monday mini-blizzard was some of the worst of the entire season, and while it is better than that now, you still should be extra cautious when driving in the Forest, particularly if you are on roads where you don’t expect other vehicles which could help in an emergency.  Let someone know where you are going and when you plan to return.  Weight limits are still in place, so the one thing you don’t have to deal with are large trucks.

Trails are also in poor condition.  ATV use on state grant-in-aid trails is not allowed during this mud season with good reason.  An ATV can severely damage a trail when the ground is this soft and ruin the riding for everyone else for the rest of the summer.  Please respect restrictions, and also follow your own common sense – just because a trail is officially ‘open’ doesn’t mean it is actually ridable.  Hikers can also damage trails – the Leave No Trace recommendation is that if you come to a wet part of the trail, hike through it.  Skirting the puddles will simply widen the trail, leading to more erosion problems later.

As the snow has left the roadsides, a winter’s worth of litter has appeared.  We’d like to take the time to thank volunteer groups and just individual people who have taken the time to pick up the trash they see.  Overall, the vast majority of people up here in northern Minnesota don’t litter, and if you travel the US, you’ll notice that the Superior is a very clean place.  Thanks for keeping it that way!

We do have a couple of signs of summer coming.  On May 1^st, we entered what we call the quota season for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.  That means that overnight campers in the wilderness will need to have a permit issued to them though one of our offices or at a cooperating business.  There have been a few changes this year, so it is worthwhile to visit our webpage and the reservation system Recreation.gov for more information.  One change has been to the Leave No Trace video, which is required watching for permit holders.  It has been broken into three shorter segments, the first two of which you watch at home before picking up the permit.  This means you can get useful information on planning and preparing for a trip ahead of the day you enter the wilderness…and that you will spend less time in the office when you are actually picking up the permit.  Our new videos came out at the same time as a certain superhero movie, and for a while at least, we were in close competition for box office numbers.  Maybe if we’d only introduced the character ‘Kevlar-tron’ in our videos…

Starting with May 1^st and running through the quota season, our offices are now open seven days a week from 8:00 to 4:30, and are staffed by our own superheroic front desk people.  Not only can they help you with Boundary Waters permits, but they can help with everything else you may want to do on the Forest from hiking to gravel permits, all while simultaneously selling Smokey’s 75^th birthday items and operating the video player.  Now that’s a superpower for you!
In the fire shop, there are a few prescription burns planned, mostly to maintain wildlife openings.  Current weather conditions are not good for burning, but you can expect those burns to happen if we get a few good days.  Check our webpage for announcements of burns, and follow posted traffic signs if you end up driving near a burn in progress.

Until next week, we will hope for better weather and the return of spring to the Superior.  This has been Steve Robertsen with the National Forest Update.
 

Cook County Community YMCA Branch Executive Director, Emily Marshall talks with North Shore Morning Host, Jean Grover about the many events and classes coming up at the Y.

Cook County's Family and Childrens's Service Supervisor, Grace Bushard, talked with WTIP North Shore Morning host, Jane Alexander about Mental Health Awareness Month,  Public Health and Human Services' Open House, and the Advisory Council for Adult and Children's Mental Health.
 

Recent snow along the North Shore may have put sping on a brief hold, but, soon enough springtime weather will be upon us.

WTIP's CJ Heithoff spoke with naturalist Chel Anderson about everything that changes in the spring in this edition of North Woods Naturalist.

NORTHERN SKY  by Deane Morrison
April 27-May 10 2019

Here we are again, moving from April into May, and the winter stars are disappearing in the west. But they’re not all gone yet. Case in point, a little while ago, a friend asked me about a couple of bright stars he had seen in the west around nine thirty the night before. Both were about the same distance above the horizon. So I took a good guess, and went out that night, and sure enough, what had caught his eye was the winter stars Procyon, in Canis Minor, the little dog, and Capella, in Auriga, the charioteer. Right now these two stars are getting ready to set for the season. If you haven’t seen them but you’d like to, go outside as soon as the sky gets dark, and you should see two bright stars not far above the western horizon. Procyon is on the left, Capella on the right. Above and between them are the Gemini twins, Pollux, that’s the brighter twin, and Castor.

This winter I’ve talked about all these stars except Capella. It’s a beautiful star, and when it’s low in the sky, Earth’s atmosphere often acts like a prism and makes it twinkle red and green. From the latitude of Grand Marais, it’s a circumpolar star. That is, it travels in a circle around the Pole Star, Polaris, and never sets, although in summer it gets a little too low to see very well. The stars of the Big and Little Dippers are also circumpolar. If you could follow a circumpolar star all day long, you’d see it complete one circle around Polaris every day. And if you noted its position at the same time every night for a year, you’d see it circle Polaris then, too.

Capella is also a multistar system. It has a close pair of big yellow stars, both a lot brighter than the sun and with about 2.5 times its mass. It also has a pair of little red dwarf stars orbiting the big yellow stars at a distance of about 10,000 times the distance of Earth to the sun.
The name Capella refers to the “little female goat” that the charioteer is carrying. Below Capella you may be able to make out three fainter stars that form a narrow triangle. These are called the Kids.

On May 7, Capella will be part of a string of objects lined up diagonally from lower left to upper right at nightfall, but not much longer afterward. Starting at the lower left end, we have Betelgeuse, in Orion; then a young crescent moon; then Mars, and finally Capella. On the evening of May 9, a heftier crescent moon will be between Procyon and Pollux.

And speaking of evenings, sundown on April 30 marks the beginning of the astronomically based Celtic holiday called Beltane. It was one of four cross-quarter days falling midway between an equinox and a solstice. Beltane marked the end of the dark half of the old Celtic year. The dark half began at Halloween, when all the evil spirits were set loose upon the world to vex humankind for the next six months. And that made sense; winter is the time when hunger, cold and diseases like flu run rampant. But when the end of April rolled around, things changed. At sundown on April 30, the nasty spirits came out for a last fling. Then, at sunrise on May 1, the party was over, and the spirits were again banished until sundown on October 31. The night of April 30 is also called Walpurgis night, but only because May 1 is associated with St. Walpurga, who had nothing whatsoever to do with any of this.