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Friday: Outdoors

Outdoors North

I recall the small, dilapidated shack standing broken and falling apart there alongside the corroded railroad tracks. The beat-up structure was made of splintered wood and rusty nails, and had at one time served the railroad as a place to store things used in track maintenance. Between the rails, grass had grown up amid the bedding and the railroad ties where it dried in the summer sunshine. It was a warm day, and I was happy to sit down and “take a five” as my dad used to say. I began a reverie which brought my mind back through the old trains we’d see as kids, smiling ...

New research offers hope in the war against the emerald ash borer

MARQUETTE — Every fall for years, Deborah McCullough and her husband fished salmon from Western Michigan’s Betsie River. “It’s a little river, and it was shaded, and you knew there was going to be big salmon in the deep spot over there under the shade,” she said. But all that ...

Outdoors North

It was in the very early morning hours when I slipped outside the back door to the yard to look at the “blood moon,” a full lunar eclipse which casts the moon’s face in a rusty red tint. Just a couple steps out there, I was disappointed to see the moon shrouded in a thick white woolen sock’s worth of clouds. It was only visible in an opaque fashion. Clearly, this was not the grand event I had hoped for with a big, fiery blood moon shining above my head in the night sky, big and bright. I could see that the lunar eclipse had begun with a dark shadow covering the bottom ...

EGLE to focus on resource protection

LANSING — Lead line replacement, cleaning up contamination, increasing government transparency, and strengthening the state’s energy infrastructure are a few of the priorities represented in Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget. The Michigan Department of ...

Outdoors North

The night was strange with wild winds swirling and twirling. I stood out there with rain falling on me. There was still more than three feet of snow on the ground. From behind the ghost-like clouds that were gliding around the heavens, I could see the shine of the moon trying to break through, to shimmer, to be seen. Seemingly, if the moon could only show its pock-marked face, the falling and wind-swept rain — the obvious unseasonable interloper here — would stop. If only. The paper birch trees seemed like they were melting, retracting with the cold rain spattering down ...

Outdoors North: The soothing waves of relative silence

“They said, ‘What’s up is down.’ They said, “What isn’t, is.’ They put ideas in his head that he thought were his,” – Bob Dylan I’m walking down a snow-covered two-track road with the gray-blue skies overhead catching my eye as the sunlight peeks through briefly and touches down across the forested landscape. The ice glazed over the bare branches on the trees begins to glisten and shimmer in the sunlight. The air is cool and refreshing as I take deep breaths and keep walking. I’ve been out here for a while now. I passed an ice- and snow-covered beaver pond, ...