Leelanau.com Blog
leelanau county news • traverse city news • michigan news

Ken Scott has produced this cool time-lapse video of the re-lighting of the South Manitou Island Lighthouse (complete with a soundtrack from mobygratis). Read more about this from the Re-Light the Lighthouse page and from Leelanau.com and thanks to Jim Stamm for pointing it out to me!

Oswegatchi by John Clement Howe

John adds some nice detail about Oswegatchi:

Oswegatchi, also known as the D.H. Day Farm, has long been a prominent landmark of what is now the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Oswegatchi? To read about D.H.Day and why he gave the farm this name visit these links from the National Park service: www.nps.gov/slbe/planyourvisit/dhdayfarm.htm
www.nps.gov/slbe/historyculture/dkhday.htm

News from the Week

Stories from the week included a look at a neat new blog called Northern Michigan Foodies that seeks to highlight our great local food & drink, a feature on the role of the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation in Leelanau County and the latest national mention of Leelanau, this one from MSNBC.com's fall color guide.

The Week's Weather

Last weekend and the early part of this week was simply amazing - sunny & temperatures in the 80s. Then things went south ... or north I guess into the 40s. Somewhere in there we missed that beautiful 60s to low 70s thing.

October 4, 2007: Sunny & upper 70s (78Ëš/46Ëš)
October 5, 2007: Sunny & 80s (84Ëš/57Ëš) Tied record high!
October 6, 2007: Partly sunny, some rain & upper 80s (87Ëš/66Ëš) Record high!
October 7, 2007: Mostly sunny & upper 80s (88Ëš/66Ëš) Another record high!!
October 8, 2007: Mostly sunny & upper 80s (88Ëš/64Ëš) Yet another record high!!!
October 9, 2007: Mostly cloudy, rain & 60s (71Ëš/46Ëš)
October 10, 2007: Wind, rain & upper 40s (53Ëš/44Ëš)

Click for the Leelanau news archive from October 2006!

With all the events and otters and what-not we almost missed this article on Leelanau Communications' Jeremy Steck in the Enterprise.

Read Web designer appreciates working in his home county.

You might also enjoy checking out Jeremy's awesome Leelanau & Michigan sports blog:

I ran into Sean Wanroy the other day, and he wondered if I'd checked out The Cove's new Fishtown webcam.

When I got a chance to check it out, I was amazed at how cool it was, with pre-set views including Fishtown, the breakwall, the dam, up river towards the Merc, north Lake Street, Leland's champion cottonwood and even a thermometer!

What's makes it even cooler is that you take control and zoom and pan the camera to look at what you want.

Great addition to the area net by the Cove!

After what I think we can all agree was "entirely too long" designer Fred DeMarco and the staff of Leelanau.com has unveiled a new design for the Leelanau.com home page.

If you want to look back through the years to see where we've been and what we've done, check out the Internet Archive's Leelanau.com section. They have most of our 12 year career, from "The Black Period" of '96, through a brief flirtation with red and the "Putting Stuff in Cut-out Boxes" fad, to the dawn of the Blue Age (also known as "Remember when Sugar Loaf was a ski hill and not a county embarassment?") right on past the Days when Things Looked the Same but there were Less of Them to What Could Have Been Yesterday - it's all there.

If you want to look forward, stay tuned because we've got a whole bunch more that we will be rolling out before the summer is over!

Item #727 in the Shameless Self Promotion Files features Leelanau Communication's Andy McFarlane talking about Leelanau.com, Absolute Michigan and building community via the internet on Peter Payette's Pointes North on Interlochen Public Radio.

Listen to The Internet Up North with Keith Schneider from the Michigan Land Use Institute & Andy talking about the web and public interest. Also features Leelanau vintner Don Coe discussing continuing problems securing seasonal labor in Michigan.

You may also want to check out Keith's blog modeshift.org, Absolute Michigan and the IPR Blog for more about issues discussed.

From the "It's our horn, and we're going to blow it" category comes news that the web site for the Inland Seas Education Association has been selected as the Great Lakes Information Network's March 2007 Site of the Month. I'll let them tell it:

The Great Lakes Information Network (GLIN) announced today that the Inland Seas Education Website, schoolship.org has been selected Internet "Site of the Month," citing the excellence of the Inland Seas website developed in association with Leelanau Communications of Leland, Michigan (that's us!). Recently redesigned from the ground up, the Inland Seas website contains complete information and visual support about the organizations’ on-board educational programs, the activities of the Inland Seas Education Center, news and the ISEA events schedule, information for teachers, volunteers and donors. Much of the site is interactive and includes live pictures from the ISEA webcam on the waterfront in Suttons Bay. A variety of other new features have brought ISEA’s website to the attention of GLIN.

Here's a link to Great Lakes Information Network Honors Inland Seas (so you'll know I'm not making it up). I'm pretty happy about this and have to thank everyone involved, especially the great crew at Inland Seas for letting us work on this very cool project for Leelanu's "floating classroom"!

I would like to apologize for missing a few days of news and the fact that our newsletter has been late. We have been spending some time on learning how to do some new and (in my opinion at least) exciting things.
One of these was unveiled today over on Absolute Michigan. It is an audio slideshow from this weekend's 2007 Grand Rapids Auto Show and my hope is that we can start doing features like this for the Leelanau area.

If you have any comments, I'd love to hear them!

Photo credit: DeVos Place Lobby by C.A. Carrigan.

Update! The Leland Champion Tree group is seeking donations to help with the cost of professional analysis of the tree!

The Traverse City Record-Eagle reports that the Leelanau County Road Commissioners voted unanimously to rescind a motion calling for the huge white poplar to be taken down in January.

Leland resident Jim Carpenter said the preservation group hired three experts to examine the tree and will present written results to the road commission before the end of January. He said members will accept the results of those independent studies, even if they say the tree should come down.

Read Trees life, limbs spared in the Record-Eagle.

Photo credit: Champion by Andrew McFarlane.

For a long time, Leelanau.com maintained a Northern Lights Log whereby folks could let others know when the aurora borealis is out. We are happy to announce the creation of the all-new Michigan Northern Lights Log on Absolute Michigan.

You can head over and subscribe via RSS or email to get updates. There's also some links to other photos from Michigan and other places around the Great Lakes!