Sleeping Bear Dunes historians believe the schooner fragment, estimated to be about 40-feet long and peppered with twisted metals spikes, is part of the ship’s bilge keelsons, which the Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archeology says were long timbers running most of the ship’s length, strengthening the keel.
It’s one of several fragments of the wreck to wash ashore over the years, said Laura Quackenbush, museum technician with park service. In fact, wreck fragments from the Jennie and Annie, as well as other ships which foundered off the dunes coastline, wash ashore once or twice a year.
“It’s a very dynamic shoreline,” she said. “It’s a common occurrence around there.”

Over the weekend photographer Ken Scott made the hike and posted the video below of the Jennie and Annie and also of the other (as yet nameless) wreck that we reported on last year.

Photo credit: Sleeping Bear Point Wreck by Mark Lindsay

It all began, according to the brochure:

"In 1935 Louis C. Warnes equipped a car with special motor and giant tires for personal pleasure trips into the vast sand lands near his home. Friends begged him to take passengers. Soon he added other cars and trained drivers...."

Dune Rides by creed_400

They started the rides with a used 1934 Ford that took four people at a time to the crest of the dunes and back for 25 cents each. By the time the rides ended in 1978, there were 13 dunes wagons each carrying 14 passengers on a 12 mile, 35 minute excursion.

I haven't been able to find anything specifically on the "Dunesmobiles" themselves, but to the left is a photo of a Travelalls made by International Harvester. The book A Nationalized Lakeshore by Theodore J. Karamanski notes that Warnes, backed by his new ten-year concession agreement, purchased ten brand-new Oldsmobile 88 in 1956. They used balloon tires and the two that I've seen around Leelanau are both Olds 88s.

Sleeping Bear Dunesmobile by Seeking Michigan

Today, the trucks have been pressed into service by Manitou Island Transit and far fewer people get back into the "real" dunes. The result is certainly best for the health of the dunes, but it also means that for folks who won't journey more than a few hundred feet from their cars, memories of the Sleeping Bear Dunes will consist of a few runs up and down the dune climb.

There's a couple of photos from the brochure below and you can see some more (with a few from the dune rides at Silver Lake Dunes thrown in) from Don Harrison's postcards of the dunesmobiles. The photo above is Sleeping Bear Dunesmobile by Seeking Michigan (click to see it bigger!)

Sleeping Bear Dunesmobile Headquarters by UpNorth Memories

The Bear -- which has since disappeared

A "Dunesmobile" on the specially constructed gravel road

This photo of the Northern Lights over Fishtown was taken by Ken Scott in October of 2011. Today on Absolute Michigan we posted a feature about a solar flare that may bring northern lights to Leelanau's skies tonight (and potentially over the next few days):

NASA's Space Weather site is the place to go for Aurora Borealis forecasting as they help make sense of the data the space agency receives about solar flares and their impact on earth's atmosphere. Yesterday they gave Northern Lights watchers a lot of hope with this news:

This morning, Jan. 23rd around 0359 UT, big sunspot 1402 erupted, producing a long-duration M9-class solar flare. The explosion's M9-ranking puts it on the threshold of being an X-flare, the most powerful kind. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the flare's extreme ultraviolet flash (shown right or in short movie right here)

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft detected a CME rapidly emerging from the blast site: movie. Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab say the leading edge of the CME will reach Earth on Jan. 24 at 14:18UT (+/- 7 hours).

That means it's hitting the Earth 11 AM - 6 PM EST, but this level of intensity makes the Northern Lights a real possibility for the next couple of days so definitely LOOK UP tonight and tomorrow if there's any break in the clouds! If the northern lights hit, our Northern Lights Log will light up with reports. You can also learn a lot more about the Northern Lights at Michigan in Pictures and also at aurora borealis on Leelanau.com!

This week's photo was taken by Mark Miller at Empire Beach. Last week we featured another of his photos from this spot - what a difference a few days and a Lake Effect storm can make!

Check it out big as the beach and compare it with last week's photo in Mark's slideshow.

The annual Cedar Winterfest happens from 1-3 PM at the Snowmobile Club 2 miles north of Cedar on Schomberg Rd.

You're invited to bring your winter sleds, tobaggans, saucers, cross country skis and snowshoes for a Sunday afternoon of fun. They'll have a bonfire to warm you on the outside and hot chocolate and snacks to warm your tummy. Free and open to the public!

The fifth annual Roy Taghon Memorial Snowmobile Ride begins at 1 p.m., Sun., Jan. 22, at the Empire Airport and continues to the Maple City Fitness Center, behind Kerby’s Bar and Grill, 172 W. Burdickville Road, Maple City. Whether riding on a sled or driving, all are welcome to participate in the fun-filled afternoon. Hot dogs and chili will be served at 2:30. Suggested donation is $7 per adult, $4 per child.

All proceeds benefit the Roy Taghon Music Scholarship Fund which provides an annual music scholarship for Glen Lake High School students. Roy lived in Empire and was an avid snowmobiler and church organist for more than 30 years. For information, call (231) 326-5519.

This week's photo was taken by Mark Miller at Empire Beach. See more of his great work in his slideshow.

Speaking of wolves and January, last month the US Fish & Wildlife Service removed wolves in the western Great Lakes region from the federal endangered species list. Wolves are now managed by states in the region and the ruling takes effect on Friday, January, 2012. Read the release from the Michigan DNR about wolf de-listing.

Photo credit: Moon over Lake Leelanau by Missy Luick (a February full moon...)

The Lake in Winter
by Jerry Dennis

(January, Cathead Point, near the tip of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula)

It changes every day, every hour. It is a thousand lakes, changing faces with every shift in wind and light - flurried by offshore wind, whitecapped in squalls, colored flannel gray or pearl-white or stormy black beneath the winter clouds, a dozen blues when the sky is blue.

There’s a contemporary Japanese poet who writes a diary on a slab of stone instead of paper, with water instead of ink. He writes a word, and a moment later it evaporates. This, he suggests, is the true record of a life.

We go to the shore in search of elemental things. Probably it is just coincidence that the elemental things we find there - sand, sun, wind, and waves - correspond exactly to the four elements of the ancient Greeks and Hindus: earth, fire, air, and water. More to the point is that we need elemental things to help us restore our primitive senses to working condition. We need periodically to look, listen, scent, taste, and feel our way through the world, if only for the relief of not having to think our way through. Everyone understands that eliminating superfluities can help us discover what is important in our lives.

That’s not an easy task. Time coats us in natural increase, accruing layers as if we were snowballs rolling down a hill. Jobs, families, friends, houses, cars, dogs, our health – just maintaining it all is full-time work. Add the bulging files of information, the gunnysacks of mistakes and the duffels of misjudgments and the barrow-loads of memories, habits, regrets, opinions, prejudices, principles, laws, and codes collected in a lifetime and you can see the problem. We carry as much as we can, and the rest we stack around us until all our routes to the outside are blocked. Even when we find our way out we’re wearing too many layers of tuxedoes and zoot suits and cardigans, Icelandic woolens, parkas, longjohns, thermal socks, etc. We’re strong but we grow weary of lugging that Collyer-brothers’ accumulation everywhere we go. We bend beneath the load, our backs about to break, groaning as we push our heaped-up grocery carts through the streets.

It’s too much. Now and then we need to strip down to the naked flame at our core. Most of what we carry is baggage anyway - just adornment and vanity, ballast and deadweight. It’s the crap the pioneers threw out along the Oregon Trail.

After lunch I walked to the crest of the dune and looked out at the lake. Even from that small elevation, maybe fifty feet, the water’s clarity was startling. From a boat, on a day like this, with the sun overhead, you can lean over the side and see boulders on the bottom thirty feet down. The pale shallows stepped into blue depths. The offshore sandbars were there, a hundred yards apart, each deeper than the one before, with bands of increasingly darker blue between them. Beyond the last bar a steep drop-off into very deep water turned the lake midnight blue.

Lake Michigan. My lake, I often think, because I grew up near it and because many in my family settled along its shores. So much water, in a body so large they say that the Netherlands could fit inside, with enough room left over for several New England states. It is the second largest of the Great Lakes in volume, and third, after Superior and Huron, in surface area. It is the only one of the five to be contained entirely within the United States.

Most of the 1,640 miles of shore is sandy. Some of that shore, especially around the southern end, through Indiana and Illinois, is lined with industry. Around the top of the lake in Wisconsin and Michigan are scattered limestone bluffs and rocky strands. But most of the rest is blond sand beaches that are among the loveliest in North America. Wind, waves, and ice have shoved that sand into the most extensive network of freshwater dunes on the planet. They reach their apogee about thirty miles south of Cathead Point at Sleeping Bear Dunes, the crowning feature of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, but they extend nearly unbroken for 300 miles along the eastern and southern shores of the lake, from northern Michigan nearly to Chicago. A few scattered dunes are found also along the Wisconsin shore and at the top of the lake, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but they lack the dimensions of those that face the prevailing winds.

A friend who lives part of every year in the West once told me that Lake Michigan plays the same role in the Midwest that the mountains do in Montana. That’s true for all five lakes. Like the Rockies, you can see them from miles away, forming a backdrop that is also a felt presence, always there, looming in our lives. They are depositories of geological and historical power that shape the land and the culture to themselves. We orient to them and are drawn to them and take for granted that their presence and the weather they create will affect our travels and alter our daily plans.

The lakes have always been the most prominent shaper of the character or “spirit” of the Great Lakes region. The stronger the spirit of a place, the farther it resonates beyond its borders. Alaska, Texas, Vermont, and Maine all have it in abundance. So do large geographical regions such as Appalachia, the Canadian Maritimes, and the Cajun country of Louisiana. A mythological portrait of a place needs to be only approximately accurate to give outsiders an idea of what it is like, or enough of an idea, at least, to inspire them to take some interest in it. That might explain in part why people who have never visited the Everglades or the Arctic Wildlife Refuge are willing to write letters to congressmen and donate money to protect them.

The Great Lakes have not had that advantage. Their mythology is not clearly defined. It was once very clear, a living mythology, inhabited by people, wolf, moose, and bear, but the stories that passed around campfires for thousands of years were drowned out by European invaders wielding their own stories of Jesuit martyrs, French voyageurs, Paul Bunyans of the logging camps, mariners of the inland seas, and up-by-the-bootstraps giants of industry. Most of those stories have now, in turn, lost their power and have not been replaced. Enduring mythologies tend to accrue to dominate features of a landscape. Louisiana has swamps; New England, hardscrabble hills; Montana, big sky. But the Great Lakes are too varied. No representative image fits. The water and dunes and rocks and cities on the shore are lost in a haze of homogeneity. Surely that is why those who have never stood beside the big lakes find it so difficult to imagine them.

Excerpted from The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes, by Jerry Dennis. Used with permission of the author and The University of Michigan Press. Visit Jerry’s website at www.jerrydennis.net. 

This week's photo is Lake Michigan ... from Empire Bluff with a Christmas Eve sunset, from and featuring photographer Ken Scott. See this photo and nearly 300 more in Ken's snow slideshow!

There is no better way to get outside and burn off some of those extra holiday calories than by joining a Park Ranger at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on a guided snowshoe hike every Saturday. Meet at 1 p.m. at the Visitor Center in Empire for these popular weekend afternoon adventures. They take place every Saturday, starting on January 7, 2012 and going through the month of February. Dress in layers, wear waterproof boots, and don’t forget to take your camera along to capture the wonders of winter.

Park Rangers meet interested snowshoers inside the Visitor Center to first provide basic snowshoeing instructions, and then directions to a trailhead or off-trail area pre-selected by the Park Ranger. If you do not have your own snowshoes, the National Park Service will loan you a pair free of charge (they are limited to 30 participants so email or call them to pre-register). While exploring outside, the Park Ranger will encourage participants to inquire and learn about winter’s effect on the park’s unique features. Be prepared to be outside until about 3 p.m.

Not only is snowshoeing easy, fun and good exercise, it is also an activity that can be enjoyed by all ages. The Park Ranger-led hikes are mildly strenuous, yet they proceed at a leisurely pace for no more than one and a half miles. This allows visitors an opportunity for discovery, adventure, and to look for signs of wildlife or evidence of ancient glaciers. Some snowshoers simply want to experience and enjoy a winter wonderland, which is what you will find at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

There is no charge for the programs, however, participants need to display the park entrance pass or have an annual pass to join in the fun. Reservations are not required, but are suggested, especially if you wish to borrow snowshoes or are with a group. Please call (231) 326-5134, ext. 328, for details and to make reservations. For more in-depth information about Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, visit www.nps.gov/slbe.