Mackinac Wake

Posted on by farlane

Mackinac Bridge from ferry

Mackinac Wake, photo by Bill Johnson

Bill took this photo in May of 1987 and writes:

We had been out to the island and were returning via ferry when the captain announced a slight detour in our route. There was some kind of a special group aboard and as a treat, our boat went under the Mighty Mac, something they hardly ever do. It was pretty neat. The five mile long bridge is no longer the longest suspension bridge in the world, but to me it’s still the prettiest. I’ve personally seen several other suspension bridges, including the Golden Gate, and I’ll pick the Mac every time.

View his photo background big and see more in his Michigan slideshow.

Lots more of the Mighty Mackinac Bridge on Michigan in Pictures!

Happy 128th Birthday to the Grand Hotel

Posted on by farlane

Grand Hotel at Night

Grand Night, photo by Wade Bryant

Sending out an early Happy 128th Birthday to The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island which opened on July 10, 1887. Here’s some historical highlights about Michigan’s most iconic hotel:

1887 Grand Hotel opens, billed as a summer retreat for vacationers who arrive by lake steamer from Chicago, Erie, Montreal, Detroit, and by rail from across the continent. Rates are $3 to $5 a night.

1890s Grand Hotel’s Front Porch – longest in the world—becomes the principal meeting place for all of Mackinac Island, as well as a promenade for the elderly and a “Flirtation Walk” for island romantics. Grand Hotel Manager James “The Comet” Hayes invites an agent of Edison Phonograph to conduct regular demonstrations of the new invention.

1895 Mark Twain lectures in the Grand Hotel Casino. Admission: $1.

1897 The West Wing is added to the hotel.

Turn of the century – The automobile finds its way onto the island. Grand Hotel supports an island-wide ban. A law is passed, but not strictly enforced until the 1930s.

1919 Hotel rates: $6 a day per person.

1935 A radio salon where patrons can listen to Jack Benny and other popular programs is added.

1947 This Time For Keeps starring Jimmy Durante and Esther Williams is filmed on the island and at Grand Hotel.

1960 Grand Hotel owner W. Stewart Woodfill appoints R.D. (Dan) Musser president of Grand Hotel.

1976 Musser and wife Amelia begin the redesign of the hotel’s interior and exterior with the help of architect Richard Bos and decorator Carleton Varney.

1979 The Mussers purchase Grand Hotel.

1980 Somewhere In Time, filmed at Grand Hotel and starring Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, and Christopher Plummer, is released.

1989 The U.S. Department of Interior designates Grand Hotel a National Historic Landmark.

View Wade’s photo from May of 2010 background bigtacular and see more in his My Favorites slideshow.

More Grand Hotel and more Mackinac Island on Michigan in Pictures!

Yesterday & Today on Mackinac Island

Posted on by farlane

Mainstreet Mackinac Island 1930s

NE Mackinac Mackinaw Island MI 1930s, photo by Don … The UpNorth Memories Guy … Harrison

I think that it’s pretty clear that Mackinac Island, a living museum boasting an intact Colonial era fort along with many exhibition buildings, The Grand Hotel and other historic businesses and NO CARS, is Michigan’s coolest state park. Today (June 11, 2015), Pure Michigan will be presenting Mackinac Island to the world (well, the internet at least) in a whole new way. They explain:

As the first state in the United States to ever conduct a real-time virtual guided tour, Pure Michigan is offering you the opportunity to experience Mackinac Island – virtually! We’re partnering with Georama, a real-time vicarious travel platform, so you can virtually tour the island just by simply logging into michigan.org/live on Thursday, June 11 at 12 noon to 4 pm Eastern. Tom Daldin, host of PBS show Under the Radar, will serve as your travel guide and adventure lead in this digital exploration.

…Begin your journey by taking a ferry ride to Mackinac Island before getting an up-close and personal view of the island.

We’ll take you to downtown Mackinac, home to some of the most lovely shops and art galleries in the state, offering you a chance to peek inside as well as interact with people on the streets to get their thoughts on the island known as America’s fudge capital. We’ll also tour Douds Market, America’s oldest family-owned grocery store for 131 years so you can see some of the store’s specialty items and get a history lesson on the market.

From there we’ll visit Fort Mackinac and round out our journey with a trip to the gloriously-designed Grand Hotel. We’ll give you a new perspective of this landmark and invite you to join us as we sip tea on the Grand’s famous front porch all while surrounded by 2,500 gorgeous geraniums.

Click through for more and tune in!

View the photo background big and see more of Don’s Mackinac Island postcards & photos on Flickr. Be sure to follow him on Facebook as well!

Lilac Island: Mackinac Island’s Lilacs & Lilac Festival

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Mackinac Island Lilacs and Lilac Festival

Fort Mackinac & Lilacs, photo by Steven Blair

The 66th annual Mackinac Island Lilac Festival starts tomorrow and runs through June 14th. It celebrates the Island’s historic varieties of lilacs (many from the Colonial era) and equestrian culture and is one of the Island’s biggest attractions.

Apparently it’s “Lissa Edwards Goes to Mackinac Week” on Michigan in Pictures as I turn again to one of my favorite writers for her take on the Lilac Festival.

Metaphors for islanders and their favorite shrubs are easy pickings. Lilacs are tough as native islanders (or native islanders are hearty as these flowers?). Like their human counterparts, lilacs thrive in the cold Straits of Mackinac winters; neither lilacs nor island folk shrink from sinking their roots into the island’s craggy limestone bedrock. In fact, they crave that acidy terra firma. And last but best, lilacs prefer their soil the way these islanders like their beer: well drained.

When the long, cold winter and cool spring finally ends, Mackinac lilacs show their joy by transforming the island into a fairyland of blossoms. Cotton candy–colored tinkerbelles tempt from behind white picket fences. Big bold creamy Madame Lemoine lilacs strut next to a fluttery pink and white Beauty of Moscow in Ste. Anne’s churchyard. Down at the marina, where voyageurs working the Great Lakes fur trade once pulled their canoes, blue President Lincolns wave next to white Betsy Rosses. A froth that includes double pink Elizabeths and dark purple Monge spills out over the rolling green lawn at Marquette Park. And the gauzy backdrop to them all: the anything-but-bourgeois, lilac-colored common lilac.

The island is home to all 23 lilac species, some 400 varieties and thousands of individual plants. In June—and even into July in the case of late-blooming varieties—these flowers radiate their perfume into the windy Straits, where it melts into the aroma of warm fudge wafting from Main Street’s famous fudge shops and fresh horse apples (cars are banned on Mackinac Island) to create a signature Mackinac Island scent.

Read on for lots more.

View Steven’s photo background bigtacular on the Mackinac Island Lilac Festival’s Facebook and see a bunch more lilac photos from Mackinac Island on his Photography by Blair Facebook.

More lilacs and more Mackinac on Michigan in Pictures.

Clouds of Michigan: Mackinac Bridge Edition

Posted on by farlane

Mackinac Bridge, Michigan by Zack Schindler

Mackinac Bridge, Michigan by Zack Schindler

Zack says that he shot this in B&W with the red filter turned on in the X-E1.

View it big as the sky and see more in his My Other Stuff slideshow.

More black & white photography on Michigan in Pictures.

Bad Ideas in Action

Posted on by farlane

I need to provide a retraction of sorts for this post. While Enbridge Line 5 could carry the same corrosive tar sands of Keystone XL, it’s not a part of the XL network. It still most certainly could all the terrible impacts and remains a really bad idea.  More about Line 5 right here.

enbridge-pipeline-under-straits-of-mackinac

Broken Supports on the Straits Pipeline, photo courtesy National Wildlife Federation video

Here’s what we’re talking about when we talk about piping crude oil sludge under the Straits of Mackinac. It’s absolutely unfathomable to me how a politician could ever use “jobs” and “Keystone XL” in the same sentence except to say “Keystone XL could cost us tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs in the Great Lakes if anything goes wrong.”

Eco Watch writes (in part):

This past July, National Wildlife Federation (NWF) conducted a diving expedition to obtain footage of aging oil pipelines strung across one of the most sensitive locations in the Great Lakes, and possibly the world: the Straits of Mackinac. Footage of these pipelines has never been released to the public until now.

The Straits of Mackinac pipelines, owned by Enbridge Energy, are 60-years-old and considered one of the greatest threats to the Great Lakes because of their age, location and the hazardous products they transport—including tar sands derived oil.

Click above to read more and watch the video or click here to watch it on YouTube. The dive footage starts at about 3 minutes, and at about 4 minutes in you can see drop camera footage from 200′ deep that shows unsupported pipeline hanging over the lake bed.

I know that some folks get upset when I wander into “politics” but I don’t even think this falls under politics. This falls under “companies using lobbying money & influence to do things that are really dangerous without proper safety controls.” You can clearly see from the video that this pipeline is an outdated and unsafe piece of junk, and the Great Lakes don’t belong to any company. In my opinion (which may be different from yours) it is incumbent on our elected officials to safeguard the Great Lakes for the economic benefit and enjoyment of us ALL.

PS: If the name Enbridge Energy sounds familiar, they’re the company that brought Michigan the Kalamazoo River oil spill in 2010.

PPS: (edit) The Jobs, Economy and the Great Lakes report by Michigan Sea Grant found that in 2009, more than 1.5 million Great Lakes-related jobs generated $62 billion in wages for the Great Lakes region. (report is linked at the right)

Sunrise Flight

Posted on by farlane

Sunrise Flight

Sunrise Flight, photo by ptpomber

Safe & quick flights … and travels of any kind this weekend. Speaking of flight, if anyone can identify the bird from yesterday, that would be great!

View ptpomber’s photo bigger and see more from Mackinac Island including some very cool winter shots in his slideshow.

Fall at Sugar Loaf Rock on Mackinac Island

Posted on by farlane

Sugar Loaf Rock Mackinac Island

The Rock, photo by Sandy Hansen Photography

Here’s a color check-in from last week on Mackinac Island. The Mackinac Island State Park Commission says the following about Sugar Loaf rock romation:

Sugar Loaf, a 75 foot tall limestone stack, is the largest rock formation on Mackinac Island. When glacial Lake Algonquin covered much of the Island 11,000 years ago, Sugar Loaf was connected to the nearby bluff face (today called Point Lookout). Wave action slowly washed away the softer limestone between the stack and the bluff, leaving Sugar Loaf as a stand-alone feature. High water levels during the Lake Algonquin period left only the top of Sugar Loaf exposed, as evidenced by the small cave cut into the north face of the formation by wave action. This cave was originally on the shoreline of the lake.

As with other geological features on the Island, numerous Native American legends have been passed down relating to the origin of Sugar Loaf. One story relates that a young man asked the spirits for eternal life. In response, they turned him to stone, creating Sugar Loaf.

View Sandy’s photo bigger and see more of her Mackinac Island photos.

Also check out Arch Rock and the Devil’s Kitchen on Michigan in Pictures.

The Mackinac Bridge Walk: a Michigan Labor Day Tradition

Posted on by farlane

Yikes! I accidentally re-blogged a photo by Dave so I switched it out for the one below…

OPEN ARMS

OPEN ARMS, photo Dave Trapp

The annual Mackinac Bridge Walk has been held every year on Labor Day since the Bridge opened in 1957, which means the Bridge Walk is celebrating its 57th anniversary. Just 68 people took that first 5 mile walk across the Mighty Mac, but since the Governor began leading the walk, it averages 40,000 to 65,000 attendees.

Follow along for photos and updates at the Mackinac Bridge Facebook page and also jump on the Mackinac Bridge Cam for a live view!

View Dave’s photo bigger and see more shots from his walk in 2010 in his slideshow.

Lots more about the Mackinac Bridge on Michigan in Pictures!

#TBT: Frozen Straits

Posted on by farlane

Mackinac Bridge

Mackinac Bridge, photo by Mark Miller

OK, we’re not throwing back too far for this Thursday, but I wanted to share a really cool view that Mark took this February of the Mackinac Bridge and the Straits of Mackinac locked in the grip of the Polar Vortex.

View his photo bigger and see more great views of Michigan from above in his Aerials slideshow. You can also see one of his aerial photos of the Straits from last August on Michigan in Pictures.

There’s more aerials and more Mackinac Bridge on Michigan in Pictures!