The Detroit Tigers home opener on Friday, April 4 against the Chicago White Sox is less than a month away, and I have to agree with one of baseball’s greatest showmen on this perfectly rational method of dividing the year.
Apparently, there are only 500 Amur tiger (formerly Siberian tiger) in the world, so zoos are an important method of conservation. They’re totally chill in the cold & you can learn more about Amur tiger from BBC Earth.
“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.“
-Charles Dickens
…and it is also winter in the UP! While rains are expected to wash much of the snow from Michigan today, mLive Chief Meteorologist Mark Torregrossa shares that the National Weather Service is predicting 10-15″ of snow for areas of the Upper Peninsula including as much as TWO FEET of snow for the western UP!
twurdemann shares that this incredible winter wonderland is created by freezing spray/mist from the waterfall at Michigan’s Tahquamenon Falls State Park & the brown tannins in the water. Check out more in their Winter gallery on Flickr that includes some KNOCKOUT ice cave photos from the Canadian shore of Lake Superior!
Most remember that President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law establishing that Yellowstone as America’s first national park on March 1, 1872, but not that many are aware of the 2nd national park that Congress created just three years later on March 3, 1875. The National Parks Traveler has a great feature on America’s “forgotten” national park which existed from 1875 to 1895 when it became Mackinac Island State Park, the nation’s first state park which is now Mackinac State Historic Parks.
Mark has shared a ton of Mackinac Island pics on Flickr and in our Absolute Michigan group. Here are some of my faves. See more in his Mackinac, Michigan gallery on Flickr!!
Johnny Cash was born 93 years ago today, and though he wasn’t born in Michigan, he sang about us and the struggles of workers on the line. In honor of the Man in Black, here’s a photo that Bill shared photo back in 2023 writing “Formerly the Gibson Guitar factory. Rumor has it that Elvis Presley himself came to Kalamazoo to pick up his guitars straight from the factory. Johnny Cash, Steve Winwood, B.B. King, and others also visited to check on their orders.”
Here are couple more photos of the old plant along with Bill’s burning ring of fire (with apologies to Johnny Cash). Follow Bill on Flickr & Facebook for more!
“It is always safe to dream of spring. For it is sure to come; and if it be not just as we have pictured it, it will be infinitely sweeter.” ― L.M. Montgomery
Paul has been a member of the Absolute Michigan group on Flickr for a long time. He shared this incredible photo from May 2024 that makes me long for spring a few weeks ago. He took it in , so in the interests of being seasonally balanced, here’s one of his most popular photos on Flickr from way back in 2013 at the Grand Haven Lighthouse. Head over to his Flickr for lots more!
EDITOR’S NOTE ON THE EDITOR’S NOTE: I am the editor of Leelanau.com. I wrote the Editor’s Note below and fully endorse the position of the letter writer. Honestly, if you don’t I really wonder why you follow this blog and for sure don’t care if you go away for good.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first message that I am going to share from a National Forest Service employee who is neck deep in the horrors being perpetrated against the National Park Service and the National Forest Service. Sadly, I don’t think it will be the last. Also, at the end, the author says mean things about the Department of Government Efficiency aka DOGE aka the unelected & unaccountable organization taking a wrecking ball to the federal government which I fully endorse. This is an ill-fated & poorly planned action that will cause untold & in some cases irreparable damage to public resources that you and I own. We should not allow this.
1. I still have a job, meaning I somehow cleared level one. RIF (reduction in force) is the Boss Level, and that’s still a ways off (days? Weeks? We don’t know). I am not in any way hopeful that I will still be employed with the National Forests in four months, or that there will be National Forests in four years.
2. People at work are packing, printing our performance docs, waiting for the call. Some of us (like me) have targets on our backs, but nobody is safe. Nobody sleeps. A co-worker thought he was having a heart attack. We compare what meds we’re taking for anxiety. The wait is torture. I had to process termination paperwork for a very close friend who kicks ass at her job. It sucks every day. And work used to be my happy place.
3. The termination letters site performance issues. THIS IS A LIE and they know it. That’s why they fired (and were forced by a federal judge to rehire) the head of the Merit Systems Protection Board, a board whose main job is to say, “Whoa whoa wait a sec. You can’t fire federal employees without just cause!” This is why people are signing termination docs “signed under duress.” My friend has excellent performance evaluations. Most of the fired people do. Because…
4. Probation does NOT mean we did something wrong. It means we just got hired (or promoted) and it came with a probationary period. These are recent graduates who went to school for natural resource management, wildlife conservation, forestry, and did so with the SOLE INTENT of protecting our public lands. These are the MOST devoted, passionate, educated, efficient people. With the least pay. We don’t work public lands for the pay; it is so much less than private sector wages, you guys. Look up the federal pay scale. It’s public information. Compare GS level jobs to what they’d make at a private company. In NPS we joked that we got paid in sunsets. We join because we believe in preserving public land for future generations. But it’s starting to look like our public lands will be cannibalized for parts. So
5. Please! If you go to public lands this summer, or in the next four years, know that we are doing the best we can with the staff and budget we’ve been given. There’s a district north of Yellowstone of over a million acres that has been left with THREE employees. Recreation and Trails departments across the nation have been gutted. There are NO PEOPLE LEFT ON THE GROUND TO CLEAN YOUR SHIT. If you have a complaint about your lands this summer, do NOT get hostile with the federal workers on the ground. Take that complaint, dip it in hot tar, and shove it as far up the DOGEs ass as you can reach.
With full honor & respect to the absolutely brutal temps across Michigan this morning, here are some sweet photos from a series that Bill took on February 1st at Fennville’s Pier Cove Park. There’s even a shot of a sundog in one of the photos!
In honor of this brutally cold morning with single digit temperatures covering the state, so I couldn’t resist re-sharing probably the toastiest photo ever to grace Michigan in Pictures. Take a stroll through pics from pkHyperfocal’s Metro Parks gallery & for sure check out all their galleries on Flickr.
One of my favorite things about Michigan in Pictures is seeing some of the incredible cameras people are using.
One man who has some sweet gear is Kirt E. Carter and he has been bringing some incredible Hasselblad pics to the Absolute Michigan group on Flickr for the better part of a decade. I figured today was a good day to bring attention to his amazing work. The large one below of icicles on the Eagle Harbor shoreline – see more in the Hasselblad search in the Absolute Michigan group & for sure head over to his website to view & purchase his work!
Michigan in Pictures 