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Iron Range 4th of July parade, street dance & fireworks roundup
Click here for the 2019 Iron Range parade, street dance and fireworks lineup. The Fourth of July holds special meaning on Minnesota’s Iron Range. Part of it is patriotism, sure, but there’s a sort of midsummer primal yawp going on here as well. I could provide thousands of words of information about every little town’s…
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Louisiana-Pacific starts siding line in Canada, not Cook
Officials with Louisiana-Pacific announced Friday that the company would start a new line of wood siding at its plant in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. That plant currently produces OSB, or oriented stand board, a form of wood paneling. That means that the company’s development of the former Ainsworth plant in Cook, Minnesota, moves to the back burner. William…
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Hibbing opens roads, some streets to ATV traffic
The Iron Range city of Hibbing is opening its roadways to all terrain vehicles (ATVs). Hibbing joins Itasca County and other Iron Range towns in considering and ultimately adopting looser regulations for the popular recreational vehicles. The Hibbing Daily Tribune reports on the ATV ordinance, passed in a March 22 council meeting. It opens up…
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Layman, Bakk IRRRB reform bills get closer
Following up on my post earlier this week, the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board met this week in St. Paul. Also this week, two Iron Range legislators, one Republican and one DFLer, moved toward each other with bills to reform the agency. In a contentious 5-4 vote, the board endorsed a plan to privatize Giant’s…
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Midsummer festival at Mesaba Co-op Park
This weekend, the living vestige of Iron Range history known as Mesaba Co-op Park holds its 87th annual Midsummer Festival. The park, located near Cherry east of Hibbing on North Star Lake off Highway 37, was built by Finnish-Americans in 1929. The Midsummer Festival includes fun for all ages, music, food, storytelling, outdoor activities and more…
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Glencore implosion shows troubling reality of Range projects
Right now people are voting on DFL primary day in the Minnesota House 3A Special Election. It’d be safe to assume that a good number of people are voting at least in part based on their opinion of controversial Northeastern Minnesota nonferrous mining proposals in the Lake Superior and BWCA watersheds. Some for. Some against. But the outcome…
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Smoke Week
Here in Northern Minnesota, we’ve been dealing with a thick haze of smoke from Canadian wildfires for more than a week. Just this week the smoke finally dipped further south, blanketing the Twin Cities and Southern Minnesota. Yesterday, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency recorded air quality indexes as high as 200 in the Twin Cities,…
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Eveleth mine celebrates 50 years with public event
I spent most of my childhood trying to find shapes in the steam cloud billowing out of Eveleth Taconite’s plant at Forbes. Now known as United Taconite, the Iron Range iron mine and processing facility will celebrate 50 years of mining this Sunday with a public event. EVELETH, MN – Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. (NYSE:…
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Cliffs to close Duluth office
WDIO is reporting that Cliffs Natural Resources will be closing its Duluth office at the end of the month. About 30 people work at the office. Some will be moved to mine sites, while others will be offered jobs at company headquarters in Cleveland. Cliffs has a long history of operations in Northern Minnesota. The…
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Ely explorers retrace Teddy’s fateful journey on Rio Roosevelt
During the last Great Northern Radio Show, broadcast live from Ely (click and save the podcast!), Amy Freeman detailed the North American expedition she and husband Dave embarked on last year. Dave couldn’t be on the show because he was on the Rio Roosevelt in Brazil, conquering the same jungle waters that almost claimed the life of…
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Schmit leads on MN rural broadband
I don’t like to fawn too much over elected officials, even the ones who are my friends. But OMG I’m in full senator crush mode over State Sen. Matt Schmit (DFL-Red Wing) and his recent interview with Brian Lampert in MinnPost about the vital role of rural broadband in Minnesota’s future. Schmit was one of the…
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Emerald ash borer, meet Polar Vortex
One of the stories bandied about amid the Polar Vortex of the past few days was the theory that this frigid cold might help knock back the emerald ash borer threat in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ash borer larvae die off when the temperature is sustained below zero for several days. It would take extremely…
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Court rules against Timberjay information request
The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a case with wide-reaching public information implications last week, declaring that a private contractor employed by an Iron Range school district did not have to divulge data to the Timberjay newspaper. The Timberjay information request, led by its publisher Marshall Helmberger, sought more information about the multi-million dollar St.…
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Did we win Cold War, or just ‘Get Lucky?’
To quote Rocky Balboa after his stirring fictional defeat of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV: “During this fight, I’ve seen a lot of changing, in the way you feel about me, and in the way I feel about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that’s better than twenty…
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William Jennings Bryan in Duluth
I played the narrator role of the “Stage Manager” in my high school junior year production of “Our Town.” I remember giving a line about how William Jennings Bryan once spoke in Grover’s Corners, a sign of some strange and isolated collision between this small town and the churn of national events. The Zenith City…