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Super Bowl done, now for superb owls at Sax-Zim Bog
The 9th Annual Sax-Zim Bog Birding Festival starts Friday, Feb. 12 and runs through Sunday, Feb. 14, 2016. It provides serious and casual birders alike a unique opportunity to see great gray owls, northern owls, pine grosbeaks and many other wintering species. The IRRRB’s Lee Bloomquist published an article on the Sax-Zim Bog Birding Festival…
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One River, Many Stories
Before the road. Before the rails. Before the timber cruisers or even the original people. All that connected what we now call the Mesabi Iron Range to the place we now call Duluth at the head of Lake Superior was a little southbound crick called the St. Louis River. It gets bigger than a crick, of course, but never all…
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Uncertain fate for Soudan underground physics lab
I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that advanced physics research takes place a half mile beneath the earth at the retired Soudan Underground Mine on the Minnesota Iron Range. True, what they do there can be explained. (Mostly it’s research related to isolating the neutrino, a sub-atomic particle believed to be critical to understanding the universe). Yet it…
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Economic salvation is local
Duluth, Minnesota, is among several cities featured in a James Fallows story in the March 2016 edition of “The Atlantic,” entitled “How America is putting itself back together.” The Duluth angle is what got my attention, but the rest of the story is what I’d like to talk about today. Fallows lists Duluth alongside his story’s…
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Molten iron in the sky
In China, people are wrapping up the celebration of the lunar new year. With a country as big and economically diverse as China you find many different traditions. I saw this next one on ABC News this morning. In the old steel town of Dunhuang, blacksmiths have an annual New Year tradition of melting scrap…
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Bakk explains failed bid for Range special session
We can now agree that Gov. Mark Dayton’s effort to call a special session to address pressing economic issues has been undone. The casualties include, most notably, expiring unemployment benefits of Iron Range miners caught in the gears of international commerce. Dayton cited Republican resistance to agree to terms for a special session, while Republicans seemed to blame Dayton for not calling one…
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How many economic collapses will it take?
I drove to work this morning past more evidence of our zombie economy. There’s an electronic billboard along the Highway 169 as you go through Hibbing. It’s one of those low res, pixelated types, not as sharp as the ones you see along Twin Cities highways. Kind of like the difference between a 60-inch rear…
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Super Bowl bread and circuses
“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” ~Roman poet Juvenal, circa 100 A.D.…
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See film of President Calvin Coolidge in Hibbing
The Mitchell Yards Project has put together a truly wonderful step back in time. I first saw this on Perfect Duluth Day. I’m not above link-jacking about a topic so close to my wheelhouse. Below is film footage of President Calvin Coolidge’s famous 1928 visit to Hibbing. We see the famously concise Republican president touring…
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Slide on up to Aurora for Saturday’s show!
In a short time I’ll be making my way across the Mesabi Iron Range to Aurora and Palo as I prepare for this Saturday’s Great Northern Radio Show. If you’d like to see the show live, perhaps after a day of Laskiainen fun in Palo, you need to be seated at the auditorium in Aurora…
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Nashwauk mayor Ben DeNucci enters 6A race
Nashwauk Mayor Ben DeNucci announced his candidacy for the DFL nomination for House of Representatives in District 6A on the central Iron Range. DeNucci is the owner of DeNucci’s Saloon in downtown Nashwauk and Keewatin Auto Repair in nearby Keewatin, where he also works. DeNucci made his announcement in a Crystal Dey story in the Hibbing Daily Tribune.…
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Iron Range woes on the national stage
It’s always fun to watch what happens when reporters from national publications come to the Iron Range to do major stories. Movers and shakers whisper in low tones about their possible motives, while others clamber for their one chance at being quoted in a paper someone actually reads (maybe?). The results vary, but this time…
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Iron Range musher wins fourth Beargrease
Nathan Schroeder, a Warba native who lives near Chisholm, won his fourth John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon early this morning when his team crossed the finish line near Billys Bar in Rice Lake, just north of Duluth. Jason Campeau of Alberta finished second, while defending champion Ryan Anderson of Ray took third. Schroeder won in…
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Lost special session only one of Range’s problems
Laid-off Iron Range miners will have to wait until the late start of the legislative session this March to see if the legislature will act to extend their unemployment benefits. GOP House Speaker Kurt Daudt announced Tuesday that his caucus would not support Gov. Mark Dayton’s call for a special session to aid miners displaced by a global…
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Laskiainen 2016: the flax and the furious
(The complete Laskiainen schedule is at the bottom of this post) The winter doldrums of Northern Minnesota now roll over us with workmanlike routine. Don hats and gloves. Scrape the windshield. Warm up the car. Walk like a penguin. Repeat. Perhaps small comfort, but true the same, is how for millennia these same cold squalls…