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Hunting drama ‘Cold November’ gets its deer
You might remember a couple Sundays ago I wrote about Hibbing native Karl Jacob, a Minneapolis-based actor and director, who was back on the Iron Range filming a new coming-of-age movie about deer hunting. “Cold November” tells the story of a girl struggle with the elements and the emotions of growing up, set amid what Jacob considers to be one…
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Political theater ensures people keep ‘driving through’ Range
It’s been a busy week and will be a busy weekend, so I can’t get too wound up about highway politics on the Mesabi Iron Range. After all, I’ve probably said enough in recent months about State Highway 53 and St. Louis County Highway 5, both of which are on the move to accommodate mining…
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Chisholm sets forum to talk about Hwy 5 reroute options
The city of Chisholm has called a Nov. 16 forum with people from neighboring towns and townships to discuss the rerouting of St. Louis County Highway 5 for mining expansion at Hibbing Taconite. In a post that inspired robust conversation in the comments section, we talked about the fact that Chisholm was questioning the county/mine…
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Range native holds high hopes for ‘Cold November’
This week, hunters across Northern Minnesota will check sights, erect stands and procure truckloads of cheese curds and jerky before opening the rifle deer season next Saturday. Most hope for that perfect shot, the big trophy and a freezer full of venison, but that’s often not the most important detail. For some, it’s the first…
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Another highway debate shows power tilting toward mines
By now, most of you are pretty familiar with the massive Highway 53 project between Virginia and Eveleth on Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. That $240 million re-route of the Iron Range’s most important north-south highway will build two new bridges, included the state’s tallest, to accommodate a 1960s-era agreement with the mines to move the highway…
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Book serves Range food favorites to new generation
Every member of the Cherry High School band knew from Day 1 there would come a time where we would spend the entire night in the school cafeteria making pasties for the big annual fundraiser. It was as sure as the sunset or a freshman missing the high notes. When pasty night came, every kid…
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Don Ness, Teague Alexy take book tour to Iron Range
On Wednesday, Oct. 21, Duluth mayor Don Ness and musician Teague Alexy will bring their shared book tour across the Mesabi Iron Range. Ness’s book is “Hillsider: Snapshots of a Curious Political Journey,” a self-published creative memoir combining essays, stories and photographs by the popular outgoing mayor of the Zenith City. Alexy’s book is “The New Folklore:…
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Range War: Essar, Cliffs clash shows Mesabi at crossroads
~ ~ ~ Speculation can be ignored, but one must reckon with concrete. Here along Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range one finds many messy versions of the truth surrounding Essar Minnesota’s new taconite mine under construction near Nashwauk. While controversial, actual activity at Essar shows that new mining will happen on the grounds of the…
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Thinkers, tinkers and 3-D printers
Growing up, my dad was a leather whip of a man who chain-smoked Winston cigarettes and spent nearly all his free time tinkering with an invention in his garage. When they first taught us how to use this new thing called “the internet” at my high school, my inaugural search was about patent law, seeking…
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Looking down on the Laurentian Divide
As we see the autumn leaves of the Iron Range reach peak colors, already beginning to fall in my corner of Itasca County, enjoy this recent video by Above the Range, a YouTube channel dedicated to aerial footage of Northern Minnesota scenery. See it here: The Laurentian Divide is the geographical “rock” (no pun intended) of…
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Seeing indigenous history on the Iron Range
For many reasons, the stories of native Northern Minnesota and the Northern Minnesota that formed after European and American settlement are often considered entirely separate matters in most history classes and casual conversation. The latter, written by the ancestors of most people who live here, tends to get much more attention. If kids learn about the prior, it’s usually…
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Twilight for the unlovable chair
NOTE: Today’s column is a condensed version of a monologue I did in the Sept. 19, 2015 Great Northern Radio Show which re-airs today at 11 a.m. on Northern Community Radio and will be made available as a podcast in coming days. *** My wife and I have a term for the decorating style of our…
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The missing empathy in our politics
Something remarkable happened the night Vice President Joe Biden appeared on Stephen Colbert’s new Late Show during its first week on the air. A national political figure, one often mentioned as a presidential candidate, spoke like someone you knew. He opened his heart and let us see inside. Biden did so not as part of…
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Linguist completes interviews exploring ‘Iron Range English’
To follow up on a story I wrote about in July, Dr. Sara Schmelzer Loss has completed her interviews of 30 Iron Rangers in her continuing research on the Iron Range dialect. She’ll now begin work to determine her findings on the state of our unique dialect. Schmelzer Loss, originally of Hibbing, is a visiting professor of…
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Blazing trails to sustainable Iron Range economy
To quote a line from William Blake, “Expect poison from the standing water.” True of water. True of spirit. True of Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. The kind of poison I’m talking about comes from hopelessness. Our Iron Range economy has suffered in recent months, years and decades. We have watched young people leave, and worse…