Sixteen Years on the Superior Hiking Trail: Duluth Sections
By the end of 2006 I had completed the northernmost 140 miles or so of the Superior Hiking Trail over three separate backpacking trips. My methodical march from one end of the trail to the other was broken up that summer, however, when newly cut segments of the SHT in Duluth demanded my immediate attention.
I can’t fully express how awesome it is to have the SHT through Duluth, how quickly I’ve taken it for granted, and how I never even dreamed of it before it happened.
Somehow I actually thought of Duluth as an outstanding hiking city before the SHT. In retrospect, it really wasn’t that special. There were several excellent options — Park Point Nature Trail, Chester Creek, Hartley, Lester River, Congdon Park, Lincoln Park, Western Waterfront — and then there were a few gravel railroad beds, old roads and paved trails for walkers/bikers. Mostly, however, there were many muddy unofficial paths, swampy ATV routes and overgrown ski and snowbobile trails crawling with ticks. So, not really outstanding back then; more like pretty good.
If you wanted to hike the western hillside and view the overlooks from a footpath instead of Skyline Drive, you had to bushwhack before 2006. I grew up doing that, not realizing a group of organized and ambitious human beings could carve a deluxe trail through the entire city in just two summers. God bless them. Now, we have an outstanding hiking city. (more…)
Making America Great Again
It wearies me to see hordes of people so downcast from something as small as a presidential election. Your time and energy can be put to better use where you may be of real influence: your neighbors and community.
I’m taking a two-pronged whack at getting some of you folks out of your funk. I wrote this column in the Duluth Budgeteer for you, because What this country needs most is you.
Finally, I made a nice circuit through the surrounding countryside yesterday, and believe that many of our country’s problems can be fixed if we’ll simply focus on feeding and entertaining ourselves as a community. Our city and surrounding rural area need one another to thrive. Read more about Making America Great Again at Ed’s Big Adventure.
Selective Focus: Aryn Bergsven
Aryn Bergsven is an artist and an art teacher at Harbor City International School. She talks about sharing her time and energy between her own work and the work of her students.
A.B.: I work in acrylics primarily but also dabble in watercolors and ink, mostly for sketching and traveling. I love to work with portraiture. This has always been an area of interest for me, even when I was in middle and high school. I think it’s even more compelling to me now though as a mother and an art teacher. So much of my life focuses on people and relationships I have with them that the act of really studying faces and reading between the lines has become second nature in some ways.
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Duluth native Nides in New Yorker
The Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker magazine features an article (clearly written before Election Day) on “the Democrats’ fight over finance.” The focus of the piece is on Thomas R. Nides, “who is seen as a contender for a prominent position in a Clinton Administration.”
Nides is a Duluth native and 1979 graduate of East High School. From 2011 to 2013, he served under Hillary Clinton as deputy U.S. secretary of state for management and resources.
Bellisio Foods sold for a billion
The Wall Street Journal reports the Minneapolis-based and Duluth-founded Bellisio Foods company is being sold “for nearly $1.1 billion.” The business started by Duluth’s wealthiest man will soon be owned by Thailand’s wealthiest man.
Jeno Paulucci founded the company in 1985 as Luigino’s, producing frozen food brands such as Michelina’s. The corporate name changed to Bellisio Foods in 2007. Paulucci died in 2011. He sold Bellisio Foods to Centre Partners the day before he died. Charoen Pokphand Foods in Bangkok, owned by Dhanin Chearavanont, expects to close on its purchase of the company within 180 days.
Poll: Best Bakery in the Duluth Area
With your help, we’ve compiled a list of swoon-worthy bakeries in the Duluth area.
It’s a highly subjective exercise. It may be that a fruit tart warms your heart or a cake donut pleases your gut. Whatever the case, it’s time to make a show of support for your favorite purveyor of sweet and glutenous treats.
The nominations are in. Now it’s time to vote and have a say. What’s the Perfect Duluth-area bakery?
This is a runoff poll, which means options will be whittled down over time. We started with 14 nominees; it’s now down to the Final Four: Duluth’s Best Bread, Johnson’s Bakery, Lake Superior Bakehouse and Zenith Bread Project.
This poll is now closed. The results were:
Duluth’s Best Bread – 38 percent
Zenith Bread Project – 27 percent
Johnson’s Bakery – 20 percent
Lake Superior Bakehouse – 15 percent
DTA Passenger Entrance Music
While riding a Duluth Transit Authority bus last night and listening to my head phones, I came up with a very simple way of amusing myself. Whenever the bus stopped to pick up a new passenger, I clicked my mp3 player forward to the next random track and imagined it was the chosen entrance music or “theme song” for that person. Try it out sometime. It’s my gift to you.
Russell Prather’s “Rope” takes Arrowhead Regional Biennial prize
Russell Prather’s “Rope.” Photo by Tim White.
Russell Prather’s “Rope,” a hanging piece made with acrylic on layers of polyester film, took the $1,000 first-place prize at the Duluth Art Institute’s 61st Arrowhead Regional Biennial last week. Prather is a professor at Northern Michigan University who teaches British literary and visual culture of the 18th through 20th centuries. (more…)
Positive Post-its at Denfeld
This is how Denfeld responds to hate #PostThePositive #TakeBackOurWalls ❤️ pic.twitter.com/k9OMUiyuuW
— Johanna Unden (@johannaunden) November 15, 2016
Last week racist graffiti referencing U.S. President-elect Donald Trump was found in a female restroom stall at Denfeld High School. The student body responded this week, posting inspiring messages throughout the school. The movement was led by Denfeld’s student executive board and the video was posted on Twitter by Johanna Unden, the exec board’s student school board representative.
What is the best Duluth-area bakery?
The decline of the corner bakery in modern America could be considered one of the greatest food-related tragedies of our time. An 85 percent decrease in standalone retail bakeries occurred in the United States over the past 40 years, according to Retail Bakers of America.
With this in mind, it seems important to show our local bakeries some love. That’s why our latest poll will decide the perfect Duluth bakery.
Nominate your favorite by commenting on this post. It will be a purely subjective poll, of course. Comparing an old-school institution stocked with traditional sweets like Long Johns and Bismarcks and a newfangled shop specializing in artisan breads and delicate pastries is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, but the idea is to choose an overall favorite.
Feel free to nominate bakeries that double as coffee shops and serve food or the supermarket variety, if you’re so inclined.
After much geographical consideration, we’ve determined any bakery within 16 miles of the Aerial Lift Bridge is eligible for nomination. That means establishments in Superior, Hermantown, Proctor and the many bordering townships qualify for nomination, but more distant places like Two Harbors and Cloquet do not.
Once we have a good pool of nominees, the poll will commence.
PDD Holiday Socks
We’re going to try something, offering some PDD Holiday swag for you to sport at your holiday gatherings. You can pre-order some Warhol-ish funky socks with the PDD smokin’ reindeer on them.
If 20 or more people order them, the order goes through, and everyone receives socks in about 4 weeks. If less than 20 people order, they don’t get made. So spread the news, we’ve only got 7 days.
Click here to order:
bakdrop.com/products/perfectduluthday
Duluth Film Directory
If you’re a filmmaker/actor/screenwriter — or working in any capacity in film in the Duluth area — this post should be of interest to you.
Today I launched the Duluth Film Directory: a database of all the people working in film in Duluth. I constantly receive emails from people asking me who is working in the area, and this will be a convenient way to consolidate everyone into one location. Now, when someone is looking for a freelancer, they’ll know exactly where to turn.
If you’re interested in signing up for the directory, please email me your information at duluthfilmcollective @ gmail.com.
Please include:
- Your work title
- Areas of expertise
- What you’re currently working on
- Email, website, IMDB page
- A nice picture of yourself (not grainy or small)
PDD Quiz: Novembeard
The month associated with facial hair is upon us! How well do you know Duluth denizens by their beards? Let’s find out!
The next quiz will be an end of month review of November 2016. Send your question ideas to lawrence @ perfectduluthday.com by Wednesday, November 23.
Edmund Fitzgerald
[arve url=”https://youtu.be/0M9b8zZtoPQ”]
I missed posting this by two days, but it’s still worth a look.
Customized Alphabet Letter Wall Art
Words From Nature is a new business created for an entrepreneurship project at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Our business allows customers to customize their home decor by creating their own alphabet letter art. Our large collection of letters are pictures from the outdoors and illustrate the beauty of nature. All of our pictures were taken by us, and only offered by us. (more…)
Message to a White Boy Who in Some Ways Reminds Me of Me
Dear Russell:
I want to tell you some things that might not make sense. I wish an adult would have seen me clearly enough to know I needed to hear similar things when I was 18. Do you know what I mean when I invoke the impact of being seen?
You’re a sharp kid. Like a lot of sharp kids, especially ones in their first semester of college, you know both way more and way less than you realize. I was the same way. So was—so is—every other adult, including every other teacher, you’ve known and will know.
You should accept nothing from us as truth before vetting it against your own inquiry. We do probably know more than you and your peers know about some things. We also tend to indoctrinate young people instead of helping them become autonomous thinkers. Please heed Walt Whitman and “re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”
By “inquiry” I mean deep, active curiosity that includes interrogating your own thinking at least as much as you interrogate the thinking of people you disagree with or consider stupid. It’s very hard work. It’s not just navel-gazing. You will find few examples of how to do it well. Even after doing it for years—after it has helped you learn to discern valid insight from self-serving magical thinking—it will lead you to many inaccurate conclusions because all perception is distorted and opinions can definitely be wrong. (more…)
Selective Focus: Scott Lunt
No doubt, if you live in Duluth, you’ve been exposed to the work of Scott Lunt, aka Starfire; founder of the Homegrown Music Festival, co-founder of Father Hennepin and Perfect Duluth Day, radio host on KUMD, the list goes on. His latest endeavor is St1tch:::red, a quilt show at the Red Herring, opening Saturday November 12. He tells us how he got involved in the craft.
S.L.: I cut up perfectly good fabric and sew it back together again. I made my first quilt about twenty years ago and another five years after that. At the time I knew nothing about quilting and had to enlist my mother to help me finish. Then about a year-and-a-half ago Karen McTavish opened a quilting studio in Duluth, I took my mom to visit since she is a long time quilter and something clicked. Two weeks later a sewing machine showed up at my door (thanks Mom!) and I have been making about a quilt a month since.
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Awkward Duluth School Board Moment #5,109: A Point of Order
This clip features three-and-a-half productive minutes from the Nov. 9 Duluth Public Schools Human Resources and Business Committee Meeting.
Ian Alexy – “Misfits in Love”
A song from Ian Alexy‘s new album Deserters, scheduled for release Dec. 16.
DNR will close French River Hatchery
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources announced in a news release today it will close a 1970s-era fish hatchery in Duluth Township.
The French River Cold Water Hatchery, located on Lake Superior two miles north of Duluth, needs $8 million in capital investment to address failing equipment, according to the DNR. It also consumes 10 percent of the energy used by the agency statewide.
A hatchery was first established at the location in 1919, originally known as the Lake Superior State Fish Hatchery. The French River Cold Water Hatchery was built in 1975 to conduct the majority of fish propagation. Since 1962, the DNR and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have planted about 300,000 six-inch lake trout along the North Shore each year, resulting in a 250 percent increase in lake trout netted during surveys, according to the DNR. (more…)
Coolerator: Acclaimed in Hollywood, built in Duluth
The Coolerator Company manufactured refrigerators and sold them in every state and 74 foreign nations. It began in 1908 as the Duluth Showcase Company, a manufacturer of store fixtures in Downtown Duluth. Operations moved to 50th Avenue West and Wadena Street in 1921. The focus switched to iceboxes in 1928 and the business was renamed Duluth Refrigerator Company. It became the Coolerator Company in 1932 and opened a manufacturing plant in New Duluth in 1935. (more…)