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It's great to watch the Olympics, and I discovered The Gold Zone on Peacock which lets you watch multiple events at the same time and when an event is about to finish, they focus on that event, then return to a multi-screen to follow all of the variety that is the fascination of the Olympics. It is so good to watch the events like the world record in the pole vault and hear the stories about the athletes.
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I love to visit northern Minnesota and this week our family spent four days at Heston's Lodge on Gunflint Lake, a beautiful place with the opposite shore being in Canada. We stayed in a cabin and spent the days canoeing on the lake. On the way home, we took a nice walk in Grand Marais, a very cute little town and then stopped for walks to see both Cascade Falls and Gooseberry Falls, spectacular whitewater shows.
We recently joined the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska which is run by the University of Minnesota. The Arboretum features dozens of small gardens with every kind of plant, flower, bush, and tree imaginable. A vast network of trails winds through the gardens. We just got back from our first hike there, and now that we know how beautiful it is, we can't wait to go back to see it in different seasons and weather conditions. It is a place we will want to visit many times.
We have had rain several times per week for the past month. The rivers and lakes are high, and several communities have flooding problems. I just stopped by the Minnesota River and saw the sign in the photo below. It caught my eye because the sign is usually several feet above the water level, and also because the reference is to the flood of 1965 which is one full section of my book Historic Disasters in Southeast Minnesota. Several roads, bridges, and businesses in Minnesota are closed right now and the rains just keep coming.  A few years ago, I read a book called Blue Zones by Dan Buettner. It is about places in the world where an exceptional number of people live past age 100 and stay very active and happy. It is an intriguing idea, and Buettner visited those places and tried to find connections between the diets and lifestyles those people lived as keys to their longevity. Recently, I found a four-part documentary by Buettner on his Blue Zones work and his attempts to recreate the lifestyles in other locations. His search brings out many very interesting and inspiring characters that are portrayed in the episodes. The documentary is called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones and is showing on Netflix. Well worth watching.
Although it was published in 2012, I didn't get a chance to read the book A Bolt From the Blue until now. It is about a lightning strike that hit a group of climbers on Wyoming's Grand Teton and the subsequent rescue made by the Jenny Lake Climbing Rangers. Author Jennifer Woodlief does an excellent job of telling the tense story, and I felt an additional connection to the book because I lived in Jackson Hole from 1985 to 1995 and climbed there frequently. Many of the places on the mountain were familiar to me as were several of the people involved in the rescue. It was one of those books that I read in two days. It is an amazing story.
We just received word that Southwest Media will be closing six small town newspapers in the southwest suburbs of the Twin Cities. They were small papers, but they were a connection for the people of the community. I watched this same thing happen along the Mississippi River when RiverTown Multimedia reduced their small newspapers from nine to two over a period of less than two years. This reflects a larger movement across the country to close or reduce publications. As a newspaper reader my entire adult life, I am saddened to watch this trend play out, and feel a void where those papers used to exist. I always felt local newspapers gave a community a common thread, a shared experience of that the town was about and how it was developing. Without those venues, something important is missing.
Earlier I reported that Sport Literate journal accepted my essay An Awful Quiet in the Heart about climbing at Devils Tower for their spring edition. It arrived today and looks great. Unfortunately it is a print only journal, so I can't share a link to the essay, but I'll share a link to the journal itself. They do a nice job of bringing in a variety of essays and poems about sports and activities of all sorts. It is a good read.
On a recent visit to Phoenix, my family and I stopped in a restaurant called Chompie's. We were looking over the extensive menu when I saw exactly what I was going to eat -- a sandwich called Stevie G's Sandwich. I couldn't believe that name, so when the waitress came back, I told her my name and that I had to give that a try. She brought it out and it was bacon, turkey, avocado, tomato, and enough other ingredients to stretch from edge to edge on the plate and rise four inches high. I ate all I could and took the rest to our vacation rental where I ended up with two more lunches from the same sandwich. I never expected to see my name on a sandwich.
Having moved to Minnesota six years ago, I have seen the amazing interest in hockey at the high school, college, and professional level in The State of Hockey. One of the most impressive demonstrations of this fever is the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament which was played this week. The games are held at Xcel Energy Center, the same venue where the Minnesota Wild of the NHL play their home games. It much be an incredible experience for high school kids to step onto that ice and play their games which fill the arena with thousands of screaming fans. The tournament is a spectacle and I've gained huge respect for the players and coaches who work for years to get a chance to be part of the event.
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Photo by John Jancik
AuthorDr. Steve Gardiner is the author of nine books and over 1,000 articles. |