A Busy Thanksgiving Week
Thanksgiving week turned out to be a very busy time. Monday started out with Terri Frew at MTU forwarding me the historic trail sign design proposals from her students. Reviewing and providing feedback on these would be a dominant activity throughout the week. I submitted high resolution photographs to Marc Norton at Copper Island Printing to top off the awesome work on our semi-annual Chassell Historical Organization Newsletter by our Secretary Millie Pyorala. I also forwarded to Jen Tucker (from the MEDC) a copy of the blight survey we did here in Chassell as a follow up to our meeting the previous week. I got out for a 5k run in my spikes and ran into fellow planning commission member Steve Spahn as he was walking out of the Chassell General Store. I took a detour and met up with him at the historic trail to get him up to speed on the progress.
I stopped by the historic interpretive trail after work had concluded for the day and found the following progress on the boardwalk toward the planing mill.
The Chassell Historical Organization board meeting took place at the Heritage Center on Monday evening. In addition to discussing the progress on the historic interpretive trail and setting a meeting for Wednesday evening of the subcommittee to review the sign design proposals, the big focus was on preparing for the Heritage Center’s role in Old Fashioned Christmas. You can learn more about Old Fashioned Christmas and the scheduled activities at this link.
Tuesday I talked with Chris Holmes at U.P. Engineers & Architects about the elements from the preliminary engineering study they have been working on for the township regarding Centennial Park that we will include in our SPARK grant proposal to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. I also reached out to John Arnold with the Keweenaw National Historical Park for technical assistance on a couple of facility issues we are working on at the Chassell Heritage Center. I also gained clarification from our Township Clerk Lynn Gierke on a couple of our planned components for the SPARK grant proposal including establishing ADA accessible restrooms in the Centennial Park pavilion and a challenge impacting on the planned winterization of the outdoor restrooms.
Decent weather on Tuesday allowed for continued progress on the historic interpretive trail boardwalk with the completion of the structural span (less the decking) to the planing mill.
Wednesday began with a beautiful sunrise over Portage Lake.
Wednesday’s work on the historic trail was focused on mobilizing lumber for the post-holiday work on the span from the planing mill to the location where the offices stood.
Wednesday evening I squeezed in a run in Houghton with the Keweenaw Running Group before meeting up with the Mat Moore, Luanne Hamel, and Brian Waters to review the historic trail sign design proposals.
The meeting to review the sign design proposals lasted for three hours. There were some very creative concepts that were put together by the students. We needed to tweak narratives to help their accuracy and we also needed to amend some of the photograph choices to accurately portray the messaging. I took all of our notes and spent a great deal of Friday writing individual emails on each sign to convey our input back to students through Terri.
In between on Thanksgiving Day, we started the day out by walking the dogs with our friend Beverly and caught up with the Keweenaw Running Group’s Fatty McGee run along the way at one of their stops. We then visited with the participants at the final destination over soup that was prepared by our friend G. That afternoon we headed over to our friends Mark and Kathy’s for Thanksgiving dinner with a number of our hiking friends.
The weather turned incredibly mild throughout the week of Thanksgiving with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees. Our big jump on this year’s snow base quickly started to dwindle. So much of the snow had melted that I was able to get out for a 5-mile rail-trail run on Saturday morning. Spikes were definitely in order, but overall the surface was pretty decent with many bare spots along the way.
With the temperature approaching 50 degrees, Julie and I headed out to McLain State Park for a walk along the Lake Superior shore.
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