On this Earth Week, we are busting out the hiking shoes, and hitting a few of our favorite spots. Earlier this month, the landscape of one of the most magical trails in Leelanau County saw the effects of an ever-changing landscape.

By the time our next weekly hits the stands on Thursday, it will have been one year since I moved to Traverse City and started my run at the Leelanau Enterprise. This prompted some reflection — not just of my time with this newspaper, but also in the events that led me here — as has the recent death of an elected official who I used to report on extensively.

If you give two hoots about the quality of education for your children or grand kids, as they say in the biz, this one’s for you. It’s difficult to use the word “silver-lining” in the same sentence with the term “COVID 19” but if there was one, at least on the education front, it would have to be the $3.7 billion avalanche of emergency federal government money that cascaded into every school district in the state.

For the last five years the Lake Leelanau Lake Association (LLLA) and the Grand Traverse Band (GTB) of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians have worked to eradicate Eurasian Water Milfoil (EWM) within Lake Leelanau. While not all milfoils are invasive, EWM is.

It was not a dark and stormy night. (Sorry.

Celebrating my mother’s birthday this past weekend — which had us both enjoying sunny skies via a scenic Frankfort drive to view Lake Michigan in all its glory — was a reminder that one of the most important things that I can share with her is time.

The anniversary in March came and went without a peep. It was in March of 1936 that George Gallup did his first public opinion survey and little did he know at the time the Frankenstein he was foisting on our political process but that will be left for another day and time.

The payday’s a-coming for the Campbell family farm. That’s what I keep telling my wife, Debbie, and I can tell she believes me by her crunch-eyed grin that follows.

What the heck is TikTok? If you think the answer is the soothing sound that comes out of your grandfather clock, you are technically correct but that TikTok noise you hear everywhere else these days has nothing to do with the clock ticking away in your hallway. It has to do with the 150 million Americans of all ages who are spending an average of 11 minutes every time they go on this skyrocketing media platform and they do it an average of eight times a day...A DAY..

When candidates, campaign managers and political consultants say their prayers at night they most likely ask that Michigan voters continue to be ignorant. That’s because an illinformed citizen is easy to exploit for political gain. Or to put it another way, it is infinitely easier to pull the wool over the eyes of a voter who is too lazy to do their homework on a candidate for this office or that.