Long Lake Yarns

It was a dark cold night.  It was a dark cold very cold night.  It was a dark very cold noisy night.  It was a very dark very cold very noisy night in January in Montmorency County.  Must be crazy people were once again driving cars over snowy slick roads at high speeds while spectators [...]

Fletcher’s Pond, with a surface area of 8,970 acres, is one of the largest inland lakes in Michigan.  It is a flooding created in 1935 by the Alpena Power Company.  The pond is shallow (no deeper than about 12 feet) and weedy–just the sort of lake where big bass and monster pike hang out.  Every [...]

Click here to listen at the Cornell ornithology site for the drumming of a ruffed grouse.  Click here to listen to what the lake was doing today.  As the ice cracks, especially with temperature changes when the sound isn’t muffled by a lot of snow, the entire surface of Long Lake becomes an acoustic membrane. [...]

It hasn’t been a rough winter so far.  No extremes of temperature.  Less than the usual amount of snow.  But it is still late January and there are months of wintry weather behind and ahead.  The lake is beautiful, in its wintry ways. Somehow the snow pulls both sides of the lake more toward the [...]

The woods stuffed full of snow.  The heavy wet snow that sticks to everything.  The sides of trees.  Your boots.  If you laid down to make a snow angel you would sink about ten inches.  If you made a snowball, leftover snowball would tangle in the wool of your mittens and dangle in clumps. Animal [...]

This is a section of the north branch of Thunder Bay River, just northwest of Long Lake, north of County Road 628.  But I didn’t tell you that.  It’s way too pretty a place for many people to know about.  A rickety wood plank bridge is the only way to get over the river at [...]

Walking on a two-track, on state land near Sorenson Road, we came upon these Wild Turkey  tracks in the sand.  Wild Turkeys were nearly eliminated from their habitat by the early 1900’s.  Paradoxically, hunters helped save them. In 1973, the National Wild Turkey Federation was formed.  It is both a hunting organization and a conservation [...]

Ocqueoc Falls is just about the only honest-to-goodness, rootin’ tootin’ waterfall in Michigan’s lower peninsula.  The total descent is about five feet.  Downstream from the main part of the falls, the rock walls are about 20 feet high.  And it is only about 35 miles from Hillman.  We’re not talking Tahquamenon here,  but this mini-waterfall [...]

Illusion knitting is the trickster technique of the knitting world.  It can’t be new.  Nothing can really be new in knitting, can it?  But my first experience of it was  knitting Elizabeth Fallone’s Shadow Spider Scarf in Shelridge Farm’s worsted weight yarn.   Knitters would say that yarn has a wonderful hand. I knitted most of [...]

I feel uncomfortable about this. Why is that Golden Retriever wearing a shower cap?  Is that Bailey…because Bailey told me they brought her somewhere to wash off that last skunk.  She told me it was a lot worse than the bathtub and the baby shampoo and the hydrogen peroxide.  And I don’t smell nearly as [...]