The Rake Magazine

Tag: environment

  • Pimp My E-Ride

    John Herou isn’t your typical electric-car ideologue. The founder of e-ride Industries possesses a bright strain of idealism to be sure, but fundamentally he’s a practical man, an inventor and classic car buff, more entrepreneur than tree hugger. The cars he builds, called neighborhood electric vehicles because by law they can go only twenty-five miles per hour and drive on streets with commensurate speed limits, are distinctly Minnesotan. While more common designs tend toward the futuristic, usually resembling a bubble or a jellybean, e-ride’s EXV2 and EXV4 look like small SUVs. They feature rugged tires, optional chrome hubs, plenty of cargo room, abundant panels of shiny aluminum diamond plate, and, of all things, a high payload capacity.

    In fact, if you care to know, Herou’s primary vehicle is a gas-powered Ford F-250 truck. “My dad was a chiropractor in Milaca,” said the sixty-three-year-old Princeton native, wearing khaki pants and a tucked-in shirt. He is somewhat tight-lipped and bashful. “And I was in the electrical industry here for about thirty-five years. I thought it would be fun to build an old replica of a 1932 Ford Roadster for the kids. That’s how it all started.”

    A passerby turned into Herou’s home driveway one day and offered to buy the electric Roadster. Right then, he saw that there was a market for his invention. His first electric cars were golf carts designed to look like classics from the 1930s. They were elegant and upscale, with chrome headlights, baby moon hubcaps, and solid oak drink holders and sweater baskets. He sold them to wealthy people all over the globe, including one to the king of Morocco and four to the Abu Dhabi Golf Club. The slogan was, "For the fun-loving perfectionist who loves a good ride." The description could just as aptly apply to Herou.

    His cars, which come in vivid primary colors, are sturdy, meticulously designed, and also entirely reflective of Herou’s particular tastes. We hopped into a white two-seater EXV2 outside the e-ride offices in Princeton. The car was comfortable, with the pared-down feel of a Jeep Wrangler. Its nine eight-volt deep-cycle batteries, which are stashed in a compartment between the seats, are enough to keep the car moving for fifty-five miles between charges; they also power various accoutrements, such as a horn, windshield wipers, and an optional stereo and heater.

    Herou could hardly wait for me to turn the key. When I did, there was a mere click and a disconcerting silence, as though I’d switched on a toaster. He assured me that the car was indeed running. Then, I made his day by fumbling for the nonexistent gear shifter. “You were reaching for the stick shift,” he said, obviously delighted. With one finger, he flipped a toggle switch on the dash from forward to reverse. Now, I just hit the ga… I mean accelerator? I asked, robbing Herou of an opportunity for further delight. The car moved easily, the only sound being the whine of turning wheels.

    Proponents of electric vehicles like to point out that some of the first cars in America were battery powered and that in the late 1800s, these cars held many of the land-speed and distance records. Through various actions by the oil and auto industries—some call them conspiracies—electric cars were phased out. Then, after a successful experiment in California in the 1990s, recounted in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, they were phased out again. It’s been difficult to build a sustained and cohesive electric-car movement, explained Lee Hart, an engineer and member of the Minnesota Electric Auto Association, a group formed just last year. “If you are interested in electric cars you are an iconoclast,” he said. “We’re like farmers. We’ll trade technical information on how to do things. But when it comes to political action, it goes nowhere. We don’t lobby. We don’t have lawyers.”

    Hart, who can talk for the better part of an hour about battery technology, is on his fourth electric car, a 1980 Renault he converted himself by the curb in front of his house. The car, which is powered by a dozen “plain old lead acid batteries,” was “intended as a short-range vehicle, a get-me-to-work car. I only needed a range of thirty miles or so.” Yet this self-proclaimed evangelist, like other electric-car pioneers toiling away out there, has big plans. He intends to build a vehicle that may go three hundred miles on a single charge. It’s a version of a model designed in the late 1990s called the Sunrise. If all goes well, he will sell the car as a kit—thus avoiding various federal regulations—that the average person could assemble with bolts and a wrench.

    Hardcore enthusiasts sometimes refer to neighborhood electric vehicles or NEVs, a category of automobile created in 1998 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as “glorified golf carts.” But they don’t necessarily mean that disparagingly. “John is doing great work,” Hart said. The problem, if you ask him, rests with the various state legislatures, which have limited the cars to twenty-five miles per hour. “They’ve restricted them to where they can’t be used.”

    More than forty states allow NEVs on public roadways. Minnesota passed its law just last year, thanks to a bill sponsored by Senator Paul Koering. Of e-ride, he said, “They asked me to come over and tour the factory and I was so impressed. They look like little Hummers. I want one!” According to Koering, the legislation generated very little opposition. In fact, at some point the state may offer a tax credit toward the purchase of an electric vehicle (supplementing federal credits). “I’ve gotta tell you, with the new members of the legislature,” he said, “the tone that I’m hearing, people are on the environmental bandwagon. I feel like the pendulum has swung. People are getting more excited about this every day, and rightfully so. None of us are happy with the war in Iraq and we want to see less dependence on foreign oil so we can say to the Middle East, Take your oil and gas and shove it.”

    Indeed, it was after the World Trade Center attacks and the attendant stock-market disaster that Herou’s golf-cart business dried up. “Nobody from overseas was buying anything at that time,” he explained. And so in 2003, with gas prices on the rise, he turned his efforts to electric cars. It was a logical progression. “About eighty-five percent of what we sold had never seen a golf course, anyway,” Herou said, referring to their use in retirement and other planned communities. “Plus, people wanted larger vehicles that would go farther and carry more.”

  • Playground of the Rich

    The iron ore mine in Tower, Minnesota, closed in 1962. Now Tower’s
    major industry is Lake Vermilion, an island-studded jewel and one of
    the last outposts of private property before you arrive at the Boundary
    Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

    Outside Tower, there is a turn to Old Highway 169, and then another
    onto an old logging road that wanders through the Mud Creek basin. This
    is U.S. Steel land, the largest undeveloped area on Lake
    Vermilion—roughly five miles of empty, wild shoreline. The Mud Creek
    basin is a critical wildlife corridor, providing moose, deer, wolves,
    Canada lynx, and cougar a route from the Burntside Lake area to the
    western BWCA.

    John Pahula’s father built a cabin here on land leased from U.S. Steel
    in 1946. John and his two sisters grew up walking a winding, mile-long
    trail with their parents from town to the cabin, where they hunted,
    fished, picked blueberries, cut firewood, and watched the wildlife.
    John, a Finnish bachelor, has lived year round in this idyllic
    seclusion for the last twenty years—until last year. U.S. Steel
    terminated his family’s lease and evicted him. The largest steel
    producer in the country plans to develop the area. As one local
    property-tax assessor said, “We used to mine iron ore, but now we mine
    lakeshore.”

    A little south and west, down on Leech Lake, the rough blacktop of
    Highway 200 winds out of Walker through dense aspen and pine forest.
    Suddenly, the back-roads driver comes upon a new road, one guarded by a
    fake-stone fence and heavy, electronically operated security gates.
    Forest Royal is a new gated community where luxury log homes, starting
    at $1,230,000, dot a grassy glen overlooking Leech Lake. Empty lots of
    3.2 acres with 260 feet of shoreline sell for $800,000.

    Connie Larson owns a cabin next door to Forest Royal—one of those
    rustic, bucolic nests where Minnesota families return generation after
    generation. (She asked that her real name not be used, due to her
    concerns about tax assessor retribution.) Her father, a Minneapolis
    schoolteacher, bought a fifteen-acre lot in 1943 and spent nine days
    and nine hundred dollars building his family’s retreat. Connie’s father
    died in 1980, and not long after, her husband perished in a plane
    crash. Then her mother died. Her younger sister could not afford the
    place, so Connie mortgaged her own home in order to keep the cabin.
    “After so much, I just couldn’t let it go,” she said. “It was the
    center of my family.”

    When homes and lots at Forest Royal came on the market, the local
    assessor raised the estimated market value of Connie’s property from
    $14,300 in 2002 to $74,600 in 2003, an increase of 422 percent. As
    properties at Forest Royal continue to sell, her assessments continue
    to increase. Her tax bills keep pace.

    People like Pahula and Larson represent the past. Minnesota Seasonal
    and Recreational Property Owners, an association of seasonal property
    owners, reports that the average Minnesota cabin has been in constant
    family ownership for twenty-five years. Owners have an average
    household income of fifty-nine thousand dollars. An estimated seventeen
    thousand families in Minnesota fear that they will have to sell their
    cabins in the next three years because they can no longer afford to pay
    their new property taxes. “Most of the local people have been taxed off
    the lake,” said Pahula. “I don’t like it, but what you gonna do? Money
    talks.”

    Minnesota lakeshore is a hot commodity today, with properties averaging
    about a twenty percent increase in value statewide in the last year
    alone. Some values have doubled every year for three years. The stock
    market crash in 2001 and the resulting low interest rates actually
    accelerated the vacation real estate market.

    Minnesota’s property-tax system favors development of lakeshore, rather
    than conservation of it. John James, commissioner of revenue under
    Governor Rudy Perpich from 1987 to 1991, writes in Taxing Our
    Strengths, a road map to property tax reform that was prepared for the
    2000 Minnesota Smart Growth Conference II: “Local units of government
    use zoning and other land-use tools to maximize tax revenues and
    minimize costs, often without regard for the long-term economic,
    social, or environmental consequences.” You can say that again.

    For example, the planned U.S. Steel “Three Bays” project violates local
    authority—particularly Department of Natural Resources regulations
    regarding lakeshore development—but the St. Louis County Board seems
    more than a little sympathetic to U.S. Steel.

    There are sometimes more cautious voices within local governments,
    residents who have the odd idea that the natural quality and integrity
    of the area is worth preserving for future generations. But often the
    drive for development comes from people further up the political
    structure—from the inherent commercial biases of county boards and
    chambers of commerce, to the state’s property tax code itself.

    Rod McPeak, who serves on the Breitung township planning commission,
    said, “Two years ago, Breitung Township put together a land-use plan
    for what we hoped to see as the future of the township”—a plan that St.
    Louis County approved last year. “Development is inevitable, and we’re
    not against it. We just don’t want to destroy the pristine beauty of
    the lake.”
    There is strong evidence to support McPeak’s concerns. In June, 2003, a
    study conducted by the Mississippi Headwaters Board, the Minnesota
    Pollution Control Agency, and Bemidji State University found that, on
    average, a one-meter increase in water clarity increased the value of
    Minnesota lakeshore property—property upon which local tax bases are
    built—by about twenty-five dollars per foot. Conversely, a decrease of
    one meter diminished the value of a foot of lakeshore by about fifty
    dollars per foot. That study found that “While the overall quality of
    Minnesota lakes may be good, lakeshore development has [degraded] and
    continues to degrade lake quality.”

    Well over half of Minnesota’s lakeshore is privately owned, yet current
    tax policies, market pressures, and other destructive incentives
    guarantee that this land will be developed at ever-increasing rates.
    Ironically, development often costs local townships more than they
    regain in a larger property tax base. “The [U.S. Steel] development
    will triple our expenses,” said McPeak. “The first three years will
    bankrupt us.” Regarding his eviction, Pahula said, “At first it was
    sad. Now it don’t bother me much, and I’ll tell you why. The lake is
    only a playground for the rich now. The good old days are done and they
    are gone. That was the last nice part of the lake that was left, and
    now it’ll get all built.”

    Trends in Minnesota’s lake country and forests today are moving away
    from community control, away from promoting historical context and
    continuity between generations, away from connections with places and
    people, away from preservation and protection—in short, away from
    Minnesota’s heritage.

    “Much of the high-quality lakeshore in Minnesota is already developed
    or rapidly being developed,” said Paula West, executive director of the
    Minnesota Lakes Association. “And redevelopment of priority lakes is
    occurring in some parts of the state. Seasonal cabins are being
    replaced with suburban-type homes and lawns, which create more
    impervious surfaces—driveways, roads, and roofs—that increase polluted
    runoff into our lakes.”

    The solution, said West, is for “state and local governments to put
    proper controls for development in place and be willing to enforce
    them.” So far, state government has not been much help. Its minimum
    shoreline management standards were written in 1969 and are woefully
    inadequate. Hence the need for locals to try to strengthen the
    standards for their lakes, although they often lack the power to
    enforce these regulations.

    As for local enforcement, McPeak is alarmed that no one has complained
    to the St. Louis County Board, and by the larger ramifications of this
    passivity. “It is amazing to me that they [the board] hear nothing from
    the people,” he said.  “If U.S. Steel overrides the Breitung plan,
    all local plans are up for grabs.”

    The little cabin by the pristine lake is an endangered species. Without
    drastic changes in Minnesota’s property tax system, and without
    development regulation and a change in development patterns, Forest
    Royal on Leech Lake and Three Bays on Lake Vermilion are Minnesota’s
    future. Lakes are part of our motto, our state quarter, and our license
    plates. They define Minnesota. Nevertheless, that heritage might soon
    be lost to short-term economic gain and long-term economic pain.

  • All Fished Out!

    Some of the landmarks have changed, but eight years ago, directions to the Rainbow Inn were easy: Stay on Highway 169, watch for Wigwam Bay and the Grain Belt beer sign. I found it, pulled in, and walked into the lodge. The light was comfortably dim, slanting in through the row of front windows. A man and a woman were leaning against opposite corners of a blond wood bar; they were silent, but looked up as I entered. My friends had stopped by last year to ask about cabins, I explained, and I was wondering if they had any available for the coming summer. After a few seconds, the woman started to cry.

    I switched gears from oblivious to confused. They had recently decided to sell, the man said in a resigned tone. They just couldn’t make it work anymore. Things were changing too much; people weren’t coming like they used to. I should be able to rent a cabin from the new management later in the season, he added, if I wanted one. I didn’t know what to say, so I left it at “thanks” and left them to their privacy.

    The Rainbow Inn is now gone altogether, but I remember it fondly. I did stay there that summer with a group of friends, and returned several times in later years. This cluster of five tiny white cabins, each with trim painted in a different color of the rainbow, was my scruffy introduction to the classic mom-and-pop resort. My friends and I were late bloomers in regard to the tradition of the Minnesota lake cabin, and we were surprised and a little overwhelmed at the range of options. The large resorts, outfitted with golf courses, convention centers, water parks, and the like, were too elaborate (and expensive) for our liking. Our desires were simple—just a place to sleep while we explored the area—so the Rainbow Inn was the perfect answer. For a modest weekly rate, we could come and go as we liked, cook our own food, and bring along various combinations of family members, partners, friends, and pets.

    Cabin number one was my favorite. It had red trim and a concrete dog statue next to the front door. The dog’s ears had broken off, leaving two rusty antennae, stubs of rebar, sticking out of its head. Mille Lacs Lake sparkled and beckoned beyond, though it was separated from the cabins by the two lanes of Highway 169. Inside, the focus was the kitchen, with its antique refrigerator and tiny gas stove. The table and chairs blazed with the curvy chrome and primary-colored optimism of 1950s-era modernism, but this was no ironic retro rehab. Simply put, the place hadn’t changed for a long time. A diminutive couch and non-functioning TV finished off the main part of the cabin. In the “back” was a compact bathroom, next to a gas space heater and a bedroom that was essentially filled by the sagging bed. Cabin number one and its companions were situated on a short loop drive next to the central lodge building, to which a strip motel had been attached sometime in the fifties.

    Generations of Midwestern families once came to places just like the Rainbow for their summer vacations. Some stayed in the same cabin at the same resort during the same week, year after year. At times, mothers and children would stay all summer, with dad commuting from the Cities on the weekends. For those without the means to purchase their own lake place, resort cabins provided the fishing, swimming, sun, and relaxation without the responsibilities of maintenance. Long a vital part of Minnesota culture and heritage, the cabin “up north” has attained the mythological patina of simpler times—mainly among city dwellers fueled by a Hamm’s beer-sign-tinged nostalgia. And this is only natural, considering that the golden age of the family-run resort has long since vanished.

    My family took long road-trip camping vacations while I was growing up in the seventies. Every summer my parents, brother, grandma, and I would pile into the car, with camper in tow, and head out for weeks. We took scenic routes from the Midwest down to Florida, to Oregon, New England, California—or wherever we wanted. As a young child, I believed that my dad had been everywhere in the world at least once, because he always seemed to know where he was going on these trips. Even when he pulled out a map, I figured he was just refreshing his memory; maybe it had been a while since he’d been in that particular area. In later years, when I helped navigate, I still loved the sense of exploration and discovery, which fueled my curiosity about the world.

    That style of vacation was a novelty to my parents and grandmother, but it was also helping to usher out the heyday of the mom-and-pop resort. Both the road trip and the resort are products of automobile tourism, made possible and promoted by a heavy investment in infrastructure and advertising starting shortly after World War I.

    My friend (and landlady) Neva Bridgwater experienced the growth and decline of the Minnesota resort industry firsthand. Her parents, Howard and Lela Welty, opened the Wigwam Inn on Wigwam Bay of Mille Lacs Lake in the 1930s, when she was a little girl. The vacant woodlot where the resort once stood is just outside my office window, up the bay from the Rainbow Inn’s former location.

    Neva has large, gentle eyes and a quick smile. She is athletic and whipcord thin, the result of a lifetime’s worth of swimming, which began when she fell off a dock at the age of five. Her uncle saw it happen. He said, “Young lady, you’re going to learn to swim!” and taught her on the spot. A friend of Neva’s, Jim Kalk, who ran the Wigwam Inn for a while in the late 1990s, told me that he saw her out in the lake nearly every day it wasn’t frozen. “It made me a little nervous seeing her out there so far. I’d try to keep an eye out while I was working, to make sure I could still see her swim cap above the waves, but she never had any problems.” Neva now lives on the north side of the lake with her newlywed husband, Trevor. When the couple is not elk hunting in the Rockies, they’re busy caring for their horses and building an addition on their home.

    Neva’s parents brought their young family to Mille Lacs in the early thirties from a little town in Iowa. Years of drought had become an increasing burden on their farm, and Howard Welty had always loved hunting and fishing, so he decided to make a living from that. The Weltys first leased the Vineland Lodge, a long-gone resort that was situated at the outlet of the Rum River from Mille Lacs Lake. Howard had a natural talent and love for exploring the lake, and quickly established himself as a fishing guide. After discovering the good fishing up north, on Wigwam Bay, he looked for resort opportunities there.

    Howard inquired about the Kingfisher Lodge, which was located on the bay, but its owner, Earle Brown, wrote that “we are not in a position to lease this property at the present time owing to the fact that we do not know exactly where the new highway is to be located and what effect this new location will have on the property.” Neva still laughs at that letter. Seven decades later, years of uncertainty over a proposed four-lane divided highway once again keeps people guessing about the future of their properties.

    Not long after Brown’s rejection, the lodge immediately south of the Kingfisher went up for sale. The Weltys bought it and expended a lot of elbow grease over the winter. They lived in the lodge and rented out two cabins. At first, they focused mainly on a fishing service. Howard’s reputation as a first-rate guide grew quickly, and he had a steady flow of travelers from his hometown in Iowa. Back then, many farmers had a few weeks of leisure in June. “They didn’t have much to do after the corn was planted,” Neva told me. “Farming is much more diversified now, but at that time it was corn, corn, corn.” With the kids out of school, early summer became the natural time for a vacation. Repeat business became a sure thing, with visitors coming from as far away as Chicago. “Mille Lacs walleye were publicized in Chicago, and many groups would come up just to fish with Dad,” said Neva.

    The biggest challenge at the Wigwam Inn was lodging. With only two cabins, many of their launch customers had to stay elsewhere. The serendipitous solution to the squeeze on accommodations came when a truck driver accidentally crashed into the Kingfisher Lodge. Earle Brown decided not to rebuild, and sold the Kingfisher’s five cabins to the Weltys. They moved them over to the Wigwam Inn and soon built an eighth, the largest, which was always in the most demand.

    Between the fishing opener and Labor Day, running the Wigwam Inn was a twenty-four-hour job. Laundry and housekeeping chores were never-ending, and Neva’s mother ran a lively business cooking breakfast and lunch for the fishermen. The family also stocked a small grocery store in the lodge. In an era before convenience stores, most resorts kept on hand many of the basics that their guests would need. Suppliers of milk, bread, meat, and other staples made deliveries from Brainerd to the area resorts. This was usually a great help, except in 1946 when a Kremey Krust bread truck lost control and crashed into several of the resort’s boats on the beach. (In northwoods lore, there are a lot of runaway automobiles.) The resort also functioned as a gas station, and Gluek’s beer was available on tap in the lodge. The Wigwam Inn’s lodge became a gathering place not just for guests in the tourist season, but for locals year round.

    On top of their duties related to maintaining the resort, Neva and her older brother, Francis, were responsible for entertaining the children of the guests. Some days they were in and out of the lake ten times or more, supervising young swimmers. “The fishermen usually came for three to four days at a time, and then families would start to arrive just after Memorial Day,” she said. “Most would stay for about two weeks. It was fun to get to know the ones who came back year after year.”

    “Getting away from it all” was a Minnesota tradition long before the Weltys founded the Wigwam Inn. From the early days of the Minnesota Territory in the mid-nineteenth century, the northern air was thought to be invigorating and conducive to good health. The Lake Minnetonka area became a popular escape from the summer heat of the Twin Cities by the 1860s, and the rapid growth of railroads extended the possibilities in the subsequent decades.

    As an industry, tourism provided a way to make a living in areas that had once been the domain of loggers and miners, and brought an economic dimension to the scenic beauty of the northwoods. In regions like the Arrowhead, which were still actively being logged, this created a clash of values and bolstered support for the early conservation movements. Then as now, tourists didn’t spend money to make trips of that magnitude in hopes of seeing clear-cuts. Areas like Mille Lacs, in fact, had been logged over several times by the early 1900s. But the second-growth trees still looked like a forest, and anyway the real draw, as it spread through word of mouth in the early and mid-twentieth century, was the fishing.

    While cars did not lead directly to the creation of resorts, burgeoning highway development in the 1920s and 1930s did fuel the development of housekeeping cabins and fishing-launch services across central and northern Minnesota. A tourist brochure from the 1930s announced: “The Scenic and Shortest Route to the North is through the Main Entrance to Paul Bunyan Play Ground at Lake Mille Lacs.” The map on the back points out the advantages of the roads coming north from the Twin Cities. U.S. Highway 169 was “paved to the lake.” State Highway 65 was tarvia (an early road surface using coal tar) “almost to the lake,” while State Highway 56 remained a “good gravel road.” Another brochure from the 1940s assures tourists that “the roads which lead to Mille Lacs from every direction are wide and smooth.”

    Even as roads from the Twin Cities extended farther north, gas rationing during World War II offered an additional boon for Mille Lacs-area resorts. For those who could vacation during the war, Mille Lacs was pretty much as far as they could drive, and continued to mean literally “up north” to many people. Furthermore, gas rationing meant that it simply wasn’t feasible for vacationers to tow boats with them. Not only were Mille Lacs resorts readily accessible from the Cities, but the guests also needed the cabins, food, and fishing service they offered. A brochure produced by the Mille Lacs Lake Association in the 1940s depicts a cluster of eight resorts on Wigwam Bay, including the Wigwam Inn and Vic’s Motel & Resort (later the Rainbow Inn), along with the Shady Knoll Resort, Pirate’s Cove, the Wigwam Bay Resort, Cofield & Whitehead, the Westshore Resort, and the North Star Resort.

    Road development spurred economic development, but it ultimately became a double-edged sword for the resorts. Mille Lacs had never been directly connected to the railroads, and the first highways opened up the west side of the lake, including Wigwam Bay, to tourism like never before. The beach ridges on the western shore have probably always been a natural transportation route: first for foot travel, then for horses and wagons, and finally for motorized vehicles. The speed, noise and traffic volume of a late twentieth century highway were unimaginable to the driver of a Model T on an unpaved road, but those early byways set a precedent. They made the western bays an ideal setting for resorts—accessible yet beautiful. Today, the highway is a barrier between some of the resorts and the shore, although a number have managed to hold on due to the lure of their fishing launches.

    The legacy of Highway 169’s impact on the area is most apparent at Seguchie Resort, on St. Alban’s Bay. Like the former Wigwam and Rainbow inns, it sits on the shore of Mille Lacs Lake, but it is cut off from the water by forty feet of pavement. Red and yellow cabins flank a narrow gravel road that provides access to the resort. This little road is unusual in that it has small but deep ditches on each side, and its own concrete bridge over Seguchie Creek. Owner Dave Kobilka explained that this road was the highway back in the twenties, when the resort was built. Realizing this, it’s easy to visualize the place as it was then, with a playhouse-scale highway doubling as a lane through the rows of cheerful cabins, the smell of fish frying, and the shouts of children running to the shore.

    A likely option for the next phase of Highway 169 reconstruction would move the road farther back from the shores of Mille Lacs, on both Wigwam and St. Alban’s bays. It’s interesting to consider whether the early twenty-first century highway could spark a renaissance of mom-and-pop businesses along the lake, reconnecting the lakeshore resorts with the water.

    Back in the late 1930s, “people would just love to sit and look out the window toward the north and watch the traffic,” Neva said. “It was a big thing then. Now we don’t think it’s so great.” She was talking to Jim Fogerty, who spent much of the 1990s compiling an oral history of the state’s resort industry. A curator at the Minnesota Historical Society, Fogerty selected the Wigwam Inn as a classic mom-and-pop resort case study for his project. Neva was his main source.

    According to Fogerty, the Wigwam Inn is one of two main types of resorts, catering mainly to the fishing crowd, with guests sometimes staying for two, three, or four weeks. The other type has evolved from that mom-and-pop model into a more service- and recreation-oriented complex, with golf, tennis, conference centers, spas, and other amenities. This second type, where guests typically stay for a long weekend, dominates today, with familiar names like Cragun’s, Breezy Point, Izaty’s, and Ruttger’s. The more modest housekeeping resorts are hanging on, but just barely. Clearly, their popularity peaked in during the 1940s and 1950s.

    Still, these older places have made a deep enough imprint on the Minnesota psyche to gain recognition as an integral part of our cultural heritage, warranting stewardship, studies like Fogerty’s oral history project, and even preservation efforts. Today, for instance, a thirties-era trading post is a prominent part of the Mille Lacs Indian Museum. Established by Harry and Jeanette Ayer, it characterizes the entrepreneurial spirit of many early Minnesota resorts.

    The Ayers were licensed traders living among the Ojibwe community at Mille Lacs who in the early twenties purchased land, eleven rowboats, and supplies for building and furnishing tourist cabins. They lived in one of the cabins for more than twenty years, and rented the others to motor tourists and fishermen; the proceeds from the cabins and a dining hall financed the construction of the trading post. The cabins, which eventually numbered around two dozen, were at the center of several related enterprises that employed members of the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe , including a boat works, a maple sugar factory, and a gas station. Wigwams and other traditional Ojibwe structures were built on the grounds, leaving little doubt that seeing “real Indians” was a definite draw in the tourist trade. The trading post was also a de facto community center for the band during this period, and provided an outlet for birchbark crafts, beadwork, and other traditional art.

    The Ayers’ resort and trading post were always full during May, with fishermen doubling up in the cabins and perennially hoping for an early start. In the days before large fishing launches, rowboats were tied together and towed out to the middle of Mille Lacs Lake, where the fish retreated during warm weather. It was common practice at many resorts to send the boats off for the entire day with packed lunches. The motorboat could stay there with them, or go back at dinnertime (or signs of approaching bad weather).

    Along with the trading post, the Minnesota Historical Society preserved several of the Ayers’ tourist cabins and their spartan furnishings. The low-lying beds look rather uncomfortable, and a small wooden table in one kitchen is set with enamelware plates and cups. But all it takes is a glimpse of Mille Lacs Lake through the gingham curtains to remember that the interior of these cabins was hardly the attraction.

    Ruttger’s resort is a short distance northwest of Mille Lacs on Bay Lake. It has operated for more than a century as a family-run business. Jack Ruttger, the grandson of founders Joseph and Josephine Ruttger, was also a primary source for Jim Fogerty’s study, as Ruttger’s is a classic example of that second type of resort—the one that evolved into a major, upscale recreation site. Highway 6, which leads to Ruttger’s, evolved as Highway 169 did at Mille Lacs, but it does not carry as much traffic. Also, the alignment of Highway 6 shifted away from the resort as it was rebuilt over the years, leaving the Ruttger’s cabins in peace. The old mercantile and the filling station along the former highway are now part of the resort, converted into shops and a coffee house, and a new spa continues the tradition of adapting historic buildings for contemporary uses.

    The Ruttgers’ earliest guests came in the 1890s on the railroad to the town of Deerwood, looking to escape the city summer; the first cabin was built in 1901, the same year the first family came for an extended vacation. Jack’s childhood memories of the Great Depression at his family’s resort contrast sharply with Neva’s of the Wigwam Inn. It turns out that even though Bay Lake is only about fifteen miles north of Mille Lacs, auto tourists were only just making it to Wigwam Bay, and so some summers saw a definite shortage of guests at Ruttger’s. They responded by trying to make every guest feel especially doted upon.

    Thus Ruttger’s stayed one step ahead of the changes in American vacation evolution. The 1920s brought a heavy investment in tourist cabin construction, soon followed by a pioneering golf course in the pasture (shared with the cows). Later decades brought tennis courts, an eighteen-hole golf course (minus cows), apartment-style condominiums, and a convention center.

    Meanwhile, at the Wigwam Inn, for example, the wooden boats purchased to replace the ones destroyed in the Kremey Krust disaster marked the end of their era. Aluminum boats were available starting in the 1950s and quickly gained in popularity, and while it would be decades before personal watercraft were substantial enough to tackle Mille Lacs Lake on their own, a trend toward visitors bringing their own boats began.

    Likewise, an RV park became a focus of business at the Wigwam, although the lodge, cabins and the launch remained. Today, the buildings and dock are gone. The former resort is a park-like setting with tall oak, basswood, and ash trees, and the occasional RV electrical hookup sticking up through the grass.

    The improved roads and the end of gas rationing set the stage for the long driving vacations of the late 1960s and 1970s. In my family’s case, if we had approached Mille Lacs on one of our road trips, we likely would have set up our camper at the Wigwam Inn and moved on after a day or two, rather than staying for a week or more, as guests had in the previous era.

    In this sense, the heavy traffic passing the former Rainbow and Wigwam inns becomes a living metaphor. What was once a destination has become a corridor carrying people to other places. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The roads gave the resorts life, at a pause in the moving frontier of highway development. The resorts were inseparable from the highway, and jockeyed for position to be close to it. The ease of their trip was a sure sign of progress to the guests, and they celebrated it along with all else that was “modern.”

  • Buffalo Ridge

    I’d read plenty about Buffalo Ridge, the windiest swath of Minnesota, located in the state’s grassy and treeless southwest quadrant, before I ever got there. I’d heard stories of hats blowing off, of windburn, of tumbleweeds that just kept tumbling. People living in the area are said to suffer perpetual bad hair days. But it was one thing to read about the place and quite another to be there. As I stepped out of my car, the February wind attacked viciously, whipping across my face. I was tempted to crawl back inside and duck for cover.

    But I didn’t. I was there to meet a very important person, Dan Juhl, an early pioneer of wind energy, the man who built the first commercial wind farm in Minnesota. A renowned national expert, he runs DanMar & Associates, a company that consults on matters of renewable energy and conservation, especially wind power.

    Shivering, I stepped inside the firm’s cozy office and immediately revealed myself as an out-of-towner. “Gee,” I said, “it sure is windy.”
    The secretary laughed, her hairdo surprisingly unmussed. “Everybody says that. Today isn’t even that windy.”

    At the moment, it turned out, Juhl was busy talking with a group from another blustery plains state, Nebraska. So Juhl’s twenty-six-year-old son, Tyler, offered to show me around. Tyler is tall and athletic, dressed in jeans and a quilted winter jacket. We walked through the shop, stepping over a pair of giant blades on the cement floor, ready to be installed. That job would likely fall to Tyler, who helps set up new wind turbines. “We do more in the summer,” he said. “Last summer I put up a hundred.”

    We got into Tyler’s truck and started driving. Aside from the modest, peaked-roofed building that houses DanMar & Associates, there was not much to see in any direction except endless corn fields and seventeen tall, sleek, wind turbines.

    Dan Juhl’s wind farm, one of several in the Buffalo Ridge area, is located near Woodstock, on the edge of a zone often referred to as “the Saudi Arabia of wind energy.” The wind here blows in all directions, at most times of the day and night, at an average speed of fifteen miles per hour. There are no obstacles—not a single hill, let alone a mountain—to keep it from spinning those propellers. “There’s nothing out here,” said Tyler. “If I didn’t have this job, there’s no way I’d live here.” As it is, he resides about fifteen minutes from the office, in Pipestone, a bit livelier town than Woodstock, perhaps. Tyler wistfully recalled how he almost got to live in the Virgin Islands. His dad was there, experimenting with solar power. And then, bang, just before the family moved out to join him, Hurricane Hugo hit. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “The Virgin Islands.” He looked across the empty frozen fields of Buffalo Ridge and shook his head.

    The winds are better—more forceful and consistent—in North and South Dakota than in Minnesota, the leading wind power producer in the region. But the Dakotas don’t have the wiring and other infrastructure necessary to send power anywhere. The lines that do exist are decades old and were designed to bring small amounts of energy in. New power lines are expensive, about a million dollars per mile.

    Buffalo Ridge has similar infrastructure issues, though not as severe, and hopefully now quite temporary. Xcel Energy—which has been both friend and foe when it comes to wind power—has cleared the legal and bureaucratic hurdles necessary to embark upon a $160 million project that will further hook Buffalo Ridge into the larger power grid and potentially carry an additional 825 megawatts of energy to the Twin Cities (one megawatt can power up to three hundred homes at a time). Currently, Minnesota wind plants are capable of producing just over 595 megawatts at any given moment, so the additional power lines will make a huge difference. Around 2.5 percent of the state’s energy comes from wind power.

    In the meantime, said Tyler, gesturing to a network of power lines overhead, “All these lines are filled to capacity,” like water pipes that can’t handle another drop. When there’s too much wind, the utility companies have to shut down some of the wind parks—there are almost seven hundred turbines in the state. The producers still get paid, since they typically have a contract with the utility company. “But if you’re an environmentalist, you don’t like to see a hundred turbines shut down on a windy day.”

    Tyler drove up to a cluster of turbines, which resembled giant airplane propellers mounted on towers around two hundred feet tall. In an excited gearhead fashion, he began explaining how they work. It’s simple, really: Turbines have sensors that constantly measure the speed and direction of the wind. The entire turbine can rotate depending on where the wind is coming from, and the individual blades also can tilt to maximize efficiency. As the blades spin, a generator harnesses that kinetic energy and converts it to electricity.

    Tyler unlocked one of the towers and we climbed through a narrow entryway. We were inside a skinny, vertical tunnel, a giant’s drinking straw. A ladder leads to the top, where the turbine is mounted. Tyler climbs this ladder whenever repairs are needed. In the winter, he said, “the biggest problem is icing.” Ice on the blades adds a lot of weight and drag, making the turbines slower and noisier than usual. Normally, they make only a soft whirring sound. Ice buildup is also dangerous because the turbines have been known to fling chunks of ice hundreds of feet. A buddy of Tyler’s recently had his truck totaled by a block of ice that flew from a turbine. “It was pretty wicked,” Tyler said. Fortunately, nobody was in the truck at the time.

    Dan Juhl’s office is housed in a small, one-story building heated by a corn-burning stove and powered independently of the local utility company. When he first built on the property, he was told that he’d have to pay $7,500 for a power line. Juhl more or less told the utility company to go to hell. Instead, he wired the place himself, gathering energy from his wind turbines, along with solar panels. The building is entirely self-sufficient, and Juhl hasn’t paid an electric bill in years.

    I asked Tyler how they keep the lights on and the computers running when the wind isn’t blowing. It’s a common question. Xcel spokesman Paul Alderman and others have suggested that the main problem with wind power is that wind is intermittent. “If there’s a demand for electricity and the wind stops blowing,” Alderman said, “we have to fire up other power plants to make up the difference.”

    Tyler explained away those concerns. He said that, at least as far as the DanMar office is concerned, there are a pair of batteries that store extra energy. “We can go three days without sun or wind,” he said, pointing out that such a scenario is quite unlikely, that usually there is one or the other, and often both. Theoretically, the same sort of storage technologies could be used on a larger scale to cover cities during calm days. And, besides, what’s so awful about having to power up an existing nuclear or coal plant once in the while, if we get environmentally friendly energy most of the time?

    Solar energy could be used to pick up some of the slack as well. And though solar panels are currently quite expensive, Juhl expects that the price will drop as the technology catches on. The same happened with wind power. It used to be pricey to produce. The equipment was expensive to build, the machines were primitive and inefficient, and wind power was being utilized on too small a scale to be cost-effective. But now, the cost is comparable to that of producing more traditional forms of energy, like coal.

    Wind power has become such a moneymaker, in fact, that out-of-state companies are moving in and now own about ninety percent of the wind production facilities in Minnesota. Until recently, the biggest holder was Enron, but as that company self-destructed, General Electric bought out all its wind farms, including those on Buffalo Ridge.

    In the early nineties, those companies began paying farmers for the right to build and operate wind turbines scattered about on small sections of their farms—up to two thousand dollars per year per turbine. The farmers, struggling merely to stay alive, were thrilled. Many of them made more per year on these wind deals than they did from their crops. Nobody knew then how profitable wind energy, which big power companies are obligated to purchase, would become. Now many farmers are hoping to finance their own turbines.

    They are a market Dan Juhl hopes to serve. His company is now focused on helping local owners set up personal wind farms. That’s not to say that Juhl isn’t friendly with larger corporations, too. His goal is to promote renewable energy in whatever manner he can, and to ensure that it is widely available as soon as possible, especially as global oil reserves run dry.

    Dan Juhl, a native Minnesotan, got renewable energy fever in the late seventies, after a global oil crisis left people waiting in line for hours to get gas. “I actually started just after Tyler was born,” he told me, in his naturally low-key manner. “It might have been a subconscious thing, just the thought that there has to be something better than this, there has to be a better way than the way we’re doing things.” He worked with others in the industry to design and build some of the first wind turbines. At the time, he says, “They seemed gigantic. By today’s standards, of course, they were very small.”

    He got all the usual flack. People—friends, politicians, potential financial backers—thought he was out of his mind. He said it was that sort of skepticism that doomed North Dakota, for example, which could have been a wind power leader. “For years they pooh-poohed the idea of wind power, because of the politics of the coal companies,” he said. “And now they’re crying.” With Minnesota so far ahead, largely thanks to Juhl, he doesn’t see much chance of North or South Dakota ever catching up. Since Minnesota has the potential to generate seventeen times more power from wind than we would ever likely consume, it’s improbable that major urban areas like the Twin Cities or Chicago would turn to the lagging Dakotas to meet their wind energy needs.

    Of course, Minnesota is far from tapping its full potential. It is, however, making good headway. The state is the third largest wind-power producer in the nation, after California and Texas. “Environmentalists would like to see it all done at once,” said Juhl. “I’m more practical. Do it slowly; make sure it’s done right.”

    Juhl knows what he’s talking about. He’s seen plenty of examples of blocked efforts, screw-ups, and stupidity. During the wind craze of the early 1980s, he briefly lived in California. Wind production at the time cost around thirty-eight cents per kilowatt-hour—more than thirteen times what it costs now, and quite a bit more than it cost then to produce a kilowatt-hour by more traditional means. But the government was trying to be progressive, so it subsidized wind power with huge tax breaks. Unfortunately, the breaks were based on how much an investor spent, rather than how much energy was produced, so building the most efficient systems was not the priority. There were also environmental problems. For example, many turbines were placed along migratory paths, and birds were being chopped to pieces by the machines’ blades.

    In 1986, the investment tax credits program expired, so California investors dropped wind power and moved on to the next fad.
    By that time, Northern States Power Company, now Xcel Energy, was running three tiny turbines in Minnesota, on Buffalo Ridge. The turbines were a fraction of the size of the latest models and could kick out a maximum of only sixty-five kilowatts each (today’s turbines produce about twenty-five times that). NSP also participated in an early government study that pinpointed Buffalo Ridge as Minnesota’s prime spot for wind energy.

    Though NSP showed early interest in wind power, the company ultimately opted to play it safe. “It’s quite easy to throw vast sums of money at high-visibility, high-glitz programs that merely make rates go higher and higher,” a company spokesman told the Star Tribune in 1992. “We don’t want to be leading-edge on some of these, but we don’t want to be left behind, either.”

    Where NSP saw hassle, Dan Juhl saw potential and moved back to Minnesota in the late 1980s. In 1992, he constructed the state’s first commercial wind farm, setting up five turbines outside Marshall. The local city government agreed to buy the energy. The power still cost two to three times what it does today, but, as Juhl explained, “Cost-effective can mean different things. Some people spend thirty thousand dollars on a boat and a motor they use twice a year. Or twenty thousand dollars on a diamond.” Wind power was something Juhl believed in, and unlike NSP, he was confident that it would soon be profitable.

    NSP quickly jumped back into the game, but some would say for the wrong reasons. In 1994, the company used wind power as a bargaining chip in an attempt to convince the Legislature to allow it to store nuclear waste in outdoor casks at its Prairie Island nuclear power plant near Hastings. A contentious, high-profile political battle ensued, the utility company on one side and environmentalists and American Indians living near Prairie Island on the other.

    In the end, the Legislature granted NSP the right to fill up to seventeen casks. But for every cask of waste, NSP would have to donate half a million dollars a year to a renewable energy development fund—meaning that by the time all seventeen were full, the company would be paying $8.5 million per year. On top of that, NSP was required to generate a minimum of 425 megawatts of wind energy at any given time by the end of 2002. The Legislature also said that if by 2002 the Public Utilities Commission, the federal agency that oversees the nation’s power supply, had determined wind power to be a cost-effective source of energy, NSP would have to increase its wind energy capacity by four hundred megawatts by 2012. Finally, NSP officials had to promise never to ask permission to store more nuclear waste—a promise they would break in 2003.

    As far as wind energy was concerned, the deal worked wonders. Minnesota became the national leader in new wind tower installations. As people experimented and learned the finer points, the technology improved, and the cost of producing power declined dramatically. Wind farms proved to be an economic boon to the rural communities that hosted them, creating construction jobs, filling bars and hotels with out-of-town contractors, and even drawing a small trickle of curious onlookers.

    Wind energy’s biggest problem to date is how to transport the power from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. Thanks to shortsightedness or carelessness or even defiance, the necessary wiring wasn’t being constructed along with the towers. “NSP should have known,” said Juhl. “They were putting out these contracts to satisfy the Prairie Island agreement. I’m not sure if they didn’t think it would be as successful or what, but for whatever reason, ten years later they don’t have a way to get the power out of here.” Xcel plans to start construction this year on new power lines out of Buffalo Ridge. This is promising, but the lines should have been built years ago.

    One can’t help feeling the company is a chronic foot-dragger on innovation in the area of renewable energy. For instance, in 1999, when the PUC finally declared wind energy cost-effective, meaning that NSP would have to increase its investment in this energy source, Jim Alders, the company’s manager of regulatory projects, called the decision “a mistake.” Still, activists like Michael Noble, the executive director of Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy, admit the company has made progress—but only because it had to, when the state took the company by the collar. “They keep proving they need to be pushed along step by step,” Noble said. Since wind energy has now become cost-effective, he said he feels as though he’s battling inertia. “Sometimes it seems like it just comes down to old-time utility culture, like, ‘We burn stuff for a living, and what are we going to burn next?’”

    Noble lamented that “Denmark today gets twenty percent of their total energy from wind power. It’s much, much windier here, and wind power is much more cost effective here. But they have public policy that nurtures it along, and we have roadblocks.”

    Juhl is more optimistic, as inventors so often are, as they have to be in order to envision bold solutions. Things could be better, sure. But “Minnesota is doing well,” he told me. “We’re developing our own resources and keeping a lot of those development dollars within the state.”

    And lawmakers may give renewables another boost: In March, two DFL legislators proposed a bill that would require the state to get twenty percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

    Wind power eventually will be a necessity, said Juhl. “More and more utilities are switching to natural gas. Well, the experts say that will run out in twenty to thirty years, and what then?” That, according to Juhl, is when renewable energy will take over.

    “We only have ‘cheap’ energy because we’re not putting the real cost on the table,” he said. “Everybody says coal is so cheap, but you look at the smog, the acid rain, the lung disease, and global climate change—put a value on that. We don’t put that in the electric bill. If we did, if we put the real price of energy on the table, renewable energy would be hands-down the winner.”

  • Now You See It…

    Lynx number one was a hard-luck kitten. He was barely a year old, in March 2003, when he walked into a box-like trap near Isabella, deep in the Superior National Forest. Isabella is an old logging village bisected by Highway 1 as it slices inland from Lake Superior to Ely. Beyond the village is a small network of forest roads and great patches of spruce, pine, and balsam. It’s wild and dense country that few humans ever see. This vast forest, interspersed by small, alder-choked streams and rocky lakes, is one of the areas in northeast Minnesota that biologists have recently focused on in their search for lynx in Minnesota. Lynx One’s trap was like those used by urban trappers to catch dogs harmlessly.

    Although evolution had molded Lynx One, with his long back legs and fur-padded feet, to have a special taste for snowshoe hare, his trap was baited with beaver meat. Only L1, which is how history remembers him, knew what that trap door slamming shut in the woods sounded like. When researchers got to him a few hours later, they used a syringe on a pole to dose him with ketamine hydrochloride and xylazine hydrochloride. One of the side effects of the sedatives, commonly used by neighborhood vets, would be to fuzz over the sharp edges of any bitter memory of the experience. They also allowed the biologists to handle him: First they slipped a hood over his head to protect his eyes. Then they weighed him, measured him, sexed him, and aged him. They also removed a skin plug from an ear—a sample for a DNA record—and fitted him with a battery-operated radio collar. When the wild cat was done being manhandled he was injected with antibiotics. It’s a rough life being a young male lynx in Isabella.

    When he was released, L1 shot away from his captors like a cat out of hell. But records show he didn’t go far. His radio collar allowed him to be repeatedly located in a small area around Isabella during a three-week period. If you care to be anthropomorphic, you might say L1 wasn’t just sulking. He was carefully considering his options in the face of a cruel world. Then he decided. He was a young cat. The world was big. No way was he being drafted into a twisted human research project. L1 set out on his immense journey. Traveling more than a hundred miles, crossing streams and lakes and clawing through the great Boundary Waters blowdown of 1999, he didn’t rest until he’d crossed into Canada. During this trip, which biologists call a dispersal, L1 was lost to radio contact. He may, like the lynx photographed last summer at a Saginaw Lake campsite, have passed close to human visitors on his journey. And like all lynx, except during mating season in January, he traveled alone. He often hunted, failed, and was hungry. But he found enough prey—hare, squirrels, grouse—to sustain him. He was located again by biologists later in the spring when he settled into a new area deep in Ontario. After that, airborne radio trackers kept him on the air all summer and into the fall.

    Then, on November 28, L1 blundered into another trap. This time he died. Or, as biologists say, he was harvested.

    In Ontario, it is legal to hunt lynx. In Minnesota, it is not. In fact, it is illegal throughout the lower forty-eight states. In 2000, the Canadian lynx (the scientific name is Lynx canadensis) was given threatened status under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. This was the result of five lawsuits filed by a group called the Defenders of Wildlife. A flurry of funding for studies of the mysterious cat followed. L1’s northward dispersal is emblematic of the evolving state of knowledge regarding lynx.

    “It’s normal for them to disperse, but the conventional wisdom is that they disperse from Canada south,” said Ron Moen, a biologist involved in the first radio collar study, which was conducted by the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. “The conventional wisdom says our animals should not be going to Canada. We don’t know why L1 went north.”

    Conventional wisdom regarding lynx in Minnesota is amorphous at best. Some believe there are a few itinerant migrants from Canada that may be traveling through northeast Minnesota. Others think Canadian-born animals may come to Minnesota in the height of winter to breed. Others say lynx have never been particularly rare in Minnesota, they’re just too stealthy to be seen. Those beliefs, so far based primarily on intuition and anecdotal evidence, don’t add up to much. Biologists, woods workers, and environmentalists are an independent-thinking lot. With no solid science until the last four years, the state of the lynx in Minnesota has been more opinion than fact.

    In the human world, we often arrive at larger truths by “following the money.” In the animal world, the focus is on food sources. Like any predator, lynx are inextricably linked to their primary prey. Wildlife biologists says that when populations of snowshoe hare are low in prime Canadian lynx habitat, younger cats like L1 range farther afield. They disperse south, to what has been thought to be less desirable habitat, and take up temporary residence in Minnesota. All species of predators disperse from their place of birth in search of new territory with good habitat, minimal competition, and adequate prey. If they find it, they thrive. If they don’t, they die. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of how privatizing property—putting up fences and building roads—compartmentalizes nature, and limits the movements of flora and fauna. But this is not yet a problem in northeastern Minnesota.

    The question then becomes: Does Minnesota really have a permanent lynx population? Or are the few that are padding around the north woods just tourists—lost anomalies wandering far from home?

    In the mid-nineties, that was the million-dollar question. Even people who spend lots of time in the forest, like hunters and trappers, weren’t seeing lynx. Maybe the rare track or two, but rarely a living, breathing cat. Based partly on those practical observations, Minnesota’s hair snare project was born in 1999. The snare involved a Velcro-like pad baited with catnip and castor oil. Hundreds of shiny pie tins were placed on a grid pattern across a small portion of the woods. The tins would pique the cat’s curiosity and lynx would, scientists speculated, come to rub against the deliciously scented pads. Hair left on the pads would have been sent to a lab and analyzed for DNA—if there had been any. None was collected. The conclusion many biologists officially endorsed: There were no lynx in Minnesota.

    Whether or not lynx are a functioning part of life’s web in northeastern Minnesota has institutional and social implications. If there are lynx they must be managed and, most likely, protected. Management means gearing up scientific and regulatory bureaucracies. Protection may have significant implications for land use. At least this is the typical human scramble to get on the case—and the most responsible one, knowing what we now do about how human behaviors impact nature, even at a great distance.

    But there are also aesthetic, even spiritual, issues at play. If the lynx is as much a part of northeastern Minnesota as the loon, wolf, and lichen, then those who gather deeper meaning from visiting these wilderness areas must value the wild cat on its own terms, as they do those other creatures. This duality lies at the heart of any serious conversation about human stewardship: We must protect these resources for ourselves and for themselves.

    That the lynx has not achieved the poster– child status of the loon or wolf has to do with the lack of scientific understanding, as well as institutional inertia. Quoted in the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer one month before L1 was trapped, Paul Burke, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said, “I think we have a very small number, but we do have some lynx. We may even have some reproduction, but that doesn’t make it a viable population.”

    “Not a viable population” is a sort of purgatory into which another one of Minnesota’s feline predators has been cast. It’s an imprecise term, but it is what biologists say about mountain lions in Minnesota. For example, even after hundreds of accidental but confirmed sightings of adults and kittens, state and federal biologists insist that Minnesota’s mountain lion population is not viable. Since the population is “not viable,” they don’t take a closer look, because that could lead to a legal status as threatened or endangered. Government agencies—not to mention private business interests—don’t want another endangered species. Among other things, it raises the specter of the timber wolf, which, following its listing as endangered, was studied by a generation of scientists for a quarter of a century at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. Mountain lions linger in nonviable status. Environmentalists weren’t about to let the lynx languish there, though.

    Burke’s comments were controversial, the more so because they came in the wake of the lynx finally being listed as threatened—in other words, the judgment was made that there actually was a viable population, and that it needed protection. It was a victory for activist groups like Defenders of Wildlife, but federal officials still seemed to be refusing to believe it. Mike Leahy, a biologist for the Defenders, saw Burke’ s comments as the rear guard of a lost battle.

    “We sued the Fish and Wildlife Service five times and won every time,” he said. “In spite of their mandate to protect species, federal agencies sometimes fear the implications of carrying out their duty with a listing. In the fifth lawsuit, though, even FWS scientists acknowledged that listing was warranted.”

    So what happened to overturn the previous conclusions? How had scientists failed to find lynx others were so certain were here? It is now widely assumed that the hair-snare study, which failed to find any cats in 1999, worked elsewhere in the country, but for some unknown reason didn’t work in Minnesota. The main reason that assumption is made is because, while the scientists’ snares did not capture any lynx hair, ordinary Minnesotans were seeing and photographing lynx. People who spend a lot of time in the woods were reporting growing numbers of snowshoe hare. Was there a connection between an upswing in the hare population and more lynx sightings?

    Ed Lindquist, a U.S. Forest Service biologist, decided there must be a common-sense approach to the growing evidence of lynx in the north woods. Lindquist began an old-fashioned lynx tracking program in the winter of 2001-2002. His idea was that if experienced trackers found lynx prints in the snow, and followed them backward, they would find what the hair snares failed to find: hair or droppings. Both would contain DNA. Lindquist’s tracking team started late the first winter, but they found more lynx sign than expected. The following winter they found more.

    “We’ve identified between fifty and sixty unique individuals,” Lindquist told me in August 2003. “We only surveyed about ten percent of the forest, so we believe there are lots more out there.”

    Lindquist’s team found more lynx, in part, because he looked in a way no one had previously. But he also likely found more because when snowshoe hare are abundant, lynx tend to have larger litters of kittens, and the kittens have a greater chance of surviving to adulthood. Although little is known about lynx in Minnesota, females appear to have their kittens in dens, often in hollow logs. Where lynx have been studied, they have between one to five kittens. If it’s true that lynx rely on snowshoe hare, and they thrive when their prey thrives, then there are still plenty of hare to support above-average lynx birth rates.

    When lynx kittens are grown, at about two years old, they weigh from twenty to forty pounds and are brown to gray on top with a gray to white belly. Not much is known about the size of a lynx’s territory: Canadian researchers have documented territories ranging from four square miles to one hundred square miles.

    Lindquist has much to say about the embryonic understanding of Minnesota’s lynx population and the advanced technologies used to study it. Even microscopic DNA work is more mutable then you might expect. “The lab has taken another look at the genetics and taken more strict rules in determining what constitutes an individual,” he told me last year, regarding the numbers of individuals his tracking team had located. “So our numbers were reduced slightly under these new rules.” Scientific understanding of evolution and short-range patterns can be like trying to get into a moving vehicle. However, there is now a generally set scientific assumption that lynx and snowshoe hare numbers, like many things in Minnesota’s northern boreal forest, ebb and flow in cyclical patterns. Lynx populations are thought to crest just behind the hare population’s peak. Declining hare numbers, it is believed, will drag lynx down with them. But nobody has watched closely before. It’s unclear what population peaks look like.

    When Burke grudgingly acknowledged there were a few lynx in Minnesota three years ago, he also said the hare were at their peak. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources biologists, who tabulate lynx sightings in Minnesota, said the same thing last year. Catching the peak of a population cycle is like corporate revenue forecasting. Reality is recorded well after the fact.

    “We’ve had a fairly high hare population for some time,” said Ron Moen, the NRRI biologist involved in the first radio-collaring project. “Some people say it’s starting to go down, or has been declining, for a while. But it varies in different parts of Northern Minnesota. It’s hard to pinpoint whether we’re down this year or next year.”

    During the few years that wildlife biologists have tuned their radar to lynx, they have gradually refined their research methodology. First there was the hair snare. Ed Lindquist and his tracking team followed. Now a team of agencies and biologists, along with a little financial help from Defenders of Wildlife, are concentrating their efforts on more NRRI collaring studies. Accuracy of scientific knowledge is often a function of how long research studies are conducted, and this is especially the case with lynx. “The research going on through NRRI is going to be extremely valuable because it will help us determine if lynx persist in Minnesota through the low part of the hare cycle,” said Phil Delphey, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Minneapolis. “What NRRI is doing is really exciting.”

    When L1 took his long journey north, he was a lone ping in the wilderness. Since then, NRRI biologists have captured, collared, and released fourteen more lynx between Ely and Grand Marais. They’ve also added a satellite tracking component to some radio collars. These GPS collars allow the biologists to locate a lynx four times a day. The result is a fairly precise understanding of what kinds of habitat lynx hunt and sleep in.

    The data so far is a fairly raw conglomeration of details as meaningful, and puzzling, as L1’s journey. For instance, a mature female, L3, took a similar trip. She traveled northwest and disappeared. Her collar, but not her body, was discovered far from where she was originally trapped.

    “We haven’t had most of them on the air long enough to determine the home range, but the ones that we have had on the air for several months seem to have some boundaries they stay within,” the NRRI’s Moen said. “On the other hand, three of them have made an exploratory movement outside of those boundaries. Biologists don’t know why they do this. Hopefully, we will have some answers by the time this study is done.”

    The collars have given the researchers a license to act the voyeur. L5 and L7 spent an inordinate amount of time together in February, according to records. The talk around the office was that there had been a liaison. Kittens arrived in May or early June, and the NRRI was able to photograph them and post pictures on its website.

    Another interesting collateral truth confirmed by the most recent round of studies is that bobcats (Felis rufus) roam the north woods. Bobcats don’t have the big padded feet and long back legs that make lynx specialists at catching hare in deep snow. Beyond that, though, they look a lot like lynx, with only slight differences in ear shape and tail color.

    There probably aren’t many bobcats in northeastern Minnesota, either, but two were captured in box traps in early April 2004. Both were given radio collars. Earlier, some DNA collected in the wild confirmed that there are at least two animals in Northern Minnesota that are what biologists are calling lynx-bobcat hybrids. Until very recently, biologists had not known mating occurred between the species. It was thought their territories rarely, if ever, overlapped.

    In fact, one of the NRRI study’s explicit goals is to try to understand the relationship between lynx and bobcats. Some environmentalists say bobcat populations are increasing because logging roads provide them with access into new areas. They say logging roads give the presumably alien bobcat an advantage. But at least one member of Ed Lindquist’s tracking team has seen lynx using logging roads. It is possible that lynx and bobcats have always intermingled.

    The matter of roads and habitat is not insignificant. With the Endangered Species Act listing, the Fish and Wildlife Service will be required to put together a recovery plan for the lynx. A recent sixth court victory by Defenders of Wildlife requires the federal government to designate critical lynx habitat before anybody really knows what it is, says Phil Delphey of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Critical habitat is the mix of habitat lynx need to feed, rest, and procreate successfully. Since it has barely been acknowledged that there are lynx in Minnesota, it may be presumptuous, at this point, to say what is ideal habitat for the species.

    “Good lynx habitat is good snowshoe hare habitat,” Phil Delphey said. “Good habitat for snowshoe hare, beyond the issue of deep north woods snow, is habitat with a lot of stems. They like any kind of dense shrubs or dense tree regrowth. One type of potential habitat would be new growth after logging or fire. They can also prosper in old growth areas where trees have fallen and new growth starts. The blowdown in the Boundary Waters might be good snowshoe hare habitat.”

    Having said that, Delphey, like L1 on his solitary journey northward, quietly questions the heart of conventional wisdom on lynx. Snowshoe hare, he asserts, may not be as central to a lynx diet, and thus its survival, as is currently believed
    “A lot of people think lynx may not be well adapted to prey on anything other than snowshoe hares, but there’s at least one study that shows that lynx are able to switch pretty readily to prey on red squirrels,” he said. “Good red squirrel habitat is different than good snowshoe hare habitat, but those habitats can intermingle in patches.”

    Delphey said his agency isn’t in any position to say what critical lynx habitat would look like. Neither does the agency have the knowledge to say what a healthy population of lynx, one that wouldn’t require protection under threatened status, would look like. Since the court has ordered critical habitat designation, however, the Fish and Wildlife Service will proceed.

    “They were supposed to designate critical habitat when they listed in 2000,” Defenders of Wildlife biologist Leahy said. “We’ve been pushing them for ten years, saying that’s what they should be doing. They are charged with Endangered Species and they have the authority to err on the side of caution.”

    Leahy’s organization says the bulk of lynx habitat, both in Minnesota and elsewhere in the country, is on public lands. Pressures for public land use, such as recreation and logging, are getting in the way of following the law, they say. Defenders of Wildlife say clear-cut logging, and the road-building it necessitates, along with overzealous fire suppression, have been destructive to both snowshoe hare and lynx habitats.
    Defenders literature says, “Snowmobiling is of particular concern due to the compact trails that crisscross the landscape in the winter months. These trails allow coyotes and bobcats to reach areas that they were once unable to access. As a result, the lynx now must compete for the snowshoe hare, thus reducing their main food source.”

    Many environmental organizations believe that recreational and industrial demands on public lands are keeping the FWS from exercising its statutory obligation. The government biologists, on the other hand, assert that the environmentalists have been trying to move too quickly these last ten years. Privately, at least one biologist asserted the organizations exaggerate the threatened nature of the species to build support for their organization.

    Everybody, however, appears to be pleased with the direction of the NRRI study. Results produced by L1 and other radio-collared lynx may provide some answers, and lower the acrimony between the humans.

    Last May, three radio-collared female lynx had kittens in Minnesota. One litter had five, another had three, and the third had two.

  • Feeling Minnesota, Looking Nebraska

    Illustration by Christopher Henderson

    I’m going to miss Minnesota—not because I’m going away, but because Minnesota is. The north woods? There’s a fairly good chance I will outlive them. A walk through the spruce, the cry of a loon—a lot of experiences we think of as quintessential Minnesota may disappear. Or emigrate to Canada.

    In February of 2000, the American Birkebeiner, the largest cross-county ski race in North America, was canceled for lack of snow for the first time in its 30-year history. Although the region of northwest Wisconsin that’s home to the Birkie received 16 inches of snow in the week leading up to the race, that winter wonderland was liquefied by four subsequent days of rain and warm winds. Pastor Lynn Larson of Cable, Wisconsin, remembers the week well. “We had a snowman holding a pair of skis outside our church at the beginning of the week,” he says. “By the middle of the week, we replaced the skis with an umbrella.”

    A direct son of Norway via eight immigrant great-grandparents, Larson has skied the marathon 17 times. That year, he watched thousands of crestfallen skiers—nearly half of whom had come up from the Twin Cities—trudge around Hayward with a sour look on their faces. “That really got the wheels turning for me,” he says. “I’m convinced that this is all related to climate change—the greenhouse effect.”

    Worried that the Birkie was in jeopardy, Larson started a group called Cross Country Skiers for Global Cooling. To join, members must take “the patriot’s energy pledge,” vowing to conserve energy and do whatever they can to minimize their own greenhouse emissions. Forty people have joined this very loose club, which, as it turns out, is mostly about the nifty T-shirts.

    Many winter-lovers in the upper Midwest believe that the halcyon days of consistent cold and snow in the region are behind us. The state of Wisconsin seems to agree; Tourism Secretary Kevin Shibilski recently announced plans for a program that will offer loan guarantees to businesses that depend on snowmobiling or cross-country skiing in low-snow years.

    Ahvo Taipale has run a cross-country ski shop in the Twin Cities since 1973 and is widely seen as the dean of Minnesota cross-country skiing. He says that Minnesota and western Wisconsin used to get fairly consistent snow. Until the mid-1980s, when warming spells began forcing event organizers to cancel ski races. “In particular, the last five years have been very weird,” he says. Another telling phenomenon: He says he can be fully stocked with new equipment an entire month and a half later than he could 10 or 20 years ago.

    A look back at the record with longtime Birkie staffer Shellie Milford seems to underscore Taipale’s anecdotal and personal take on the trends: Half of the races in the last ten years have been characterized by challenging snow conditions. In the previous decade, four races lacked snow or cold compared to only one race in the Birkie’s first decade.

    It’s not just the carbo-loading set that’s starting to worry. On the motoring side of things, it’s also been tough sledding for the past five years. Pete Bohlig sells recreational vehicles for the Hitching Post in South St. Paul. With the less reliable snow he’s seen lately, he sells a lot more four-wheeled ATVs than snowmobiles. “If I had a nickel for every time someone tried to trade in a sled for an ATV, I’d be a rich man,” he says.

    John Prusak, editor of several national snowmobiling magazines, says one should take such doom-and-gloom talk with a grain of salt, noting that the industry has gone through six distinct boom-bust cycles in the last 30 years. Snowmobile sales follow snowfall more closely than they do the economy, and the industry did very well in the upper Midwest as recently as 1998, he says.