Two sites in UP classified as Historic Places

By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — Two Upper Peninsula sites have been added to the National Register of Historic Places– one culturally important to members of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and the other related to a strike important to labor and women’s history. Rice Bay in Gogebic County is a traditional wild rice-growing area covering a quarter-mile-square on northeastern Lac Vieux Desert, a lake straddling the Michigan-Wisconsin border. And the 128-year-old Braastad-Gossard Building in downtown Ishpeming served as a department store and a factory that manufactured women’s undergarments before being renovated for an interior mall and offices. “The National Register is the official list of the nation’s historic places worthy of preservation,” according to the National Park Service, which administers the program. Lac Vieux Desert is the headwaters of the Wisconsin River, and most Michigan wild rice sites are within 10 miles of the state border.

Deadline looms to remove private camps from Ottawa National Forest

FORESTCAMPS
By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — With 104 long-time leaseholders seeking an extension of their right to keep hunting and vacation camps in the Ottawa National Forest, the Senate wants the federal government to grant them a reprieve. An extension also has backing from a Western Upper Peninsula filmmaker whose new documentary highlights the history and traditions of the camps and the dispute over their future. But the U.S. Forest Service says the law is clear that the leaseholders — who signed non-renewable 25-year agreements to abandon their one-acre lots by Jan. 1, 2017 — must leave. By then.

Judge OKs national forest land swap in the UP

By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING – Rejecting objections by two environmental groups, a judge has cleared the way for the U.S. Forest Service to swap 240 scattered acres of federal land in parcels for a 421- acre piece of privately owned land in the Upper Peninsula bordering Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. U.S. District Judge Robert Bell ruled that the Forest Service had followed proper procedures in approving a controversial land exchange in Ottawa National Forest. It is the only Ottawa National Forest land swap to be challenged in court, said Ian Shackleford, the forest’s acting public affairs officer. Shackleford said the 421-acre area will be part of a management area that emphasizes “semi-primitive non-motorized recreation. Visitors can enjoy remoteness and solitude while visiting the area for hunting, camping, hiking or other activities.”
Ottawa National Forest covers about 1 million acres in the western U.P.
Two conservation organizations – Partners in Forestry Cooperative and Northwood Alliance – and seven individuals who use that part of the Ottawa sued to block the deal, arguing that the deal “will trade away old-growth, hemlock, cedar stands and related wildlife habitat and will remove from public ownership unique and rare geographic features, including Wildcat Falls, Scott and Howe Creek, bluffs and ledges and other special parts of the public lands.”
The land the Forest Service would get from owners Robert and Lisa Delich “offers little incentive to use, as the timber was recently cut very heavily and offers little in aesthetic value or other features to attract the public,” and “improper forestry practices had occurred,” the challengers’ lawsuit contends.