The village continues to grow

Looking toward L'Anse and the Huron Mountains from the Baraga side of the Bay

While the rest of the country freaks out over Winter, local fishermen are rejoicing. I think there are fishing shacks out on Keweenaw Bay that hadn't been on the lake since the 1990s. There's also been a flurry of new construction. This isn't the area where the S.O. and his friend go fishing. They're more adventurous, more nomadic. They use tents and tend to head farther north up the bay past the Sand Point lighthouse.

The power plant putting out the plume of smoke is the J. H. Warden biomass plant. It started off as a coal-fired plant, got converted to gas, was mothballed for awhile, and now burns "biomass," an interesting term for shredded railroad ties and other weirdness. Oh, they also burn fresh wood chips, but for awhile it seemed like it was all old creosote-soaked railroad ties all the time. There's nothing quite like being downwind from a plant burning creosote-soaked wood chips to make a person start wondering just how many lies got told during the permitting process. Every time I catch a whiff of it, I'm glad we live way back up in the hills, just over the horizon, instead of in town.

And what is Winter looking like at our place? About the same as it did the last time I put up a grader photo. This one's from this morning:

Our snow levels haven't changed much. We got about 8 inches of fresh fluff overnight, but the stuff on the ground has been settling so it's still not super deep. I doubt if it's much over 30 inches, although the S.O. swears it's at least 3 feet.