Jim Wellington and a few pals have resurrected a mountain bike trail that heâd etched about 17 years ago in a Goshen woods as it follows the snaking Elkhart River.
He can paddle to the trail across the river from his house, reaching a spot where heâs driven an orange stake to monitor fluctuations in the water level. After all, water affects access. If itâs too high, you canât take the only path riding into the trail: under a bridge. In that case, you can hoof it â though with extreme caution â across busy Plymouth Avenue.
But once youâre there, the two miles of flat trail weave as a quiet reprieve from the busier (and also flat) dirt trails across the river in the cityâs 34.5-acre Dr. Larry Beachy Classified Forest.
The annual Maple Sugar Festival at the Chellberg Farm went virtual this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. See the process of how the syrup is made.
A year after the COVID-19 pandemic derailed most of the annual events and festivals along the Lake Michigan shoreline, a cautious reopening is taking place here in Northwest Indiana and in neighboring Chicago.
The Indiana Dunes National Park, which encompasses 15 miles of the local shoreline, is cautiously moving toward reintroducing its popular annual festivals, said Bruce Rowe, supervisory park ranger/public information officer.
The Maple Sugar Time festival, which has attracted crowds of up to 4,000 people over its two weekends, is being held primarily online this year due to continued concerns about the highly contagious and potentially deadly coronavirus, he said.
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Tyler Spence sets his keister in the dune snow, with a harness around his torso as a taut line rises to a kite perched overhead in a steady wind. Itâs the same sort of kite (more like a sail) that drags surfers across the Lake Michigan chop, which is several yards behind our backs, now a quietly unstable mass of thick, crusted ice.
When ready, Spence rocks up onto his snowboard. Itâs as if heâs taken his foot off of an imaginary brake pedal. The wind propels him toward the slopping dune. I chase after him on my cross-country skis, but Iâm no match. I watch him immediately shrink to the size of an ant, just like the sledders who are picking their slopes around him at Warren Dunes State Park in Sawyer.