Points North

After Traci Lynn Martin’s mom died, she knew she couldn’t keep putting off her dream: Becoming the first person to kayak around the Great Lakes in one year.

Minnesota and Wisconsin are bitter rivals at just about everything. So in 2019, when Wisconsin’s secretary of tourism claimed Wisconsin had more lakes than Minnesota, the embers of an age-old debate were stoked. Minnesota is known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”, but does Wisconsin really have more?

Cougars are making a comeback. The iconic wildcat hasn’t had a breeding population in the Great Lakes states since the early 1900s, but now they’re moving east. Experts say they could be back soon. Some people swear they already are.

Inside rustic cabins and yurts at the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park there are log books. For more than 70 years, visitors have written in them. We went into this time capsule to see if people’s experiences here had changed much over the changing decades.

When a black bear in Minnesota woke up from hibernation in the middle of winter and attacked three people and a dog, researchers were left with one question: Why?

Each Monday on Morning Edition, an IPR journalist brings you up to speed on what’s going on in northern Michigan, and what IPR is working on this week.

Americans stepped up to do something about dying bees. Beekeeping is all the rage right now. But what if all those backyard colonies are making the problem worse?

Erik Grams has been taking trips to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota for over 30 years. It’s his favorite place in the world. But last year, during a fishing trip, there was a fatal accident that left Erik wrestling with his feelings about the place he loved.

Microplastics are everywhere. But after accidentally combining materials in a lab, scientists at the University of Michigan are on the cusp of discovering a new method to capture and remove microplastics from water. Researching it takes time, money, and repeated set backs.

One calm September day, Big Abe LeBlanc set his fishing net in Lake Superior. Then he called law enforcement and turned himself in. What happened next changed fishing in the Great Lakes forever.