A Day in the Life of a family at Le Bear Resort

Glen Arbor Sun

For Marty and Judy Ulrich, Le Bear Resort seemed too good to be true. How else could the couple from downstate Grand Blanc, with three busy daughters between the ages of eight and 13, buy a luxurious second home in the Glen Arbor area and enjoy vacations “up north” without the hassles of cooking, cleaning and finding kindling for a beach bonfire? How else could they enjoy the amenities of an upscale resort within cherry pit spitting distance of Lake Michigan, while still being able to walk into town and enjoy all the shopping, dining and culture that our tourism industry has to offer during high summer?

The Ulrichs had been coming to the area, and usually renting at The Homestead, for 25 years, so when Le Bear opened on the north end of Lake Street in early 2005, they jumped on the opportunity to become fractional owners in Glen Arbor. Marty and Judy, an ear, nose and throat physician and a part-time nurse, respectively, paid approximately $325,000 for a 2,600 square foot luxury apartment with three bedrooms and two bathrooms on the ground floor. For six weeks a year (though usually not consecutively), the couple in their mid-40s can sit on their circular couch in front of the fireplace and enjoy the view of Sleeping Bear Bay through the north-facing windows, or soak in the resort’s heated pool that’s open year-round. Or Marty and Judy can stroll the beach while their girls, Lauren, 13, Amanda, 11, and Emily, 8, skip into town to buy ice cream at the Pine Cone.

They take advantage of the amenities their wealthy, gated community provides, while enjoying life in Glen Arbor, too — all while avoiding their car while on vacation.

“The location for me is what sold the deal,” explains Judy, who remembers sitting out on the deck eating pizza delivered by the concierge, while the kids swam in the pool, and she and Marty signed the papers. “We can park here for a whole week and walk around. I love the location and the beach access, but I love the town access just as much.”

Marty believes that Glen Arbor has retained its rustic feel and controlled its growth unlike, for example, Petoskey, where the Bay Harbor resort makes Lake Michigan off limits to the public for miles and miles, or parts of Traverse City, where fast food restaurants and sprawl litter the landscape.

“Here you truly feel up north,” he says. “More people have come to the area and homes have gotten bigger, but all these years later Glen Arbor still has places like Art’s Tavern and the Pine Cone.”

What is a typical day in Glen Arbor like for the Ulrich family? In the morning they go to Barb’s Bakery for cinnamon twists or to Thyme Out for smoothies, and then they make the shopping rounds to staple locations like the Totem Shop, the Cottage Book Shop, Tiny Treasures, T’nT Video and the candy shop at Boone Docks. The afternoon might yield a couple hours kayaking in the bay, on jet skis that Le Bear has delivered on request, or horseback riding. While on vacation the Ulrichs typically don’t eat dinner until 7 or 8 p.m. About half of the time they eat at one of the area’s fine dining locales (“In Grand Blanc we don’t have the choice of restaurants that we do here,” laughs Judy) and half the time they order in, because Judy would prefer not to cook while on vacation. The concierge at Le Bear will pick up from any local restaurant, or Windows Restaurant at Le Bear will also deliver to their apartment.

In fact, what doesn’t Le Bear do for its residents? Judy can email concierge Lisa Rahe with a grocery list before the Ulrichs arrive up north, and they’ll open the door to a fully stocked refrigerator. The cleaning staff will come at a prearranged time every day and take care of the dishes and dirty laundry so that the family can avoid household choirs while on vacation. And yes, of course they leave mints on the pillows.

For the kids, the concierge coordinates pie eating contests, or arts and crafts one day and an ice cream social the next. How about kite flying on the beach or a group roasting s’mores every evening on the beach? The resort provides a detailed itinerary of local events, art openings, concerts, farmer’s markets and anything a family in vacation mode might enjoy. As Judy says, “that encourages us to patronize and spend money locally.” The family recently stopped by Great Lakes Tea & Spice and asked owner Chris Sack to send tea packages to Grand Blanc. They did the same at Cherry Republic.

Last year the Ulrichs spent Christmas in their home at Le Bear, and when they arrived the staff had set up a Christmas tree — a real tree, which the kids hadn’t had before — with the lights already arranged on it. All the family had to do was hang the ornaments. But perhaps the most memorable evening for Marty and Judy was the anniversary they celebrated up north. Chef Randy from Windows came to their kitchen with white linens in hand and prepared a delicious perch fillet with crab puffs and a salad while the spoiled couple drank wine at the counter. For dessert they dipped fruit in a heavenly chocolate. Then, Judy remembers, they walked the beach while the staff cleaned up.

“We are creating memories with our time here,” Judy explains. “We don’t want to work while we’re up here. We want quality time with each other because it will be gone by in a flash. Another four years and the kids will begin heading off to college.”

Sigue Adelante! Guatemalan non-profit Safe Passage moves forward, in Hanley’s spirit

Glen Arbor Sun

Safe Passage, one of the most successful non-profits in Central America and the guiding light of hope for families living and scavenging for food on the periphery of Guatemala City’s enormous garbage dump, is alive and well despite the death of its founder Hanley Denning in a car accident last January. The Great Lakes Friends of Safe Passage, the local branch of the organization known throughout Guatemala as Camino Seguro, will hold their third annual Fiesta fundraiser on Tuesday, July 17 from 5:30-8 p.m. at the Hagerty Center in Traverse City.


This year’s event, a “Journey to Guatemala,” will feature a “virtual visit” to Safe Passage, live music, food and drink, silent and live auctions of Guatemalan arts and crafts, as well as a short film tribute to Hanley by Leslie Iwerks, whose documentary “Recycled Life” about families in the garbage dump was nominated for an Academy Award. The auction will include art made by the children of Safe Passage, and guests can also buy an “Angel of Hope” like the one Hanley carried on her keychain.

In the wake of Hanley’s passing, northern Michigan locals are playing increasingly important roles in the brain trust of Safe Passage, which now helps almost 600 local children leave the dump’s squalid conditions and pursue an education unimaginable to most in Guatemala’s impoverished, desperate capital. Half a dozen Safe Passage children were recently accepted into some of Guatemala’s most competitive private schools; and Safe Passage was recognized and visited this spring by both U.S. First Lady Laura Bush and Guatemalan First Lady Wendy Berger.

Sharon Workman, of Cedar, was recently named Chair of the Board of Directors at Safe Passage, replacing outgoing Chairman Paul Sutherland of the Traverse City-based Financial Investment Management Group, who started our area’s relationship with Camino Seguro when he met Hanley on an airplane — an event that changed his life. “Like most people who met Hanley, I was so moved by her dedication to these children, and by the difference Safe Passage was making in their lives, I knew I had to stay involved,” says Workman. In the past two years, over 40 area residents have traveled to Guatemala as volunteers on service-learning trips. And Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) just announced a new educational partnership with the organization. Professor Mary Pierce, who returned from a visit to Safe Passage in late June, explains, “It is our hope that we would send students and interested staff and faculty, on a rotating basis, to do volunteer work. It would be an invaluable opportunity for the College to provide this rich and rewarding learning experience for our students.”

Maggie Cassem (who has 10-year-old twins adopted from Guatemala) and her 17-year-old daughter Kaitlynn of Cedar — a future doctor who performed dental hygiene work with the children —were among the locals who embarked on a service-learning trip in February, just three weeks after Hanley’s passing. “I thought I had seen poverty from being down there before to adopt,” says Maggie. “I thought I was somewhat prepared for it. But I just cried when I saw [the people competing with the vultures in the dump for food]. It’s unbelievable what they have to go through to put a meal on the table.”

What struck Wendy Martin, a retired Glen Lake schoolteacher who also visited in February, was the contrast between the dump and its desperation, and the program and the hope it fosters. “You snap a photo of the dump and then turn around and here is this program that offers so much hope, so much faith in the future. [The prevailing mood was not about Hanley’s] death or about how the dump is taking over the city and all human life around it. The new children’s guarderia [daycare] is immaculate. You could eat off the floor in that place, and the kids there are singing, smiling and reading. The overwhelming feeling was one of hope and possibilities.”

Hanley Denning, a native of Yarmouth, Maine and graduate of Bowdoin College, founded Safe Passage in 1999 when she sold her car and computer and returned to Guatemala City to fund a drop-in center for tutoring and shelter. The organization quickly grew into a comprehensive support program that guides children into school and on to graduation. But Hanley, the guiding light of hope for families in the garbage dump, perished on the night of January 18 as she was returning from the capital to her home in nearby Antigua after attending meetings to establish the guarderia so that children in Safe Passage could leave their younger siblings in good hands while continuing their studies. Also killed in the accident was her driver Bayron Aroldo Chiquito de Leon, who was at the wheel.

To those children and their families, Hanley was akin to Mother Teresa. In fact, she was often referred to in the Guatemalan media as the “angel of the garbage dump”. As the news of her passing spread through Guatemala City’s poorest slums, mourners gathered throughout the night at the hospital, and crowds packed the streets at a memorial service later that week, especially grieving mothers with young children. “Before meeting her, I never would have imagined that my children would go far in their studies,” Yolanda Campos, a 33-year-old mother of Safe Passage kids, told the national Prensa Libre.

Hanley twice graced our presence in northern Michigan, most recently at last summer’s Fiesta at the Haggerty Center. Great Lakes Friends has raised over $50,000 for Safe Passage since Hanley’s first visit in 2005. Today, nearly 600 children who live around the Guatemala City dump spend their mornings or afternoons at the program where they receive assistance with school work, a healthy meal (often the only one they eat each day), access to a medical clinic, exposure to the arts, and vocational programs in a caring and safe environment. Many of the children in the program are the first in their families to attend school.

“I want the next president of Guatemala to come out of Safe Passage,” says Paul Sutherland.

Tickets to this year’s “Journey to Guatemala” Fiesta on July 17 at the Hagerty Center in Traverse City are $25 each and can be reserved ahead of time by calling (231) 590-6072 or emailing safepassageglf@yahoo.com. More information about Safe Passage is available at www.safepassage.org. If you’re unable to make it, donations in honor of Hanley Denning — to continue her legacy and sustain Safe Passage – can be sent to Great Lakes Friends, P.O. Box 621, Traverse City, MI.

Protecting the Crystal River’s manmade history

Glen Arbor Sun

Dr. Chuck Olson is on a mission to protect historic structures in the Crystal River. Ever since he and his wife Connie acquired a seasonal home on the river just off County Road 675 northeast of Glen Arbor 20 years ago, the former professor at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and former trustee at The Leelanau School has watched historic, manmade structures disappear at an alarming rate. He thinks the culprits are unknowing canoers and kayakers, or the flood of new homeowners on the river who, understandably, believe they are doing a service when they remove hazardous, nail-filled boards for the benefit of future recreation or clean up the river in front of their property.

Glen Arbor boasts two commercial canoe and kayak liveries and a surge of new homes, especially in the Woodstone neighborhood, between 675 and the east end of town, where the Crystal River flows southwest before reversing its direction and emptying into Lake Michigan at The Homestead resort. Not surprisingly, the growth in our area since Olson arrived (he and Connie still spend most of their time in Ann Arbor) has collided with efforts to preserve nature and local history.

“Whoever was doing this was not thinking about it from an historical perspective, or that it might be a violation of existing laws,” Olson guesses.

The structures Dr. Olson pointed out to the Glen Arbor Sun during a canoe trip in mid-June are either remnants of manmade fish sanctuaries — logs or stumps nailed onto much older water control structures in the early twentieth century by Trout Unlimited and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to create fish habitat in the river — or the remains of water wheels from before 1900 that early settlers used to irrigate cranberry fields in the bogs and low swales just east of the river.

In any case, the fish habitat features and the waterwheels are both protected, in principle, under state law and may not be legally removed without a permit from the Department of Environment Quality (DEQ). Olson believes that the structures dating from the 1880s may also be covered under the Federal Antiquities Act.

Though Olson originally thought the DNR held jurisdiction over historic objects in the river, the Department’s conservation agent for Leelanau County, Mike Borkovich, yielded to the DEQ. According to John Arevalo, the DEQ’s Cadillac District Supervisor for the Land and Water Management Division, one needs a permit to place new structures on the bottomland, to excavate or to build a dam — but that rule envisions larger projects that involve heavy equipment. “Someone could easily use their bare hands to remove a structure,” says Arevalo. “Technically, someone drifting by in a boat would need the permission of the structure’s riparian owner to remove it. But the reality is that we have a limited staff and a limited budget. Normally, if there really isn’t a large impact … and if it was impeding navigation … you could probably just remove it.”

Dr. Olson doesn’t necessarily expect government help to preserve the structures in the Crystal River. His primary goal is to inform local residents and canoers that these objects are relics of history, and deserve respect. He appeals to aerial photographs from 1952 for evidence of cranberry bogs, which he believes were once commercially farmed by Native Americans. “That’s why I like aerial photos,” he says. “Some say a photo never lies, but it never tells the whole truth either. A photo only answers the questions you’re asking.”

Local history guru John Tobin corroborates his belief that water control structures there were temporarily designed to transport water over the ridge to grow cranberries, especially when the river was low. Olson believes that the previous owner of his home, Jack Russell, wanted a fish farm on the east side of the ridge and that he paid a contractor and heavy equipment operator named Martin Egeler to dig a pond and use wooden conduits to channel water away from the river before the DNR stopped him.

Olson found a hollowed-out, split cedar conduit on his land in 1989 that may have been connected years ago to a water wheel. He’s also found numerous nails in the river structures — rough and square, clearly forged by a blacksmith — that he believes date back to the 1880s.

Dr. Olson has also been instrumental in initiating other endeavors to promote local history. Through his friendship with Guy Meadows, a professor of naval architecture and marine engineering, and director of the ocean engineering laboratory at the University of Michigan, they brought the M-Rover submarine to Big Glen Lake in the early summer of 2003 to search the depths for the remains of a steamboat called the Rescue, which captain John Dorsey allegedly sank intentionally in 1914 under mysterious circumstances that prompted a community-wide debate and search four years ago. Read about the search for the Rescue on our website at http://www.glenarborsun.com/archives/2003/06/dorseys_sunken.html.