Lisa Steinmann

Last night I went out with my friend Patricia and we talked, as women do, over sushi and white wine. It’s an important ritual. We treasure the chance to sit and exchange our stories and have our say, at least with each other. What goes unspoken is that it’s a world where we do not always feel we get to have that.

We drove carefully along Duluth’s Skyline Parkway toward Chester Park Saturday morning. The streets were thick with fresh, wet snow and fog shrouded our slow progress into the forest. We knew we had arrived at our destination when we spotted a set of wooden buildings decked out in a rainbow array of old skis. We had come on a mission to discover the Shangri-La of community-run ski hills, Chester Bowl.

This winter is a happy one in the U.P. The area, which has an annual average snowfall almost four times what we get in the Twin Cities, depends on great snow for winter tourism. Unfortunately, there have been some warm winters lately. The snowfall this year is generous, as we discovered last weekend.

I wrote earlier about the Lite Brite art event now being prepared at downtown St. Paul’s Union Depot and I have more info thanks to a kindly update from Heidi M. Smith at Grassroots Solutions. The Lite Brite project is part of a launch event for The Saint Paul Foundation’s Forever Saint Paul Challenge, a grant program that funds–to the tune of $1 million–ideas ” to make Saint Paul great!”