Points North | Great Lakes. Great Stories.

Lake Champlain is more than 16 times smaller than Lake Ontario, the smallest Great Lake. But in 1998, Congress designated Lake Champlain as the sixth Great Lake, teeing off a historical and cultural fight over which lakes can really call themselves Great.  _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send you some coo...

Blue moon ice cream, this quintessentially Midwestern, bright blue dessert, is a mystery. No one can agree on what it tastes like, and no one with the info will say. We try to find out. _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send you some cool Points North goodies in return. Subscribe to the Points North Newslet...

Ron Reimink knew how uncomfortable and annoying swimmer’s itch could be. He spent much of his adult life trying to eradicate it in lakes across northern Michigan. Then one day, he realized he was completely wrong.  _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send you some cool Points North goodies in return. Subscrib...

Emily Ford goes on a winter vacation. She doesn’t go to some warm beach location, though. She sets out to thru-hike Wisconsin’s 1,200 mile Ice Age Trail. _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send you some cool Points North goodies in return. Subscribe to the Points North Newsletter for more Great Lakes news. A...

Tom Farnquist is in the business of preserving underwater artifacts and displaying them in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. The problem is, a lot of those artifacts were technically stolen from the State of Michigan. And one day, the state notices. _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send you some cool Point...

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. _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send you some cool Points North goodies in return. Subscribe to the Points North Newsletter for more Great Lakes news...

Minnesota and Wisconsin are bitter rivals at just about everything. So in 2019, when Wisconsin’s secretary of tourism claimed her state 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? _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the...

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. _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send you some cool Points North goodies...

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. _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send yo...

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? _______________________ Join the Points North Fan Club today! For just $5/month, you can support the show you love, and we'll send you some cool Points North goodies in return. Subscribe to the Points North Newsletter for more Great Lake...

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.

On April 8, 2024, Meghan Hetfield and her partner Roni Pillischer witnessed a total solar eclipse over Lake Ontario. But in the middle of this intense and beautiful experience, something else kept grabbing their attention: the mystery of the squeaky sand all around them.

Kenny Pheasant first became a teacher of Anishinaabemowin at 14 years-old, teaching customers from behind the meat counter at a grocery store. Now, it's his life mission to get more people speaking the Great Lakes’ original and endangered language.

This is a tale of two cyclists, one legendary race, and an unlikely rivalry.

One minute David Holtfreter was kayaking on Lake Michigan; the next he was in the water, fighting for his life. A fisherman saw David struggling from the shore and swam out about 200 yards to rescue him. But in the rescue commotion that followed, David wasn’t able to give the stranger a proper “thank you.”

One family’s visit to a famous Indiana sand dune turns into a wild tale of a missing boy and mysterious tunnels.

In 1998, a hunter named Mitch Rompola claimed he’d shot the biggest whitetail in North America. It was all over the news, and people waited in anticipation for it to be entered in the record books. But then Mitch just went silent. And instead of becoming a famous hunter, he became an infamous one.

Last December, Theresa Eischen was watching the news when a story caught her attention. The original Star Wars film was being translated into Anishinaabemowin, an endangered language. Theresa had zero voice acting experience, but she loves Star Wars and is fluent in Anishinaabemowin. So she auditioned to voice Princess Leia. It was a long shot.

A researcher in Ohio was surrounded by hundreds of dead ash trees. They had been wiped out by this beetle called the emerald ash borer. But then, in that same forest, she found a lone tree thriving. Could this tree be the key to saving ash from extinction?

For more than 20 years, Nic Theisen has spent his days on his hands and knees in the dirt farming. It’s a tough way to make a living, and for years Nic didn’t always know if the farm would make it. Until something big changed.

Peter Quakenbush’s dream is to create a conservation burial forest – a place that would both preserve the woods and give people the option to be buried in nature. But not everyone is on board with that idea.

Lake trout are on life support in Lake Michigan. Every year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spends tens of millions of dollars raising and stocking them. But what if there was another way: genetic engineering. Could it be used for conservation?