- Hi and welcome back for another edition of Destination Michigan.

We have a really great show planned for you, so take a look at what's coming up.

First, we head to Mount Holiday in Traverse City, where a village of volunteers are on a mission to make sure everyone has access to the slopes.

No sketch, no problem.

Meet one artist whose designs go straight from imagination to creation.

And into it, see how a puzzle maker is connecting the pieces and showcasing Michigan's beauty.

A life, a memory preserved with loving care, when loved ones can't, how one couple steps into spread beauty for those no longer with us.

(bright music) Hi and welcome back.

Well, here in Michigan, we can all agree winter sports are thrilling, but they can do a number on our wallet.

At Northern Michigan Ski Hill, it's about making sure everyone has access to the slopes.

Jimmy Menowitz bundled up and takes us to Mount Holiday.

- Mount Holiday's been here for 75 years.

It's gone through a lot of changes over those years.

We became a nonprofit, 1999, 2000, right around there.

It's a community asset and one that I am passionate about keeping around for another 75 years.

Primary mission is kids.

We love our kids.

This is the place where you can drop off your kids at the ski hill and know that they're in good hands.

They're gonna have a great day.

- [Stefanie] 10 minutes from downtown Traverse City, you'll find Mount Holiday.

It isn't the tallest peak in Michigan, but for those who live nearby, it's a way to connect with nature and each other.

- Everyone comes out and shows up and hangs out here.

So we're like the neighborhood gathering spot and part of my mission is getting just if any kids who wanna do this we're gonna get 'em on Ski Hill.

Whether they wanna snowboard or ski or tube, there's no barrier.

We're gonna figure out a way to do it.

- [Stefanie] Mount Holiday is focused on accessibility for all offering affordable programs and lessons.

The Kiwanis Club of Traverse City plays a big part in that.

- They've been a partner with Mount Holiday for 60 years.

Not only are we running our Kiwanis Kids Ski School program and snowboard program, which is a three day a week program, you get three days of lessons.

It's so budget friendly and it's amazing program that even our Bunny Hill is named after Kiwanis.

We also have free skiing and snowboarding for international students, for exchange students.

And then we're partnering also with Big Brothers/Big Sisters we have a Friday night program for teens and tweens.

Just more and more stuff like that to get kids out here, get 'em outside, get 'em off the phones, you know, socializing with each other and having a lot of fun.

- [Stefanie] The day we visited, kids of all ages, including Miles and Linus, were zipping down the hill in front of cheering crowds for the holiday race team invitational.

What does it feel like when you're going down the ski hill?

- Fast.

- I feel like I'm floating in the air.

- We learn how to ski.

- We like practice the courses for races.

Mm, my favorite course is probably yellow.

- And my favorite course is the trees and yellow.

- [Stefanie] What is your perfect day at Mount Holiday?

- My perfect day is having fun and going skiing.

- Same.

- [Stefanie] The trained Ski Patrol makes sure everyone stays safe and volunteers are always welcome.

- You get to be an ambassador for Mount Holiday and just, you know, be out there, be that face on the hill.

Maybe even when you pulled in you might have seen that there was volunteers in the parking lot helping out too.

So it takes a village here for sure and we have one.

- [Stefanie] That village atmosphere isn't something that happened overnight.

It's been built season by season through traditions that date back for generations.

- Oh, that's the first place I learned to ski.

Oh, that's the place I got married.

You know, my kids grew up there.

That was the first time they just, it gives me goosebumps.

Everybody just seems to have a good Mount Holiday story and I'm a sponge for 'em.

I mean, I love history and this place has such a rich, varied history.

And I'm going through our archives and I'm finding so many photos and actually somebody gave us their family home movie from 1960 from here.

Wild, it's so cool.

And so that it's just the history, the community, and it's a pretty awesome little place to ski too.

- [Stefanie] Some of those stories belong to longtime volunteer Mark Goethel, a mount holiday legend, known for his love of the hill and some pretty wild tricks.

- Things are pretty easy going right now.

I got a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, so I'm skiing a lot with family right now.

And when we have enough snow, we teach, it's called Base Camp where people can learn how to do a competent straight air and we do that by a series of airbags.

So we have these jumps set up where they'll just go off a jump and land in the airbag and it's just like a big fluffy cloud.

From there, once they're looking pretty controlled, we'll just go with whatever they're feeling.

Like you want to try grab, you want to try 180, and we just build up to their comfort level.

- [Stefanie] For the most part it's fun and games, but for Mark and many like him, it's about so much more.

- Oh man, dude, it's everything.

Like I met my wife here, my best friends here.

I mean every long, the longest lasting relationships I've had to date are all I met here at Holiday.

You're not just coming here and hitting this massive jump.

It's just everybody from the lift ops to the people making snow, the people in the kitchen, everybody knows you and they're looking out for you.

(upbeat music) - If you don't wanna ski your snowboard, you can always grab a tube.

- I've jokingly call Mount Holiday a tubing hill with a skiing problem because we process so many tubers through here every week.

It's probably our marquise attraction honestly, because everybody can do it.

You know, everybody can tube and it is a lot of fun.

You don't have to walk back up the hill, you know, we can take you back up on the lift.

- [Stefanie] And when the snow melts, Mountain Holiday offers plenty of year round opportunities to play outside, including hiking, biking, and more.

- We do some other fun programs in the summer, like we do our slip and slide party, our solstice party.

We do bookend parties on Memorial and Labor Day weekends.

Get outside, have a good time, come in for lunch, maybe get yourself an adult beverage if you're old enough, and then hang out in the Tea Bar Lounge, come out and just, you know, support your local ski hill and just, you know, come and have a good time.

- To continue their mission of making sure everyone has a positive inclusive experience, Mount Holiday is also a certified autism center, which means staff have completed specialized training in autism and sensory.

And one more big thanks to Chris, Mark and the rest of the Mount Holiday crew.

Our visit got a little messy in the parking lot, so thank you guys for pulling us out of that mud.

Well our next stop takes us to a roadside sculpture park located on M28 just outside of Marquette.

Adam sits down with the artist behind the whimsical metal art.

(bright music) - Well, I've worked construction my whole life as a welder, and about 30 years ago drinking got to be a real habit.

So I quit drinking and then something to occupy my free time, I just started building sculptures.

- [Adam] Tom started creating metal sculptures in his front yard, quickly filling it up, much to the dismay of the township, which said his creations were illegal, so we moved them to the backyard, but that space wasn't big enough.

- 2003 we refinanced our house for another a hundred years, bought this property, made some trails through the woods and zigzagged around where I could get as much trail space as possible and cleaned out the yard and threw all that junk out here and been adding to it ever since.

I mean, I enjoy building the stuff and then you see like especially this time of year, there'll be school buses pulling with, you know, 40, 50 kids jump off and go running through the place and having a ball and you know really enjoying it.

- [Adam] Today Laken and Land spans 37 acres and features more than 100 sculptures, plus picnic areas, pavilions, entertainment stages, a playground and more.

It's free to enter, open year round, and it deserves to be mentioned.

- Yeah, everything out here is scrapped that was going to a recycle or dump or something.

You get into these mines and powerhouses and paper mills and you know big industrial places and they just rip out tons of iron sometimes and you know, you go in there and talk to the right guy and you know tell 'em what you're doing with it and they'll just about give you anything, you know, bring a case of beer on the job and load up with whatever you want, you know?

- [Adam] Visitors can walk the winding trail or drive part of it to admire Tom's creation.

One of my favorites was the rusty chain band.

- That was some conveyor chain I got out of Louisiana Pacific down in Sagola.

And that was the big drag chain where they haul all the mills or the logs up into the mill.

They run 'em through a water bath and clean them in big paddles and that was actually pretty easy.

You just take a piece of chain and bend it like a knee and weld it together and that was it, you know?

So I don't have no real rhyme or reason.

Just every once in a while I'll get an idea of something I'd like to build, but usually it's just whatever I can make out of the junk I've collected.

- [Adam] As I wandered through the park, I was convinced his property had to include an old mine.

Turns out I was wrong.

- No, all that mining stuff is all junk that I hauled here.

Yeah, that's just with all the mining heritage around the area I thought I'd make some type of, you know, mining sculpture and yeah it was just parts and pieces.

The head frame was an old electrical tower from up in the Pagani, the steam drum there was a condensing tank out of the paper mill, the little ore cars were dust collectors from the Tilden mine, the cabin was an old sauna from down in Rumley, the little mixing balling machine was a cement mixer I got from a buddy of mine and the railroad and that all the little ore cars were on the wheels were come off the ore dock and were ladders.

So yeah, there wasn't no mine here, but, well it's different I guess.

I heard that a long time ago, if you're gonna be successful, you either gotta be really good or really different.

I said I think it'd be easier just to be different.

So this is kind of different and you know people seem to enjoy it, come and go as they please.

- [Adam] Each piece can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to complete and Tom does nearly all the work himself.

Now recently retired, he has no plans to stop.

He'll keep turning scrap into art for everyone to enjoy it.

- My mother does a lot of the painting.

If you see where it looks nice, the painting, that's all her creativity.

I'm not much of a painter and I'll slosh one coat of paint on in some color and then she comes down and touches everything up and does all the detail painting.

So I still have a lot of junk and I'm always collecting more.

My daughter's an iron worker and my son is a heavy equipment mechanic, so they get scrap off of their jobs for me and I still got buddies that call every now and then, so I'll be building more sculptures and just keep adding them to 'em.

But yeah, you wanna see something different, stop by, it's open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

- After seeing all of Tom's creations it's really hard to believe that he doesn't sketch the ideas out in his head.

He just starts creating with a scrap that he already has.

So if you find yourself in the upper peninsula, it's free and it's open year round.

But Michigan is home to makers, artists and entrepreneurs who create products enjoyed all over the world.

At Lighthouse Puzzles in Dewitt, they're creating wooden puzzles that are as much as art as they are entertainment.

- In 2022, I was at a thrift store and I found a small collection of wooden jigsaw puzzles and I didn't really know what that world was until I found those.

And we took 'em home, I put one together.

It had a very tactile feel, it was very satisfying and I kind of fell in love with the world.

So we did some research.

It seemed like maybe there was a commercial opportunity because they sell quickly online.

So we dipped our toes into the world of jigsaw puzzles.

- [Chris] After dipping his toe in the jigsaw puzzle pool, Jason began to explore what materials he would use for his puzzle project.

- Wooden jigsaw puzzles, not only do they have that tactile feel, but the shapes of the pieces are all different.

So on a traditional puzzle, you have a lot of pieces that look and feel the same.

A lot of 'em are cardboard, some of them aren't very good quality, but with wood you can feel it's almost a 3D shape.

It was a whole nother layer of discovery when we were going through that process to create puzzles and enjoy them.

- [Chris] Cardboard puzzle pieces weren't cutting it, but Jason's son had an idea to help the process and increased the quality of their creation.

- My son kind of challenged me, he's a teenager, he's like dad, just make 'em yourself, right?

So we said, okay, well let's go figure out how to do that.

So he and I joined a local makers network.

We learned how to use a laser.

We scoured the state for high quality wood that would work well with the laser.

And then it became, okay, what artwork are we gonna put on this?

And so we reached out to a bunch of local Michigan based artists, or at least artists who had deep roots in Michigan.

And we had to sort of figure out, you know, what makes a good puzzle?

And that could be color blocking on the image, it could be patterns on the image, it has to feel like a good image for a puzzle.

And then we reached out to those folks and we said, Hey, we'd love to partner with you.

You know, you can get a percentage of every sale.

We love your work.

And luckily, a couple of them said yes.

And we started making these puzzles and you know now we have folks sort of that are asking us if they could join our little movement we have.

- [Chris] There's a lot of creativity involved when you're designing a puzzle and that includes some specifically designed pieces.

- What we do is we start with the artwork and then we say, if we're gonna create shaped pieces that are themed to this artwork, what would those be?

So we typically on a large puzzle that's between like 30 and 50 shaped pieces.

So if we're using an image that's like the Grand Hotel at Mackinac, we pick things that are themed to Mackinac Island.

So there's a horse and buggy.

We picked the fountain that was in front of the Grand Hotel.

We picked bicycles and all those things that you would find on the island.

And then we sort of, we create those, we draw those, we digitize them, we lay them out on the canvas, and then we create the pieces that interlock between those.

So there's little people, then there's, you know, there's shapes like instruments, sometimes animals.

And it's almost like you get to discover this world as you're doing the puzzle and you're sort of getting into the mind of the designer of the puzzle.

Like, oh, they must have thought this was interesting for this part of the puzzle.

We put masking on the front and the back of the puzzle because lasers create residue and we don't want any of that residue to be on the puzzle when it's finished.

So it's an extra step we take and not everyone does, but we want to have a flawless puzzle when we're done.

And then once it's cut, it sits in our shop here for about a week while sort of the burnt smell goes away and then my wife and I will box them up and get them all ready to go.

- [Chris] Puzzles.

The pieces require connectivity of course, and that connectivity can include the people who are trying to complete the fun project.

- Puzzles are definitely a great way to connect.

We have a lot of people that are on the holiday times will tell us as they're buying the puzzles, we're buying it cuz we're gonna have it out at Christmas for the family.

And we've had customers send us pictures of those moments.

So I think, you know, in this digital age, right, when everyone's scrolling on their phones, you know, having something that's on a community table, everyone can put the digital away for a few minutes, you know, have a chat over a puzzle and try to figure out the interlocking pieces, I think it is something, you know, it's a throwback to a simpler time, which I think in general wooden puzzles are.

We called ourselves Lighthouse Puzzles because the state has more lighthouses than any other state in the union, right?

So a lot of what you see in our puzzles are representing the shores and the beauty of Michigan.

I think it naturally is a gorgeous state.

So it wasn't hard to find art that was reflective of that.

It's more challenging to say, okay, of these, you know, 20 pieces of art that are of the shoreline, which one is the best representation?

- [Chris] A Michigan entrepreneur creating Michigan focused art from Michigan products with your home as the destination.

- It's all been here.

We started in our basement and you know, at some point we moved up into the garage and now we sort of have half of the garage as our workshop.

And as we grow, you know, we may get a space that's bigger than this as we have multiple lasers, but for right now everything comes outta one spot, it's right here in our house.

- Thank you so much, Chris.

Those puzzles are beautiful.

While using brushes, water and the right cleaning materials, one husband and wife team set out for a sense of purpose.

Together they work to restore grave markers of loved ones by preserving the stories etched in them.

Take a look.

It's a quiet, peaceful morning at Oak Hill Cemetery in Owosso.

The towering oak trees are still bare this time of year, but there are signs of life turning up on the ground below.

- And because of the (indiscernible) the wind can't get to them.

And so because of that, the stone remains wet.

And because of that you get spores, mold spores, and different things that come through the air.

They land on the stone and they just eventually grow and they actually become a part of the stone.

They grow into the stone because stones are porous.

- [Stefanie] While memories fade with time, nature has its own way of moving forward.

That's where Michael Clapp comes in.

He, along with his wife Mary, carefully and thoughtfully restore gravestones of loved ones, long gone.

It all started when Mary's grandpa passed and eventually went from hobby to business.

- I cleaned it last week about five days ago.

We would go there, tend to his grave, you couldn't help but notice in the graves nearby, some of them were untended, they were, you know, overgrown or, you know, covered with moss and different things like that.

And it was a sad thing to see and you wanted to fix them, so that's what we started doing.

This polished area doesn't have much lichen growth.

There is some bleeding over onto the polished area, but you have this texture here and then you've got this roughly huen section on the sides where it's cut.

That attracts lichen, you know, and it sticks to it, it just lays there, it grows into the pores of the stone and just stays there and just will overtake the stone in due time.

The ones that seem to be especially forlorn, where you could assume there were no family members taking care of them and nobody left to do anything, you get kind of addicted after a while because you see the place brighten up and you're trimming and you're doing all these different things and it cleaned up grandpa's neighborhood, you know, and we just kind of started adopting graves and different areas.

I wanna clean this away now because it'll get a little bit moist and I don't want these in the way.

(bright music) - [Stefanie] At the ready with various buckets and products, Michael gets to work restoring the memory of the person behind this marker.

- It's almost like washing a car.

You've got brushes, you've got a bucket.

If you're gonna use a certain type of soap, you're just brushing away at the monument.

This is granite, so you don't really have to worry.

It's just a stiff bristle brush.

There's Orvis and some people use this soap or whatever and you have to be careful with that, but you'll use a bucket if you're gonna use Orvis soap.

- [Stefanie] You can't even see the name etched into the stone because of the rampant moss and lichen, but with some heavy elbow grease, a life revealed on the surface.

Eveline Hood Cummings, laid to rest next to her husband William Cummings.

A point of pride from Michael.

- I hate to see people forgotten.

I hate to see something that's undone and I've always been somebody that pays a lot of attention to detail and that's a good thing, but it can also kind of cause you to linger too long somewhere, or what you think is sometimes too long.

- [Stefanie] Of course, these days, not everyone chooses to spend eternity in a cemetery.

But for the friends and family who do have loved ones below the ground, the Clapps makes sure their memory is pristinely preserved for many more years to come.

- There's some really old ones here.

You know, there's some dated 1868.

I think the oldest one I've seen here is 1865 and they can use a good cleaning, so it's very tempting.

It's just good to see old things made to appear new again.

- Michael says a lot of their customers contact them through their website or their Facebook page, but a lot have become return customers because of the meaningful way that he and Mary have cared for the memories of their loved ones.

And once again, we find ourselves in awe of the special people and places in our Great Lake state.

Thanks so much for watching.

(bright music)