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| Skidway Lake Dock near Greenwood Ave & Park Street |
The Skidway Lake area is one of the fastest growing resort, recreational and retirement areas
in Northeastern Michigan. Building sites range from lakeshore to creek, river and woodland lots, with builders and suppliers
available. The advantage of good highways leading here from any part of the state make it only three hours from Detroit, two
hours from Flint, and one hour from the Tri-City area. While riding the trails watching for deer, one may see hundreds of
cattle on the largest ranch east of the Mississippi, comprising 9,000 acres. A miniature footbridge resembling the "Big
Mac" spans the river west of Skidway Lake on Greenwood Road at the Rifle River crossing.
Skidway Lake has
long been known as an ideal vacation center! Visitors often return to enjoy the many recreational facilities offered here
both in the summer and the winter.
Boating, swimming, fishing during the summer months; hunting, skating,
ice-fishing or snowmobiling down the snow covered trails in the winter proves this area to be a land of enchantment.
Bathing beaches are located on Skidway Lake and Elbow Lake. Many people meet here and enjoy dipping in the cool water.
Water skiing is popular on the larger lakes like Cranberry, Hardwood, Hughey and Mills. These lakes are located
a short distance north of Skidway Lake. Fishing remains good throughout the year. Boat rentals and housekeeping cabins are
available. Public access sites are located on some of the lakes and the Rifle River.
The Rifle River has its
source in Lake Devoe, located in the northern part of Ogemaw County. It flows an irregular course southward, through green
forest, around sharp curves, with up to forty-foot banks on one side, tamarack, cedar and spruce lowlands on the other. This
turbulent little river takes its amber color from the soil over which it flows through Ogemaw and Arenac counties, traveling
a distance of ninety miles from its source to its final joining with beautiful Lake Huron, just east of Omer...
Skidway Lake Area Chamber
of Commerce
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| Skidway Lake from Greenwood Road |
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| Ogemaw County |
 COMMUNITY PRIDE
Imagine what a safe, livable and healthy community might
look like. Around the United States and the world citizens are coming together to create a vision of what their community
might be and to develop steps toward making these visions come true. Alternatively called "healthy," livable"
or sustainable communities, these efforts are integrative, inclusive, cooperative and participatory. In many communities --
large and small, rural and urban -- issues are being addressed in an interconnected manner. They are demonstrating how innovative
strategies can produce communities that are more environmentally sound, economically prosperous, and socially equitable for
everyone.
The Ecology of Community
An ecological community can be defined as a group of actually
or potentially interacting people living in the same community or area. A community is bound together by the network of influences
that people have on one another. Inherent in this view is the notion that whatever affects one person also affects many others
-- the "balance of nature". We build an understanding of communities by examining the two-way, and then the multi-way,
interactions involving groups of people or many people individually.
Ecology can give us a very good model for
local community development. In nature, an area of land, initially barren of life, will see pioneer species establish themselves
in the area, and start to modify the site conditions, making it easier for even more species to establish themselves in the
area. A new plant and animal community will go through stages of development from shrub land to woodland to forest to rainforest,
where each stage will sequentially replace the previous stage. Each stage will allow a greater quantity of living matter to
be maintained. The area will then stabilize in quantity, as a forest, for example, and then develop in quality as a mature
community, achieving greater sophistication and integrity of its life support processes.
So here we can imagine
a neighborhood community going through a series of developing stages, so that more efficient processes of food production,
preserving, processing and distribution sequentially replace one another. And more appropriate house building, resource sharing,
higher quality landscape design and maintenance, work programs, skill development, meeting facilitation and envisioning will
occur over time. These succeeding stages will initially see the pioneer activities being generally crude and basic, with a
broad niche breadth, yet over time and through the stages, the processes will develop a greater sophistication.
In ecology, primary succession is the model for developing new human communities, and secondary succession is the model
for changing over existing neighborhood communities to a thriving, vibrant, living, flourishing ecological community.
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| The BOONDOCKS |
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