BEMIDJI — Getting out and exploring are my favorite parts of journalism. Honestly, it’s why I got into this field: having the opportunity to experience the world around me from different perspectives.
Spring and fall are always interesting times to be outside in Northern Minnesota, and I covered two stories where I also got to hang out with kids doing science stuff.
In the spring, I was lucky enough to be invited to tag along a fifth grade field trip for a trout release in the Clearwater River out past Pinewood. I didn’t let the kids see me freak out about my first crawly tick of the season, but I did get to learn more about the students' class pets from Trout Unlimited coordinator Bob Wagner.
"The really important thing is what they've learned for 110 days in the classroom, ... the whole life cycle," Wagner said. "Most kids, most adults, have never seen a [trout] egg. All of a sudden, it develops a little nose, then a tail, then it starts wiggling. ... Then it turns into a beautiful little colored trout."
I also got to visit the idyllic Waldsee German Language Camp in October for the annual Water Festival, where northern Beltrami students from Red Lake, Ponemah, Blackduck and Kelliher schools learned about the water cycle.
Headwaters Science Center brought a demonstration, and demonstrator James Owens told me his strategies for getting kids engaged with science.
“Kids, they don't want to be soft handled all the time. They want to be out there, on the edge like they live their lives, you know, with each other,” Owens said. “So we get a little snappy and sassy.
“And then we take this — which formerly was a Mickey Mouse balloon, but we turned that in their mind, hopefully into a shape of a water molecule — and then we essentially blow that up and make water with it.”
But taking the top spot of favorite field trips was Unicon21, which took place all over Bemidji in July.
They came from Japan, they came from France, they jumped up on their unicycles and made them dance.
I know unicycle fever got a good grip on KAXE volunteer photographer Lorie Shaull, who only intended to hang out for one day but instead stayed for three because she simply could not get enough.
Lorie, Volunteer Coordinator Dan Gannon and I all tried unicycling, and while Lorie managed to get an excellent picture of me on a unicycle looking like I knew what I was doing, I got really great photos of Lorie and Dan making the best concentration faces.
Bemidji truly had a memorable summer, as unicycles of all sizes could be seen traveling on our expanding network of bicycle trails. The “Olympics of unicycling” as organizer and Bemidji State alumna Kirby Goldstein described it, featured dozens of free and nominally ticketed events at the Sanford Event Center, Bemidji High School and at Bemidji State University.
Unicon hasn’t been hosted in the United States since 2002, and when the organizers for the convention-competition were deciding on a location, they ultimately landed on Minnesota.
“[We] thought about a few places and when someone suggested Bemidji, having been a BSU graduate, I thought, well, they have all the facilities we need," Goldstein said. "Let me put out some feeler emails and when those emails came back with a resounding, ‘Yes, we would love to host. We would love to be a part of this. Like what can we do?’ We were sold."
With a nonstop schedule of events over a 12-day period, Lorie and I had plenty of options for meeting these competitors. We met up with Jakob Flansberry from Quebec, who competes in mountain unicycling as well as racing and jumping on a unicycle.
“The community is one of the main reasons why we're all here today, really,” he said. “Unicycling is the kind of sport where there's no money involved, so people are here to enjoy, to see our friends, to see people with the same passion.”
There was a lot of ground covered by the KAXE News Team in 2024, and I’m looking forward to the new adventures in 2025.
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Lorie Shaull/KAXEBemidji is the center of the unicycling universe through July 26, 2024, for Unicon 21, where about 1,000 competitors from around the world gather for two weeks of unicycle sports. -
Larissa Donovan/KAXEUnicon21, a two-week convention and competition for a global community of unicyclists, wraps up in Bemidji on Friday, July 26.
