By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Every sinkhole led to a summit, every detour to completion at Saturday’s Mt. Baldhead Challenge.
Ferry Street, a key route for this year’s 636 runners to the races’ Oval Beach sunrise starts, was judged late July unsafe to continue bearing car and truck traffic.
Ferry is in Douglas and continues north turning into Park Street past the Saugatuck line at Campbell Street towards Mt. Baldhead, the beach, Ox-Bow Art School …
The two cities with Saugatuck Township spread word jointly the link had been ruptured, found ways around for daily walkers, bicyclers, motorcycles too can go through, budgeted extra time and caution for the narrow Lakeshore Drive bend down Campbell and around the detour.
Police, fire and more emergency first responders found or made go-rounds to get to where needed fast as possible. The Saugatuck-Douglas Rotary Club teamed with them figuring ways to bus runners from the spacious parking lot/campus at Community Church to the beach and, later from the Coghlin Park finishing party back to retrieve their vehicles.
All rallied for a cause: the Challenge, via race entry fees, Holland Area Boys and Girls Clubs counsel and resources and generous sponsors who believed in the value of after-school programs, four years ago opened in Saugatuck Public Schools now serving more than 210 working families.
The Interurban and schools furnished buses, drivers volunteered and did weekend shifts, local businesses chipped in as we could.
Sept. 7 dawned picture-perfect for runners: 54° clear skies, breezes off Lake Michigan. Dunes, woods and more waterfront courses waited with signs, maps and arrows, now and them whimsy to keep runner spirits high.
Too, the trails furnished respite from day-to-day mental stresses, tuning in to more body basics like heartbeat and breathing while taking in nature all around. Times for solitude, awe, meditating, connecting with fellow seekers on this quest.
Runners were far from alone among the wildlife, within earshot of lapping waves, human volunteers at aid stations. Some rang cowbells heard first softly from a distance, growing louder, coming into view around bends, at last water, first aid and friends’ ministrations to help keep on.
Each race has an epic quality; course sections chapters flowing into next ones, amassing and advancing, only part-completed stories at the end.
Russ Gardner, seen at Fridays’ pre-race church packet pickup, recalled MBC founders circa 2000 trying to talk Rogaine into funding Baldy. But better then was Dan Shanahan, whom with local Huntington Bank branches, saw opportunity reinvesting $10,000 in this community knowing active residents and businesses stood to benefit. Some return!
In 2002 — MBC’s third year — I came with other Grand Rapids area zealots to sample this Challenge we’d heard about via raves in Michigan Runner magazine stocked in running stores conveniently near to race fliers. Word spread by mouth there too.
I was nervous: 283 steps midway through a 15K (9.3-mile) course better be worth the strain and views.
I was told 700+ runners entered Year 3. Both 15K and 5K courses started and ended near Saugatuck’s Coral Gables. The 3.1-miler was not long enough to get to the steps and back. but still furnished an entry-level challenge whetting interests and lighting fires to train and grow fit enough to step up — perhaps next year — to the longer quest.
By 2006 I had landed my dream job writing and taking pictures for The Commercial Record. By then I’d become MR editor and shamelessly promoted both MBC and spring Town Crier runs raising funds for schoolkids too via story spreads in each publication.
Numbers dropped after Huntington, like other brank branches, took a hit from the nationwide mortgage crisis had to back off its sponsorship, but the community found ways to keep what we knew was a great thing going.
When Saugatuck city rebuilt Baldy’s aging 283 steps in 2009, the Challenge took a year’s hiatus, then took a 2010 detour to a Beery Field finish/start in Douglas.
Already losing a year’s race momentum, new race leaders saw another signup drop due to cold 2011 rains
A newly-chartered Rotary chapter here stepped up in 2012 to relieve them.
Club members and race directors walked and set up courses, took over soliciting sponsors spreading words best we could and made numbers rise enough to make MBC the small chapter’s biggest funder.
The next few years furnished colorful chapters too. Heirs repeated founders’ Rogaine caper when we found a donated weekend’s porta-potty use had gone unclaimed as a door prize, so “awarded” it to the winner of a Who Looks Most Like Baldy contest.
Another year, one runner turned wrong at a missing direction sign and others, unwitting, followed. Most after took “going the extra mile” with a sense of resigned humor, but race directors learned from constructive criticisms and next installment made corrections.
The pandemic shutdown changed things too. By then, 2020, MR was gone, a dinosaur — avid runners got news online almost instantly, our writers and publishers were aging, it had lived its course. The CR had to pivot too, closing our local office.
Working from home remotely, I still could still drive here often but no longer host race planning meetings with fellow Rotarian directors Jack Sheridan and Chris Yoder in the paper’s conference room; store pre-ordered race supplies, t-shirts delivered sized in boxes and such in our now-gone garage.
By then, in 2017, clubsparkplug Jim Sullivan (no relation to me, except in spirit) and Gordon Stannis has stepped in to bolster Chris, Jack and me, and re-envisioned what MBC could be.
It was Gordon’s idea to move the long race’s start to Wicks Park, back in downtown Saugatuck, and shuttle shorter-course runners early across the river, within sight and hearing range, for a first-time simul-start. That way, their adventures could include the steps and more memorable nearby trails leading to heart-pounding summit views.
One whimsy that fast went the way of Rogaine and potty auctions was start both races from Wicks and cross a river-spanning barge. What other race began with a run on water? We were safe to dream that knowing the U.S. Coast would not allow blocking a federal channel.
In 2018 I joined Brent Birkholz, cannon-firing Boyce brothers Rob and Mark and Meridith Ridl boardinf Brent’s amphibious World War II Harbor Duck, bound for starting both races from the river’s center.
It was cold and choppy that morning; one of our on-board rental speaker wires shook loose where someone earlier had been soddered it. Sputtering, then no sound emerged for our efforts, but onshore made sure the race went on.
After taking pictures of Saturday’s latest Challenge, I met new city manager Ryan Cummins, his wife for the first time, council members Holly Anderson at the Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance booth and Rotarian Helen Baldwin helping out every way she could.
Among venturers they served were council peer and sometimes political critic Russ Gardner in this quest to make our next chapter better yet.
