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Sanctuary continues Heritage Trail work

ALPENA — The Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary continues to work on the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Trail.

“I don’t think there is a single member of staff who hasn’t worked on this project. We’re working on over 100 interpretive signs that will go between the three counties and spill over into Tawas,” Sanctuary Superintendent Jeff Gray said during Tuesday’s Sanctuary Advisory Council meeting.

The purpose of this trail is to do a couple of things, Gray said.

First it’s to interpret individual sites and maritime assets. It will serve as wayfinding so people can find the shipwrecks and know how they can get to a lighthouse, he said.

“It’s also to have some interconnectivity so when you experience one resource, you can see other resources like that or others different than that,” Gray said. “From an economic tourism standpoint it’s meant to hold them in the area.

“It’s the first part of the project and it’s the bricks and mortar of the program. In hopefully the coming years we’ll do more and more assets to go along with this.”

Also discussed at the meeting Tuesday was the new website for the sanctuary.

“At the last meeting we had an update about the Friends website,” Education Coordinator Sarah Waters said. “I have been asked several times what’s the deal with the Thunder Bay website. The deal is the office of the National Marine Sanctuaries, over a year ago started to overhaul the headquarters website.”

All the sanctuaries within the system will have new websites geared toward mobile layouts.

“They’ve been embarking on doing the switchover but they need a certain amount of content for the site and also there’s only one person for all the sanctuaries. We’re second in line now, so we’re working on it. We have to wait to go through that route. It’s not as flexible as the Friends website, which is so great the Friends website exists while we’re waiting.”

She said staff want to ensure the website is able to load images and video.

“We have to check on the clickability of things, the loading speed. Lots of big images a lot less text. We’re getting there slowly, but surely,” Waters said.

Jordan Spence can be reached via email at jspence@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5687.

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