Selling bikes is interesting, but being in the woods in spring, gathering maple sap, is addictive, a distinction Mark and Melinda Spinler know well.
The Spinlers live about 7 miles outside of Grand Marais, the small town on the North Shore that was more quaint than trendy when the couple moved there in 1984.
Mountain biking wasn’t yet a thing when the Spinlers arrived in Grand Marais. But they were into it, and they opened the town’s first bike shop, which they operated for about 30 years before selling it.
Now, instead of two-wheelers, they peddle wood-burning stoves. Also, Mark has a chimney-cleaning business. And together, come March, he and Melinda, both 65, decamp to two relatively small stands of maple trees — one they own and one the state owns — to begin a process that will produce about 270 gallons of syrup, which they market to local businesses.
“Northern Minnesota is a wonderful place to live,” Melinda said. “But a hard place to make a living.”

It’s the syrup business that has embroiled the Spinlers in a standoff with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources that speaks to a larger debate about public lands and their proper use. Similar issues have affected northeast Minnesota residents since at least 1926, when the border region that would become the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness was first established as a roadless area.
But the Spinlers’ brouhaha has nothing to do with paddling or camping.
At issue instead is a 13-acre tract of relatively isolated state land adjoining their property that they have leased from the DNR for about 25 years.