Minnesota briefs: St. Cloud opens new center for homeless youths

The Pathways 4 Youth Center held an open house last week to celebrate its opening, which is slated for early April. The center (P4Y), built for 16- to 23-year-olds who are homeless, provides social services, classes, showers, food and clothing for teens. It's not a shelter — there are a few homeless shelters in the area — rather, it is geared toward helping connect teens with services in order to end youth homelessness in the St. Cloud area.

The Rotary Club of St. Cloud, the Granite Rotary Club, the Great River Rotary Club and the St. Cloud Rotaract Club teamed up to open the 3,700-square-foot center in the Youth for Christ building at 203 Cooper Av. N. More than $300,000 was donated to cover the first year of the center's operation. The center will be open 2-7 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Nearly 40 percent of homeless young people in Minnesota live outside the Twin Cities and its suburbs, according to Wilder Research. An estimated 150 16- to 23-year-olds are homeless in St. Cloud each day.

Kelly Smith

Adventurers who dream of the natural splendor of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness can get a monthly dose of living vicariously in it through a new podcast from the community radio station in Grand Marais.

WTIP launched a monthly Boundary Waters Podcast in mid-February, each episode containing a mix of people's personal wilderness stories and discussion with gear manufacturers.

"It's exciting for the radio station and we're having a great response so far," said news director Joe Friedrichs, who co-hosts the podcast with climbing business owner Matthew Baxley. "People love [the Boundary Waters] so much ... they can stay connected to it through this."

The station will release new episodes on the 15th of each month at wtip.org/wtip-boundary-waters-podcast. People interested in telling their stories on the podcast should e-mail bwcapodcast@gmail.com.

Pam Louwagie

A 5-foot-long mammoth tusk thought to be 10,000 years old has been put on display at the Nobles County Historical Society Museum after its former home, the Blue Mounds State Park Interpretive Center, was deemed unsafe and closed.

Found in the 1980s in a gravel pit north of Adrian, Minn., the curved tusk had been on display at the interpretive center for years until "structural integrity" concerns required the state Department of Natural Resources to shutter the center, according to the DNR's Peter Hark.

There is no timeline for the center's repair and reopening, he added.

Roger Zarn at the Historical Society museum in Worthington said he's been only too happy to show off the museum's new feature.

"From what we've been able to determine, it's the left tusk," he said.

Matt McKinney