“There’s a fair amount of stuff we’ve digested over the years,” Kerfoot told the Star Tribune at the time of the sale. “It’ll take a while to pick all of it out of me.”

In recent years, he and Sue have spent summers in Minnesota and then traveled back to Missouri to be close to family for the rest of the year.

Visitors love to drop in and talk about Justine Kerfoot or Bruce Kerfoot or the years they spent working at the lodge, Fredrikson said. He’s found that Bruce’s energy seemingly matched that of his mother, who died in 2001 when she was 94.

“He was one of those people that was able to get stuff done more easily or better than other people,” Fredrikson said. “Maybe because of who he was, or maybe because the stars align for this kind of person.”

In a social media post, Kerfoot’s family said they had peace knowing he and his mother “were paddling together to their shore lunch spot.”

Mark Hennessy knew Kerfoot for 40 years, but has had a closer view for the past three years. He said without Kerfoot, the Chik-Wauk Museum and Nature Center, located near the end of the Gunflint Trail, wouldn’t exist. Whenever there was a work project, the executive director said, Kerfoot would show up.

A teenage motorcyclist was killed in a collision with an SUV at a Burnsville intersection, officials said Friday.

The crash occurred shortly after 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Burnsville Parkway and Interstate 35W, police said.

The motorcyclist was identified by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office as Peter Vsevolod Genis, 17, of Burnsville.

An SUV driver was turning left from westbound Burnsville Parkway to northbound 35W when Genis went through a red light while heading east and struck the SUV.

The SUV driver and a woman with him, both from Burnsville, were not hurt.

The other vehicle was a Mercedes SUV. The driver was a 30-year-old male from Burnsville, with a 29-year-old female passenger from Burnsville. Neither of them was injured.

Many Minnesotans who have homes in Florida escaped the worst of the damage from the latest hurricane to batter the Southeast coast.

Hurricane Milton, which made landfall Wednesday, killed at least eight people. The storm, predicted to be a Category 5, weakened to Category 3 but had sustained winds of 120 mph. It also arrived in Florida just one week after Category 4 Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 230 people across several states, according to the Associated Press.

A large contingent of Minnesota snowbirds who live in Naples, Fla. — about two hours south of Sarasota, which bore the hurricane head on — did not see as much destruction as storms from years past, said Mike Schumann, who resides in St. Louis Park during the warm months. Florida has long attracted Minnesotans for its warm winters and spring training baseball, as the Minnesota Twins train in Fort Myers, on the gulf coast and about a 45-minute drive from Naples.

As Schumann traveled on a long-planned trip to Germany during the storm, his home and furniture store in Naples were at the top of his mind. Schumann streamed a local news station based in Naples and received updates from his neighbors who decided to hunker down and brave the storm.

“We were on pins and needles all night,” he said the day after the storm. “My neighbors were kind of crazy to try to ride this one out. But based on the pictures they sent us of our home, this was not as bad.”

Schumann, who was on his way back to Minnesota from his trip, said he was going to wait until the power was back on and hurricane relief efforts settled down before he heads back to check on the state of his properties.

“We got really lucky,” he said. “A lot of people thought it was going to be significantly worst than it was.”

Naples, once described as ‘a warm Edina,’ has such a large Minnesota population, that in the 1960s, Minnesotans formed a weekly winter breakfast club that still meets with Minnesota politicians and CEOS.