Longville's Turtles Stopped Racing. Hackensack's Chainsaws Haven't Started Yet.

Drive through downtown Longville on a Wednesday afternoon in early September and nothing happens. No turtle mobile idling on Main Street, no volunteers roping off the block, no announcer counting down to a 2 p.m. release. For ten straight Wednesdays every summer since 1967, when a Longville saloon owner named Russ Nyvall decided the town needed something for kids to do, this exact stretch of pavement has shut down for turtle racing. Now it's just pavement.

Three weeks north in Hackensack, the same quiet holds. The chainsaws that will fill downtown with sawdust and the buzz of a dozen carvers working logs into art haven't arrived yet. That happens the last weekend of September, this year September 25 through 27.

Right now, in the gap between those two traditions, is when this stretch of lake country actually belongs to the people who live here.

Two Traditions, Two Different Jobs

The turtle races and the chainsaw carving aren't cousins. They're built on opposite logic, and comparing them side by side shows how differently each town organizes its summer around a single tradition.

The turtle races repeat all summer because they're designed to give a family staying at a Longville-area resort something to do on their Wednesday. The chainsaw event happens exactly once because it's a destination weekend, not a weekly habit. One is built for repeat tourism, the other for a single big draw. Between them sits everything else this area actually is when neither crowd has shown up.

The Gap Nobody's Marketing Right Now

That gap isn't hypothetical this week. Hackensack's Friday evening Lakeside Concerts at the Lions Pavilion, a Northwoods Arts Council series that ran weekly from June 19 through September 4, wrapped its final show just days before this was written. Longville's Music in the Park series at Salem Lutheran closed out its own summer run around the same point on the calendar. Two separate outdoor concert series in two separate towns, both finished within days of each other, both timed to Labor Day the way most seasonal programming here is.

What doesn't close down:

• Frosty's Ice Cream & Pizza Parlor in Longville, a seasonal favorite that keeps serving locals after the concert series and turtle races have both wrapped
• The Woodpile in Longville, open for breakfast and lunch with a drink list that's more creative than a small-town diner card usually offers
• YoYo Donuts on Minnesota Avenue in downtown Walker, open seven days a week
• Public programs at Deep Portage Learning Center outside Hackensack, an outdoor education center that's been running since 1973

None of these are festival businesses. They don't need a turtle race or a chainsaw carver to justify being open on a Tuesday in September.

The Donut Shop That Ships To An NFL Training Camp

YoYo Donuts is the clearest example of the difference between a business built for the tourist calendar and one built to actually live here year-round.

Luke and Alise McGregor both grew up in the area. Luke graduated from Walker-Hackensack-Akeley in 1999. Alise graduated from Brainerd in 1998 and spent summers and holidays in Walker with extended family. In 2023 they bought the original YoYo Donuts location in Minnetonka and opened a second store in downtown Walker, then moved to the area themselves. What they built next wasn't a seasonal ice cream window. It was a full production kitchen that now supplies the Minnetonka store with cakes and ice cream, ships baked goods to a bakery the McGregors also own in north Minneapolis, and has sent donuts to the Minnesota Vikings training camp, a delivery notable enough that Sports Illustrated wrote it up.

The shop makes everything nut-free, a deliberate choice the McGregors built the business around from the start. The flavor list runs toward the specific rather than the safe: a Maple Bacon Long John, something called the Chocolate Zebra, a Crème Brûlée donut.

A donut shop that ships nationally out of a small Northwoods town isn't a novelty act for the tourist season. It's year-round infrastructure that happens to sell donuts.

That's the real signal buried in this story. The businesses worth paying attention to in the gap between turtle races and chainsaw carving aren't the ones performing for a crowd that's already gone home. They're the ones with a supply chain, a production schedule, and owners who moved back on purpose.

What The Chainsaw Weekend Actually Asks Of The Town

When the Hackensack Chainsaw Event does arrive September 25 through 27, it isn't a single attraction. It's a coordinated effort across most of the town's civic and business infrastructure at once.

The carving itself brings in about a dozen artists from across the country, working logs into finished pieces that get auctioned off over the weekend. The timed quick-carve format gives carvers roughly 90 minutes to finish a piece before it goes up for bid. Alongside the carving, the weekend includes the All-American Lumberjack Show, with log-boom racing, log rolling, and crosscut sawing, plus a craft show and food trucks lining the closed-off stretch of First Street.

Past Septembers have folded in more than the headline events. Rendezvous Brewery has used the weekend to debut a new beer and run team trivia. Faith in Action has held its booya fundraiser at Union Congregational Church at the east end of Lake Street. The Legion Auxiliary has served a hearty breakfast Saturday morning, and the Farmers Market has set up at the Hackensack Hub the same day. It's the kind of weekend where a church, a brewery, a Legion post, and a volunteer fire department all end up working the same three days, because the town only gets one shot a year at this particular crowd.

That's the opposite problem the turtle races solve. Ten Wednesdays a summer means low stakes each time. One September weekend means every civic group in Hackensack shows up at once.

Why The In-Between Is The Real Town

The version of this area most visitors encounter runs on a schedule built entirely around them: turtle races timed to family vacation weeks, a chainsaw festival timed to peak fall color and the last warm weekend before Minnesota's weather turns. Neither of those calendars was designed with the people who actually live here in mind.

The three weeks between them are. This is when Frosty's serves regulars instead of tour groups, when The Woodpile's morning crowd is neighbors rather than resort guests checking out early, when Deep Portage's programs run for people who'll be back next month instead of families who fly out Sunday. It's the stretch where a bakery that ships donuts to an NFL training camp is just the place you grab coffee on your way to work, because the owners live three miles from the shop and always have.

If you're already living somewhere between Walker, Hackensack, and Longville, this is the version of the area you actually get most of the year. The turtle races and the chainsaw carving are real, and worth catching if you haven't. But they're bookends, not the book.

If you're weighing a move into this stretch of lake country, or thinking about what it actually costs to own a slice of it long term, Mike Kennedy Group knows this area from the inside, quiet Septembers included. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics.