![]() ![]() ![]() Towering Perched dunes are found on headlands bordering Lake Michigan such as Empire Bluffs, Sleeping Bear Bluffs, Pyramid Point and South Manitou Island. The most noted features of the park, however, are its dunes, high bluffs and dune plateaus. There are also 26 lakes in the park, which on most of them the use of motorized boats have been banned to preserve the water quality. The park was created primarily to preserve the fragile dunes along the shoreline but it is still wide enough to contain beech/maple forests as well as meadows of abandoned farm fields, wetlands, cedar swamps, streams and bogs. Sleeping Bear Dunes is a long and narrow park, only six miles at its widest point with most of it lying in Leelanau County. But few people who visit the national lakeshore today would argue that its outstanding natural features or its cultural ones, including an 1871 lighthouse, are not worth saving from the development that has ravaged much of the Lake Michigan shoreline. In many cases farms and summer homes had been in a family for generations, the reason resentment towards the National Park Service still lingers in the area. Individuals were forced to sell their property, almost 51,000 acres, to the federal government. It is one of Michigan’s best-known destinations, an area that attracts almost 1.2 million visitors a year who come to play in the dunes to hike, ski, camp, run wildly down the Dune Climb or simply sit on top of a dune and absorb the pastel blues of Lake Michigan.įirst surveyed for National Park status in 1958, Sleeping Bear Dunes was pieced together in the 1970s resulting in a bitter controversy. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the country.Įstablished in 1970, the 72,000-acre park stretches between Frankfort and Leland and includes 35 miles of shoreline on the mainland, two remote islands in Lake Michigan and the largest dunes in Michigan. The 200 miles of sand dunes fronting Lake Michigan's east shore is the largest collection of freshwater coastal dunes in the world and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the only National Park unit in the Lower Peninsula, is the crowning jewel.
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