Sleeping Bear Dunes

Why should it be a National Park?

An Ojibwe story explains the place. A mother bear and her two cubs swam Lake Michigan to escape a fire on the Wisconsin shore. The mother reached the eastern beach and climbed the bluff to watch for her cubs, who drowned within sight of land. The Great Spirit raised two islands where they went under and a solitary dune where she waited. North and South Manitou Islands are out there, and the dune is still on the bluff. The geology is glacial. Ice sheets left moraines along this coast, and wind piled sand on top of them, which is why these are perched dunes, sitting on high ground rather than at the water's edge. They rise 450 feet above Lake Michigan, and standing on the Lake Michigan Overlook on Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive is like standing on a cliff made of beach. The lakeshore takes in 71,000 acres and 65 miles of shoreline, with beech and maple forest, small glacial lakes, and the two wilderness islands offshore.

Sleeping Bear is regularly called one of the most beautiful places in America, and it has never been proposed as a National Park. The fight here was about wilderness instead. A proposal made in the 1970s sat unresolved for four decades before Congress finally designated 32,557 acres in 2014, making it the newest wilderness in the country at the time. The park question simply never came up, which is worth noting in a book about places that were considered: some landscapes get everything except the conversation.