We had another completely fabulous day! We set out after a decent hotel
breakfast (oatmeal, cereal) and stopped at a grocery store for a small
picnic meal for later. Then we headed west out of Traverse City to the
Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. What a wonderful place! We started with
a scenic drive that had two absolutely breathtaking overlooks–one at the
top of one of the HUGE sand dunes that this park is famous for. They go
down 300-400 feet in a very steep incline to this absurdly clear, tropically
light blue water, and no photos will do them full justice. It was so
beautiful, standing there high up with the Manitou islands and otherwise
just endless lake in front of us. We also saw a lake in the making–all
these little lakes directly inland dot the Leelanau peninsula that we are
on, and they get created when a sandbar gradually closes off a bay or a part
of a bay. This is why we drove across so many little land bridges
yesterday, with Lake Michigan on one side and a little lake on the other.
After the scenic drive, we did the “must-do” thing, the “Old Faithful” of
the park–we hiked up the big dune in the center of the park (not near the
shore”), which was really the only busy art of the park–almost everywhere
else, we ran into at most 20 people. The Dune Climb again defies photos in
terms of scale–it’s a HUGE dune and a hard climb up, but it’s fun to get to
the benches on top and then run back down the enormous sloping hill of fine white sand–and watch the five-year olds that manage it effortlessly!
The dune climb was exhausting, but we then took one more small hike before lunch–from the Maritime Museum, which explains the early coastguard rescues on this coast–to Sleeping Bear Point, a 1.4 round-trip trail across dunes to a very quiet beach with a bottom-up view of those enormous sand slopes at this coast. We ran into a park volunteer who was monitoring the rare bird species that is currently having their young here–the Great Lakes piping plover, an endangered species of which there are only abut 70 breeding pairs left–and 24 of them in this park (as of last year’s nesting statistics). She showed us images of what they look like and pointed out their nesting area, and a few minutes later we saw two different moms and chicks zipping around on the beach ! The chicks are no bigger than a wren and even the mom is teeny, and their camouflage is amazing, so there were very hard to spot. But Mark caught a couple on camera, so we were excited!
After a quick visit to the maritime museum, complete with old rescue boats
and cork-based life vests, we had out picnic lunch, and then headed for
another point on this bay, Pyramid Point, with another little hike through
forest and then sand dunes. This was another high-up, don’t walk down or
you’ll never get back up dune, and we also saw a beautiful yellow monarch in these wild lilies at look like fire lilies to me. Then we left the park
after a brief visit to a long, narrow beach, where there were in face tiny
shells, so I was wrong about the ocean-lake difference in that respect. We
continued along the coast up the Leelenau Peninsula, up to a lighthouse in a
state park at the very tip, called Grand Traverse lighthouse. But there
wasn’t much park around it, and it was a bit too touristy for my taste–we
didn’t tour the lighthouse because they wanted to charge us, and I think the
whole “lighthouse collecting” business, where many road trippers try to
visit as many lighthouses as possible is s bit silly.
We continued down the coast, catching many glimpses of the lake between
building or through the trees, and stopped at a public access spot to see
the very clear division between a light and a dark blue layer in the lake
more clearly. A guy who was just getting his boat out of the lake confirmed
out hunch that the lake drops off very sharply, from 15 feet to about 50
feet, and that causes the very different color “lines” in this super clear
water. We returned to Traverse City, at the end of the peninsula, around 5
pm, and found the downtown area, around Front street. It was very nice, not
just tourist-oriented, although that’s clearly part of its clientele–but it
was more Pearl Street in Boulder or the Haymarket in Lincoln than Estes Park or Bar Harbor–lots of restaurants and brew pubs, art galleries and fancy clothes stores, but also food trucks at the end of downtown, a great old movie theater, and an old canal between Front Street and actual Traverse Bay. We found a pub with outdoor seating and had a fabulous , really fresh pizza and an ice cream sandwich made by the locally famous ice cream company, Moomers. It was yummy (cinnamon ice cream between oatmeal-raisin cookies). We shared the dessert as well as the meal, so we felt very moderate! We took a quick walk to the waterfront, but after a gorgeous, mostly sunny day with almost no wind, it had gotten a bit chilly by then, and we just headed home to our motel, with plans to shut up shop extra early.