A Coast Made of Sand — a stop on M-22.
Look to your left when the trees break, and start noticing the sand — because you are driving along the largest collection of freshwater dunes on the planet.
Here's how they got here. The glaciers ground the rock of this region into sand and dumped it. Then the prevailing wind on Lake Michigan blows out of the WEST, straight down four hundred miles of open water — so everything the lake picks up gets driven onto this eastern shore. Sand washes ashore, dries, blows inland, and piles up. It has been doing that for thousands of years, and the result is a rampart of dunes running almost the entire length of this coast.
Watch the beach grass on the dune faces. That thin, tough, unimpressive grass is the only thing holding the whole system together; its roots run for yards underground and pin the sand down. Break the grass and the dune starts to walk. That's why you'll see boardwalks and 'stay off the dune' signs everywhere along here, and it isn't fussiness — a footpath up a dune face becomes a blowout, and a blowout can swallow a forest.
You'll see all of this at a spectacular scale later on at Sleeping Bear. But it starts right here.