Beachcombing the Coast — a stop on M-22 South.
If you stop at any beach on this drive, spend ten minutes looking down, because Michigan beachcombing is a genuine local obsession with real things to find.
The famous one is the Petoskey stone — Michigan's state stone, and it is a fossil. It is colonial coral that lived in a warm shallow sea covering this region around three hundred and fifty million years ago, later ground smooth by glaciers and waves. Dry, it looks like an ordinary grey pebble. WET, a honeycomb pattern of six-sided cells appears, and once you have seen one you will find more. They are commoner north of here around Petoskey itself, but they turn up all along this shore.
Look also for beach glass, worn frosted by the sand; for fossil crinoid stems, which look like tiny stacked washers; and for driftwood bleached silver-grey.
The best hunting is at the waterline right after a blow, when the waves have turned over the gravel and sorted it. Early morning, before anyone else has walked it.
One rule: take a reasonable pocketful, not a bucket. There are limits in the state parks, and a beach that everyone strips is a beach with nothing left to find. Wet your finds in the lake to see what you actually have — half the pebbles that look dull dry are beautiful wet.