Crystal Lake & the Rolling Hills — a stop on M-22.
Off to your right through here lies Crystal Lake, and it's one of the loveliest inland lakes in the state — nine miles long, startlingly clear, ringed with cottages and a scenic road that a lot of people drive as a loop off M-22.
It also has its own version of the Onekama story, and this one went badly. In the eighteen seventies a man named Archibald Jones promoted a scheme to connect Crystal Lake to Lake Michigan for boat traffic. The digging started, the outlet cut through — and the water went out far faster than anyone intended. Crystal Lake dropped something like twenty feet before it stopped. Docks were left standing in mid-air; the whole shoreline moved. Locals have called it the Tragedy of Crystal Lake ever since.
The odd twist is that the disaster created the wide sandy beaches the lake is now loved for — the exposed lakebed became the shore. A catastrophe that turned into the town's main asset, entirely by accident.
As we run north from here the country starts to change: the hills get bigger and steeper, the farms thin out, and the woods close in. That's the first sign we're approaching the dunes.