Four Very Different Coasts — a stop on M-22 North.
Whatever season you're driving this in, you're seeing one of four almost unrelated versions of this coast, so let me tell you about the other three.
SUMMER is what most people know: turquoise water, packed beaches, a two-hour wait for dinner in Glen Arbor, and the dunes crawling with people. Beautiful, and busy.
AUTUMN is, for my money, the best of it. The hardwoods go scarlet and gold against that blue water, the crowds thin out after Labor Day, the cherry and apple harvest is on, and the light gets low and golden. The middle two weeks of October are the peak, and the vineyards are picking.
WINTER is genuinely extreme. Lake-effect snow — cold air crossing open water, picking up moisture, dumping it on this shore — buries the peninsula in feet of it. Ice shoves pile up along the beaches in blue-white ridges. M-22 stays open and plowed, but the park roads and Pierce Stocking close. On a still February day with the dunes under snow and no one on them, it's as beautiful as this place ever gets.
SPRING is the shortest and the least visited: mud, then in the second week of May the whole peninsula erupts into cherry blossom, and for about ten days it's white in every direction.
Come back in a different one. It won't be the same drive.