How a Bluff Falls Into a Lake

Now that we're up on the high shore, let me show you something the postcards leave out: this coastline is actively coming apart, and fast.

These bluffs are not rock. They're sand, gravel and clay dumped by glaciers and stacked hundreds of feet high, and the only thing holding them up is the vegetation on the face and the beach at the bottom. Take either away and gravity does the rest.

The lake decides how fast. Lake Michigan's level swings by several feet over cycles of years — and in the high-water years around two thousand nineteen and twenty, the water came up so far it ate the beaches entirely, letting waves work directly at the toe of the bluffs. Whole sections slumped. Houses that had stood for generations went over the edge or had to be moved back; roads were closed; some homeowners spent six figures on rock armor and watched it undermined anyway.

You can read it as you drive. Look for raw, unvegetated faces of bare sand — those are fresh failures. Look for trees leaning downhill or lying at the base, still green. Look for stairways to nowhere.

It's why building setbacks along here are strict and getting stricter. And it's a decent thing to keep in mind at the overlooks: stay behind the railings, and don't stand on an undercut edge for a photograph. That ground is not as solid as it looks.