The Bluff and the Big Lake — a stop on the Tunnel of Trees.
When the trees do break, look left and down, because you are driving along the top of a bluff a couple of hundred feet above Lake Michigan.
That drop is glacial. The ice sheet that gouged out the lake basin left this shoulder of clay, sand and gravel standing above it, and the lake has been working at the toe of it ever since. In places you will see raw, unvegetated faces where a chunk has recently let go — this bluff is actively eroding, and the high-water years of the last decade took real bites out of it.
The water is the clearest you will see on this coast. Look for the colour bands: pale turquoise over the sand shallows, then a hard line into deep blue where the bottom drops away. On a calm morning you can see the sandbars from up here as clearly as if they were drawn on a map.
There are a handful of small pull-offs along here and they fill up in autumn. If you find one empty, take it. And please pull fully off the pavement — a car half in this lane on a blind curve is the single most dangerous thing on this road.
Sunset from these gaps, incidentally, is spectacular. You are facing west over open water with nothing in the way.