The Dunes Ahead — a stop on M-22.
The country is changing around you now — bigger hills, sandier soil, and glimpses of something very large ahead. That's Sleeping Bear, and since our drive ends at its doorstep, let me tell you what you're about to be looking at.
These aren't ordinary beach dunes. They're PERCHED dunes, and that's the trick of the place. The glaciers left behind enormous plateaus of gravel and clay several hundred feet high. Then wind carried beach sand up and over the top and piled it on the plateau — so you get sand sitting on a high headland rather than at sea level. That is why the bluffs here rise something like four hundred and fifty feet straight out of the water. There are few places on earth with freshwater dunes at this scale.
In two thousand eleven, a national television audience voted this the most beautiful place in America, and the traffic has never quite recovered.
One serious warning while I have you. People look down that giant dune face at the water and think they'll run down and stroll back. It is a four-hundred-foot climb in loose sand on the way up; it routinely takes hours, people are rescued off it every season, and it costs them a great deal of money. Look at it. Photograph it. Don't go down it unless you're truly prepared to come back up.
Empire, and the end of our road, is just ahead.