The Perched Dunes — a stop on M-22 North.
Now the main event. What's rising on your left is Sleeping Bear, and it is not an ordinary dune — it's a PERCHED dune, and the distinction is the whole reason this place looks the way it does.
Ordinary beach dunes sit at water level and are maybe fifty feet high. Here, the glaciers left behind a plateau of gravel, clay and rock several hundred feet tall, standing right at the shoreline. Then, over thousands of years, wind carried beach sand UP the face of that plateau and dumped it on top. So you get a mountain of glacial debris with a blanket of pure sand perched on the summit — bluffs rising something like four hundred and fifty feet straight out of the lake.
There are very few places on earth where freshwater dunes reach this scale. In two thousand eleven a national morning show ran a viewer poll for the most beautiful place in America, and this won it, and the region has been busy ever since.
One warning I'll repeat all day, because the rangers here spend their summers on it: the giant dune face down to the water is a one-way trip. Going down is minutes of fun. Coming back up is a four-hundred-foot climb in loose sand that takes most people two hours, and if you can't do it, the rescue is billed to you. Look at it from the top. That's what the top is for.