The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is a 35-mile (56 km) stretch of Lake Michigan’s eastern coastline and is certainly worth a visit as Mike and I discovered today.

The park is named after an Ojibwe tribe legend of the sleeping bear. According to the legend, an enormous fire on the western shore of Lake Michigan drove a mother bear and her cubs into the lake for shelter. Determined to reach the opposite shore, after many miles of swimming, the two cubs lagged behind. When the mother bear reached the shore, she waited on top of a high bluff. The exhausted cubs sadly drowned in the lake, but the mother bear sat and waited in the hope that her cubs would finally appear. Impressed by the mother bear’s determination and faith, the Great Spirit created two islands – North and South Manitou – to commemorate the cubs, and the wind buried the sleeping mother bear under the sands of the dunes where she waits to this day!

Over two million years ago, glaciers creeping along like bulldozers moved rock and soil, gouging, carving, deepening and widening existing drainages and rivers. Around 14,000 years ago, temperatures warmed and the glaciers started to melt leaving behind ridges, glacial landforms and the sand dunes, beaten down by wind and weather.

At 450 feet above the shoreline of Lake Michigan it is seriously windy! You need to hold onto your hat, protect your eyes and keep your mouth closed so that you don’t ingest flying sand!

It’s even more fun at 600 feet above Lake Michigan and certainly worth the climb!