Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Mother Bear
Near Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan
About forty minutes west of Traverse City, enormous sand dunes rise hundreds of feet straight out of Lake Michigan, some of the tallest freshwater dunes in the world. This is Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and its name comes from an Anishinaabe story carried down through the Ojibwe people. As the legend goes, long ago a mother bear and her two cubs fled a great forest fire on the Wisconsin shore and plunged into Lake Michigan to swim to safety.
They swam all night, but the two cubs grew tired and fell behind. The mother reached the far shore and climbed a high bluff to watch for them, waiting and waiting, but they never made it. The Great Spirit, moved by her devotion, raised the two cubs from the water as North and South Manitou Islands, and covered the grieving mother with sand as she lay on the bluff, a solitary dune that watches over her lost children still.
In twenty eleven a national morning television program named this stretch of shoreline the most beautiful place in America, and few who stand atop the dunes would argue.
