The Sand Dunes and Grand Haven State Park

This stretch of beach at the channel mouth is Grand Haven State Park, forty-eight acres of pure sand right where the Grand River meets Lake Michigan. It became a state park in nineteen twenty, one of the first parks Michigan created after it formed a state parks commission. Here is a secret about this beach, though.

It is not entirely natural. When engineers built the long piers to protect the harbor entrance, those piers blocked the steady drift of sand that the lake pushes along the shore. The sand piled up against the structure, and over the years it built this wide sunny beach for you to lie on.

For the real towering dunes, you look just south of town to Rosy Mound, where a wooded parabolic dune climbs nearly two hundred feet above the lake and holds a record of sand going back more than three thousand years. These are part of what is often called the largest freshwater dune system in the world, a ribbon of sand running the whole eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Wind, water, and a river mouth built all of it, grain by grain.