The Sleeping Bear Waits

The sand bluffs here rise four hundred fifty feet above Lake Michigan. On a clear day you can see the North and South Manitou Islands from the top, two green shapes on the water about fifteen miles offshore. The Anishinaabe have a story about those islands. It begins in Wisconsin.

A mother bear and her two cubs were driven from their home on the Wisconsin shore by fire. They swam east across Lake Michigan toward the opposite shore. The cubs fell behind. They drowned before they could reach land. The Great Spirit, seeing what had happened, raised the cubs from the lake bottom as the Manitou Islands, so they would always be visible from shore. The mother who made it across lay down on the beach to watch over where they had disappeared beneath the water. She has been there since. The dunes are the sleeping bear.

The National Lakeshore established here in nineteen seventy protects about thirty-five miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, plus the dune systems, the inland lakes, the forested uplands, and the beaches. It was not established without cost. Thousands of private landowners in Leelanau and Benzie counties were bought out, some willingly, some through condemnation proceedings. The communities of Glen Arbor and Empire exist at the park's edges as service towns for the people who come to see what their predecessors were moved to make accessible.

The dunes themselves are a geological inheritance from the glaciers that carved the Great Lakes basin and retreated twelve thousand years ago. The sand has been moving ever since.