Silver Beach, St. Joseph, MI, photo by lucasseidenfaden.
Lucas has a panorama of Silver Beach in St. Joseph that you have to check out, and you better have a look at his other beach and landscape photos too.
You can view more photos from St. Joseph on this Flickr map and there’s also a whole bunch of St. Joseph information posted today in the Berrien County, Michigan article on Absolute Michigan.
My dog can fly, photo by J. Star.
J Star writes:
The boy, the dog and I went to Lake Michigan yesterday, planning to stay until tonight. The forecast called for clear skies and eighty degrees for today…last night at about midnight the storms started. By morning, the thunder was deafening, the tent was afloat in three inches of water, and hail was pounding down everywhere. Needless to say, we packed it in early and headed home.
We did have fun on the beach for about two hours yesterday. Steve seems to think it was worth the drive. You can tell by the sand being joyously flung everywhere, and by the huge gob of it he left stuck to my polarizer.
The DNR page on Grand Mere State Park near Stevensville says that the 985 acre park features magnificent sand dunes, deep blowouts, one mile of Lake Michigan shoreline and three inland lakes behind the dunes in the undeveloped natural area. Both the DNR page and Wikipedia entry for Grand Mere State Park are remarkably scant on information, leading me to believe that with a 1/2 mile hike to the beach, it’s a pretty good place to avoid the crowds. Here’s a Google map to Grand Mere State Park.
Been there? Done that? Tell us or show us what it was like in the comments!
Warren Dunes State Park, photo by mizjellybean
Heading up the shoreline from New Buffalo, we come to the Warren Dunes State Park. I think that the first thing you need to do is check out this slideshow of the Warren Dunes. Go ahead, we’ll wait.
Wikipedia’s entry for Warren Dunes State Park is a 1,952 acre state park, located along the shore of Lake Michigan in Berrien County, Michigan (near Sawyer). The park’s dunes include Mt. Fuller, Pikes Peak, Mt. Edwards and (the tallest) Tower Hill which rises 250′ above Lake Michigan. Warren Dunes was designated as a state park in 1930 and draws around one million visitors annually. The page on the village of Sawyer from the Harbor Country Chamber of Commerce adds that although most in the area saw the land as worthless, businessman Edward K. Warren had a vision to preserve them and bought the land at the turn of the century.
Speaking of Wikipedia – something we seem to do fairly often – they have a massive page of map data and hacks for Warren Dunes including a Flickr map of photos from the Warren Dunes area and the Google map to Warren Dunes State Park.
I should add that the DNR page for Warren Dunes State Park notes that due to an infestation of the Emerald Ash Borer beetle, over 4,000 ash trees have been removed from the modern campground unit, dramatically changing the appearance of that campground.
Sunset over Lake Michigan, photo by briethe.
There’s not much doubt that as we head up Michigan’s west coast in our shoreline tour, we’ll see a lot of breakwalls and sunsets.
The New Buffalo Township’s excellent history tells us (among other things):
The city of New Buffalo came into being because of a violent October storm in 1834, when Captain Wessel D. Whittaker grounded his schooner Post Boy in the mouth of a small stream called State Creek near the present village of Grand Beach. The ship was destroyed, but Captain and crew survived the disaster and walked to Michigan City, where there were taverns that could provide food and shelter. There Whittaker hired a rig and headed north for St. Joseph to report the ship’s loss to its underwriters. On his way up the coast, he was struck by advantages and beauty of the spot where the Galien River passed through Lake Potawatomi into Lake Michigan. Lake Potowatomi, since drained by the sawmills, was, by varying accounts, two miles long, a half mile wide and up to ninety feet deep or four miles long by a mile wide and fourteen feet deep. It is now just “a lazy bend in the river.”
In addition to all kinds of visitor and business information, The New Buffalo Business Administration has a nice timeline of the history of New Buffalo and a cool old photos of the C&O Railroad Roundhouse that I would very much like to see larger. Maybe it can be found at the New Buffalo Railroad Museum. I also learned at NewBuffalo.com that the nation’s first Highway Travel Information center opened on May 4, 1935, on US-12 at New Buffalo. New Buffalo’s Wikipedia entry is on the lame side, and I would encourage any enterprising New Buffaloeans to spruce it up a little.
You can View a map of photos from New Buffalo and nearby, and explore more of our Michigan Shoreline tour pictures.
You can see Chicago from 42 miles away! by TRVentura
This summer, Absolute Michigan will be taking a tour of Michigan’s shoreline, looking at the heritage and attractions of the communities along Michigan’s Great Lakes shoreline.
Michigan in Pictures will be going along, trying to point out some of the beauty along the way.
We’d really like it if you’d help us by telling us what not to miss. If we do miss something – and with 3000+ miles of coastline, that’s pretty likely – then please feel welcome to post a comment or a link at the place where we missed it.
And if you want to climb in the car (or on the bike or in the kayak) and join the tour and let us know what you found, well that would be very cool too.
The above photo was taken at the beach in Michiana, Michigan (and Yahoo/Flickr geotagged photo map). I’m always a little surprised to find that you can’t see the state line from space.
Michigan in Pictures 