Sahara-Level Sand Dunes, Mediterranean-Blue Water: Welcome to Michigan.

'Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is one of the Midwest’s most delightful surprises.

The Dune Climb is one of the most popular things to do in a remarkably beautiful, off-the-radar corner of northwest Michigan called Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Yet it had me suffering like a modern-day Sisyphus on a June afternoon. With each oxygen-sucking, uphill step, I slipped and slid backward on the sandy slope. My lungs burned, my bad knee ached, I was drenched with sweat — and I was only halfway to the top.

For locals, the sandy clamber is a childhood rite of passage. “Our mom would take us there to tire us out,” a friend told me, “while she lounged in her beach chair and drank Tab.”

And on this day, kids galloped past me and rolled down the 300-foot dune, their squeals as high-pitched as the cries of the herring gulls overhead. For visitors like me, the steep climb was a way to dig into the park’s quintessential feature: sand.

The park has a plethora of the stuff, from 35 miles of beaches to “perched dunes” towering 450 feet above Lake Michigan — part of the state’s 275,000 acres of sand dunes, which help make up the largest freshwater dune system in the world. . .

For all the park’s odd, otherworldly beauty, it can be reached year-round via a short flight from Chicago (In summer, there are direct flights from several major airports). Yet, like many lifelong Midwesterners, I’d never heard of it until a few years back, when it garnered headlines after “Good Morning America” viewers voted it Most Beautiful Place in America.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/travel/sahara-level-sand-dunes-mediterranean-blue-water-welcome-to-michigan.html?