A quick weekend business trip to Chicago provided the perfect excuse to sneak over to Indiana Dunes National Park on the shores of Lake Michigan. We justified the ridiculously expensive 70-mile taxi ride by calling it my birthday celebration. Upgraded to national park status in 2019, Indiana Dunes is one of our newest national parks and we were excited to see what makes it special.
The park’s 50 miles of trails feature woodlands, prairies, and wetlands in addition to the impressive dunes. Wind and waves have shifted the huge dunes over time.
The park’s 15 miles of coastland had waves like an ocean, so it was hard to reconcile the fact that we were looking at a 305-mile long freshwater lake. The water’s color shifts from bright blue when the sun reflects the clear calm sky, to gray when storms churn up the sand from the bottom, to green when chlorophyll is reflected off of floating phytoplankton. During our visit the lake was a blueish gray, like the sky that cold day.
I am used to the delicate white dunes on the Florida gulf with their signs that admonish us to keep off the dunes. But we found trails and staircases through monstrous dunes reaching heights of over 170 feet. Joe hiked the mile long West Beach trail. If you look closely on the stairs below you can see a picture of Joe taking a picture of me while I am taking a picture of him.
Our son encouraged us to look for evidence of the legendary Diana of the Dunes, a free-spirited Chicagoan who left the city in 1915 to spend nine years hiking and living in the dunes. The park celebrates her life with a hike and a challenge to dare to be different and to embrace the dunes.
We drove up the coast to see a cluster of five Century of Progress homes from Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. The houses offered an optimistic vision of futuristic changes on the horizon to people mired in the great Depression. They still looked futuristic and modern. It would be fun to visit the inside in October during the annual tour.
There is plenty more to see at this park. Next time we will visit Mount Baldy, the 136-feet tall wandering dune that sifts 5-10 feet per year.
The next day we took a shorter trip to Pullman National Monument in Chicago.