The Lake Michigan shore is fast eroding. If you think about it, it's a natural process - who says the beaches and dunes should never change? They would be wrong. The very reason the Indiana Dunes National Park exists is due to the natural processes of erosion and the winds depositing sand into piles along the shore. It's an ever-changing process, there is no "perfect state" where everything will become static and never change again. I think it's important for people to realize this - the beach and the dunes are changing, and that's okay.
What needs to be stopped is change due to an unnatural cause. The pier in Michigan City was built to guide boats into Trail Creek. This pier has prevented sands from moving naturally along the shoreline past the creek. Therefore, the beaches to the west are "starving" sand is no longer naturally replentished so the dunes are collapsing at a fast rate.
It's not erosion caused by someone walking on the dunes - contrary to what the Park Service wants you to believe. I know this because all of the dune ridge trails I used to walk along are long gone - part of the bottom of Lake Michigan. I didn't do that! The other visitors who have been packing down that sand for decades didn't do that! The waves did, and no amount of keeping people off the dunes would have ever prevented that. Our footprints are long gone.
From time to time, the park has replentished the sand along these starving beaches to keep the waters from further eroding the dunes. They've piled boulders along the shore where there are roads or houses - to save property. The latest attempt at Central Beach is underway. From the beach we noticed a very tall pile of sand extending from the Central Beach access point. It's about 25 or 30 feet tall, and sticks out toward the water. My hope is this pile of sand is just the beginning, and they don't intend to leave it this way, because it looks terrible. My second hope is that this sand was collected locally, and not shipped in from somewhere far away, bringing with it stones and fossils from another area that don't belong here.
The view from this area is always quite beautiful, in any weather, even in the snowfall of this cold morning. Once Central Beach reopens, we should once again see the views from this dune.
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