Algonac State Park's lakeplain prairie

Most people pull into Algonac State Park to camp and watch the freighters slide by. The riverfront sites look straight across the St. Clair at Ontario, and a thousand-foot ore boat passing fifty yards off your picnic table is hard to top. But walk inland from the water and you cross into something far rarer than the view.

Behind the campground lies a lakeplain prairie — open grassland on dead-flat ground that old Great Lakes shorelines left behind, often wet underfoot in spring. Threaded through it is oak savanna, sometimes called oak openings: a scatter of big bur and pin oaks standing alone over the grass, the way a savanna does, instead of crowding into a closed forest. Two centuries ago these grasslands rolled across a wide band of southeast Michigan. The plow and the subdivision took almost all of it. What survives now comes in scraps, and Algonac holds one of the larger surviving pieces — enough that the state set part of the park aside as a dedicated natural area.

It rewards a slow walk. Big bluestem and little bluestem grow head-high by late summer, blazing star throws up purple spikes, and the whole stand hums with butterflies and grassland birds that have nowhere else left to go. These plants are fire-adapted; the prairie wants to burn now and then, and crews set controlled burns to keep the oaks from closing in and shading the grass out of existence.

Stay on the mowed paths — the prairie soil and its seed bank are delicate, and a single boot-worn shortcut undoes years. Come in August, when the grass is tallest and the wildflowers are loud, and you can stand in a piece of Michigan that looks almost the way it did before anyone got here.