You Can Walk a Great Lakes Beach Below the High Water Mark, Even a Private One

Joan Glass wanted to walk the Lake Huron shore in front of the Goeckels’ cottage, and the Goeckels wanted her arrested for trespassing. That fight went all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court, and in 2005 Glass won. The court held that the wet-sand strip of any Great Lakes beach — the band between the water and the ordinary high water mark — is held in public trust, and you can walk it even when the dry sand behind it belongs to somebody with a deed and a “Private” sign.

The catch is in the word walk. The public-trust right grew out of old rights to fish, hunt, and boat the Great Lakes, and passage along the shore is bundled in with those. What the court pointedly did not hand the public was the beach itself. Spreading a towel, planting an umbrella, and settling in for the afternoon on someone’s frontage is still trespassing. You get to pass through, not to move in.

Now the tricky part, and it’s the part people get wrong. The ordinary high water mark that governs walking is not a number. It’s a physical line — the point up the shore where the water’s steady action leaves a distinct mark, in the erosion, in where the beach grass stops. Glass borrowed that definition from Wisconsin, and it moves with the lake. There is a second high water mark, a fixed elevation the state sets in MCL 324.32502 (579.8 feet for Lakes Michigan and Huron, dropping to 571.6 for Erie), but that one is for permitting seawalls and docks, not for deciding where your feet may go. Confusing the two is how a beach argument turns into a survey argument.

Lakefront owners still own down to the water’s edge. They just took that title, as the court put it, subject to a public right that predates their deed by a couple of centuries. The line between a lawful stroll and a trespass is genuinely blurry on a quiet stretch of sand, so if you own frontage and you’re minded to run somebody off — or you’re the one being run off — that’s worth a Michigan attorney’s read before it turns into a citation.