Hawk Island was a gravel pit before it was a snow-tubing hill

The lake at the center of Hawk Island isn’t natural — it’s the hole the gravel left. For years this 100-acre patch on Cavanaugh Road in south Lansing was the Sablain gravel pit, the kind of working scar most cities just fence off and forget. Ingham County took it instead and turned the pit into a park, the dug-out basin filling in as a small lake with a swimming beach and fishing docks around the rim.

In summer it’s a splash pad and a swim beach, a mile and a half of paved, accessible loop around the water, and shaded shelters that book up for birthday parties. The real surprise is winter. The county piles up a sledding hill and grooms sculpted snow lanes, then runs a conveyor lift to haul tubers back to the top so you don’t have to climb. You drop down a wide groomed chute, slide out across the flat, and ride the moving carpet back up to go again — a tubing run inside the city limits, no mountain required, with a warming lodge to thaw out in between runs.

What makes it work is that it’s an Ingham County park sitting entirely inside Lansing. Most county parks are out in the townships; this one is hemmed in by neighborhoods, which means a lot of people can reach a real lake and a real sledding hill without leaving town. The snow season is at the mercy of the weather — a warm February can cut it short — so the tubing dates shift year to year.

Stand at the top of the snow chute in January and look down at the frozen lake, and it’s hard to picture the gravel trucks that used to grind through here.