Mac Wood's: the dune ride that started with a failed farm

Mac Wood was handed twenty acres of dune sand and told to farm it. This was the 1920s near Silver Lake, and his father meant well, but you cannot grow much in a blowing dune. The crops failed. So Mac gave up on plowing and turned the place into a little resort he called Flora-dale instead.

What people really wanted, it turned out, was the part he did for fun. To entertain his family and guests, Mac rigged up a Model A Ford to claw over the open sand and ran them up and over the hills for the thrill of it. Neighbors saw, then passers-by saw, and they kept asking for a turn. By 1930 he was charging a quarter a head and calling it a business — the dune scooter ride.

That ride never stopped. The Wood family still owns it, almost a century on, and the basic bargain is unchanged: you climb aboard, somebody who knows every soft spot drives you out into a landscape that looks like the surface of the moon, and you hang on. The old Model A grew into open-sided trucks on big aircraft tires that carry close to twenty people at a clip, bouncing across the same dunes, with Lake Michigan flashing into view at the high points.

Most of the Silver Lake sand is split between a pedestrian side and the famous off-road side where the public drives their own jeeps and buggies. Mac Wood’s runs on its own permitted ground in between, the lone tour outfit allowed to carry riders across the sand. A failed potato patch became the thing the whole resort town is partly built around — and it began because one farmer would rather give people a wild ride than fight the dirt.