Porch Notes
Warren Dunes: the 240-foot sand mountains next door
Outdoors
The first time you crest Tower Hill — 240 feet of bare sand rising straight out of the Lake Michigan beach — you understand why a million people a year visit Warren Dunes State Park. Nearly 2,000 acres of dunes, woods, and three miles of shoreline make it one of the most popular state parks in Michigan, and one of the great freshwater beach days anywhere: sledding down sand in summer, hang gliders launching from the ridge on the right wind, sunsets that empty the parking lots slowly.
The park exists because of a local conscience. Edward K. Warren, the Three Oaks businessman who made a fortune on featherbone corset stays, started buying this shoreline in the 1880s specifically to keep it wild — and also preserved Warren Woods a few miles inland in Chikaming Township, one of the last old-growth beech-maple forests in the state. For the people of Bridgman, Lake Township, and the surrounding wine-and-orchard country, his long-sightedness is now simply the neighborhood beach. Few neighborhoods anywhere have a better one.
Where to see it
Off Red Arrow Highway in Lake Township near Bridgman; Tower Hill rises straight from the beach, with Warren Woods' old-growth forest a few miles inland.