Discover top sights at new national park

The sun rises over the 12-story Mount Baldy sand dune at Indiana Dunes
National Park. NPS photo.

Imagine a place where you can stroll magnificent Lake Michigan beaches or scramble over towering sand dunes, where you can explore mysterious marshes filled with carnivorous plants or amble about peaceful grassland prairies and oak savannas, where you can roam among migrating birds on their stopover or traipse about historic turn-of-the-century homesteads. The place is real: It’s called Indiana Dunes National Park.

Located in northwest Indiana on Lake Michigan’s shores, Indiana Dunes became our nation’s newest and 61st national park in February 2019. An easy drive from Chicago, Indiana Dunes attracts about 3.6 million visitors per year, making it the seventh most visited national park. Formerly Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, the 15,000-acre park sits in a built-up area and is physically divided into 15 largely disconnected pieces. Still, Indiana Dunes boasts 14 distinct trail systems with more than 50 miles of trails.

Indiana Dunes’ designation as a national park follows a more than a century-long effort to achieve that status. As far back as 1899, calls were made to preserve the Lake Michigan shoreline. Then in 1916, the National Park Service’s first director, Stephen Mather, advocated creation of “Sand Dunes National Park” along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Industrial interests, however, fought instead for a larger port there; indeed, remnants of the steel industry remain all around the park.

Then in the early 1950s, the Save the Dunes Council under the leadership of Dorothy Buell and activist Hazel Hannell sought federal protection. When U.S. Sen. Paul H. Douglas of Illinois joined their cause, the area became a national lakeshore in 1966. Gradually, the park expanded over the next three decades.

In 2017, Indiana congressmen called for the national lakeshore to be reclassified as a park to bring it more recognition and hence economically boost the northwestern part of their state, which had suffered greatly since the decline of the steel industry and other manufacturing there. Initially, the National Park service opposed the reclassification, saying Indiana Dunes had more in common with its national lake and seashores than with a national park. Still, a bill renaming the national lakeshore soon passed Congress and then was signed into law by President Donald Trump.

With the park stretching more than two-dozen miles from end to end and the large crowds, how can you ensure that you see its main sights when vacationing or driving through? Here are the park’s five must-see sights and the trails to reach them:
• Mount Baldy Summit Trail – Clamber to the top of a 12-story living sand dune on this 0.8-mile hike.
• Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk – Explore West Beach, dunes, a waterfront, fishing pier, and 900-foot breakwater leading to a lighthouse on a 0.9-mile loop.
• Pinhook Upland Trail – Discover the unique plants of a beech and maple forest and a bog on this 2.1-mile round trip route.
• Cowles Bog Trail – Enter, if you dare, a mysterious fen on a 2.85-miles round trip hike.
• Great Marsh Trail – Spot sandhill cranes and great blue herons at the largest wetlands complex in the Lake Michigan watershed on this 1.26-miles trail.