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On Saturday, June 4, at 2 p.m., Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore will host a free InstaMeet event to celebrate National Trails Day. An InstaMeet is an interactive, in-park event, allowing Instagram users (IGers) to meet up, take photos, and get to know each other. Once the IGers meet, they will accompany a park ranger on a nature hike.

From staff reports Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore has long been a popular destination for its natural resources, rich cultural history and daytime recreational activities. It also offers visitors an extraordinary opportunity once the sun has set. Located far from sources of urban light pollution, the National Lakeshore allows for an unhindered view of the […]

From staff reports National Park Week, April 16 to April 24, is America’s largest celebration of national heritage. It’s about making great connections, exploring amazing places, discovering open spaces, enjoying affordable vacations, and enhancing America’s best idea—the national parks. It’s all happening in your national parks. Celebrate 2016 National Park Week with Sleeping Bear Dunes […]

Did you know that bats are the longest-lived mammals in the Great Lakes region or that bats have larger babies, relative to the size of the mother, than any other kind of mammal? You can learn more at a public program about Michigan’s bats and threats they face at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on April 9.

By Sarah Bearup-Neal Sun contributor In the year leading up to the centennial celebration of the National Park Service’s (NPS) creation, the Glen Arbor Sun has offered stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SBDNL) and some of the people in the community who have developed a relationship with it. As the NPS’s 100th […]

“Find Your Park” is the message being sent to the world by the National Park Service in anticipation of its 100th Anniversary in 2016. In 2015, a record 1,535,633 people “found their park” at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. This just exceeded the 1,531,560 park visitors received in 2012 following ABC’s Good Morning America declaring the park the “Most Beautiful Place in America.”

A Traverse City guy drives into a local National Park. He wants to explore. He wants to leave the world behind for a bit. He’s certainly not there to have a long conversation with another human being; but that’s what he does.

Every Kid in a Park, an initiative to do just what its title says, kicked off Sept. 1 in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and all national parks. It focuses on fourth-grade students, who will be given free access to any national park, forest, land or water for the 2015-2016 school year. The pass also grants access to the fourth-grader’s family when in the company of said 9-year-old.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes are alive in many ways — in folklore and legend, in plant and animal life, and, beginning in the late 1990s, with music. The first of many mid-July concerts staged at the Dune Climb took place on July 19, 1998. The idea was spawned by Crispin Campbell, cellist and Interlochen Arts Academy instructor since 1980.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — with its 64 miles of freshwater shoreline; its massive, eponymous dunes; its forested hills; its ridge and swale wetlands; its inland lakes where the only domestic architecture might be a beaver lodge — is an artist magnet.