“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.”
2015 was the year of the storm. The “wind shear” on Sunday, August 2, packed 100-mile-per-hour gusts, toppled thousands of trees in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and around the Glen Lakes, rendered Glen Arbor impassible for days, caused millions of dollars in damages and cast a national spotlight on our rural town.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore reported in a press release today that it will officially reopen portions of the Alligator Hill Trail on Thursday, Nov. 19. The trail has been impassable since a severe storm blew down thousands of trees on Aug. 2. National Park Service crews and National Lakeshore volunteers have completed work on the Easy Loop, Advanced Loop, Islands Lookout, and Big Glen Lookout. More than 2,800 trees have been cleared on six miles of trail. Clearing of approximately 1,000 more trees from the two-mile Intermediate Loop and trail access from Forest Haven Drive will take place in the spring of 2016.
A week after the storm Shira Klein, a seasonal resident, approached Peg McCarty, director of the Glen Arbor Art Association (GAAA), and planted the seed for an exhibition, a show of art predicated on the hopeful belief that there was beauty to be found in the storm’s destruction. That seed-of-an-idea grew into New Views: A Storm of Art, which will be held next June 10-23 at the GAAA, on 6031 S. Lake St. in Glen Arbor. For artists wishing to exhibit their work, a prospectus describing this juried exhibition is now online at GlenArborArt.org.
“The Park has got to figure out how to address the dead fall hazard,” declared Glen Lake Fire Department chief John Dodson after the October Glen Arbor Emergency Services meeting. The “Park” he refers to is the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SBDNL). All that dead wood, he says, “is fuel building up. Our fire department does not have the staff to maintain a wildfire the size of Alligator Hill.”
Although my friend, Bonnie Gonzales, didn’t quite make it up Alligator Hill when she tried the first time, she felt it was doable. She wanted to try it one last time before she left for the winter. The trick would be to take the fairways rather than the impassable trail. I was game, so we met at the trailhead entrance by the charcoal ovens one sunny Sunday in mid-October.
This week, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore workers began clearing the Alligator Hill Trail of downed trees, following the Aug. 2 storm that decimated local forests. Alligator Hill is located just west of downtown Glen Arbor, north of Little Glen Lake, and offers stunning views of Sleeping Bear Bay.
The public is invited to buy their copy of Storm Struck: When Supercharged Winds Slammed Northwest Michigan and help cash-strapped private Glen Arbor property owners tidy up their property and replant trees in the wake of a fierce Aug. 2 storm.
Deputy Superintendent Tom Ulrich reports that Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is pursuing funds from its regional office of the National Park Service to re-hire seasonal workers and clear the Alligator Hill trail by cross-country ski season.
Amidst the pain, it’s important to remember this lesson: the Aug. 2 megastorm — though it may have been the storm of the century — is one of several cataclysmic events that have changed this land we call Sleeping Bear since the glaciers receded and left behind the great lake and the rolling dunes and forests. And after each event, the land and its animals adapted and tended ahead. Alligator Hill will do the same.