Friends of Sleeping Bear, the nonprofit citizens’ group that maintains the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail, will host a public open house on Wednesday, Aug. 8, from 1-4 p.m at Glen Haven to showcase new accessibility features available in the National Lakeshore—including a beach wheelchair, an all-terrain wheelchair, and a wheelchair-accessible boardwalk on the Glen Haven beach.
Time for a day of fun and discovery with park rangers and skilled volunteers at the annual Glen Haven Days. The event will be held Saturday, May 26, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Glen Haven Historic Village and U.S. Life-Saving Service (USLSS) Station at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The festivities will include hands-on activities and costumed reenactments. All programs are free with a valid park pass.
About a block up the road from the old Cannery down on the shore in Glen Haven, Henry “Hank” Bailey gets out of a white Lexus in front of an abandoned, turn-of-the-century building that looks like it used to be a store. The whole village is deserted and sad. Glen Haven today is a bleak little shore-side ghost town in the bright sunlight. It’s the off-season, middle of May, the leaves on the trees are in delicate shades, fuzzy-looking and babyish in their newness.
Join park rangers and skilled volunteers for Maritime Living History 101 throughout Glen Haven and the Maritime Museum on Saturday, May 27, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. All programs are free with a valid park pass.
A Request for Proposals (RFP) is currently being issued by the National Park Service (NPS) for the Sleeping Bear Inn and Garage in Glen Haven. The RFP provides an opportunity for any interested individual or organization to submit proposals to the NPS to lease the property.
Celebrate the National Park Service’s 100th birthday by joining in the annual Glen Haven Days historic festival. The event will be held Saturday, May 28, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Glen Haven historic village and United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS) Station at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The festivities will include hands-on activities and costumed reenactments.
Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes will be hosting a kickoff meeting for Adopt-A-Beach volunteers on Saturday, May 21 at 1 p.m. in the DH Day Log Cabin at DH Day campground. Because of limited parking at the campground, consider parking at Glen Haven and walking to the Log Cabin along the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail. The cabin is about ¼ mile east of Glen Haven and right along the trail.
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.
There are as many stories from the megastorm that hit Glen Arbor on Aug. 2 as there were people touched by it. This is the story of a local law enforcement ranger who survived a very near miss in the first moments of the storm and then without hesitation went back to work protecting the lives of others.
The area in Northern Michigan which is now the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was first inhabited by Native Americans, who lived in small settlements around rivers and lakes. But the village known today as Glen Haven was not a major site of Indian settlement. It didn’t even attract much attention from European settlers until 1857, nearly a decade after the Leelanau mainland had begun to be inhabited. By that time, the opening of the Erie Canal had greatly increased steamship traffic on the Great Lakes, with vessels carrying freight and passengers from Buffalo to Chicago. The need for wooding stations to fuel the ships that passed through the shipping lane reached an all time high, and in 1857, C.C. McCarty, the brother-in-law of Glen Arbor pioneer John E. Fisher, recognized the potential of the Sleeping Bear Bay area to become a major refueling station and a thriving settlement.