Posts

What’s new in town in 2016 — particularly if you haven’t visited Glen Arbor since last July — are the forests around the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. They are completely different. That’s because of the Aug. 2, 2015, megastorm, which packed “straight line” winds of 100 miles per hour, leveled thousands of hardwood trees across Alligator Hill, along the east side of Big Glen Lake, across Leelanau County and on Old Mission Peninsula north of Traverse City. The storm was the most dramatic thing to hit Glen Arbor in modern times, and it changed the experience of visiting our beloved National Lakeshore for generations to come.

A mother of an infant was sitting in her tent at DH Day Campground, holding her baby, when the storm arrived Sunday afternoon. She suddenly realized that the tent wasn’t a safe place to be. So she and the baby moved into their vehicle. Within minutes a tree fell onto their tent. Had they still been there, it might have killed them. This story was told to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore chief interpreter Merrith Baughmann when National Park officials evacuated, and closed, the campground on Monday.