Massive Sand Dune Devouring Lake Michigan Home: Watch

MEARS, MI — The winds that created the towering Silver Lake sand dunes that lured vacationers to Lake Michigan’s eastern coast are now destroying some of the summer homes they built to enjoy the shoreline views. A Chicago woman is taking on the wind, moving tons of sand by the truckload to save her iconic lighthouse-shaped cottage from becoming the 11th to be buried in the resort town of Mears, Michigan.

Sue Dressler knows what she’s up against. For more than 25 years, she and her husband owned another cottage the shifting dunes gobbled up earlier this year. Her plight is shared by other homeowners along North Shore Drive on the northern edge of Lake Michigan’s Silver Lake area.

The homeowners aren’t likely to prevail in their battle against nature, Oceana County Sheriff Craig Mast said after a shift swallowed up the first Dressler-owned home on the 1900 block of North Shore Drive this spring.

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“You’re probably fighting a losing battle,” Mast told the Muskegon Chronicle in April. “It’s like trying to hold back Lake Michigan. You’re not going to hold it back for very long.”

The dune are in a constant state of motion, Mast said, and homeowners who build or buy on them expose themselves to significant financial risk. The extremely fine sand in the dunes make them unstable, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

To protect their investments, Dressler and her neighbors consulted with a national dune expert and state officials in the skirmish with the shifting sand dunes, which still contain pieces of the cottage devoured in April. They pooled their money to hire heavy equipment operators to truck away the northern tip of the 2,000-acre dune.

The dunes are a marvel of nature, formed during the last ice age when Lake Michigan was in its “Nipissing lake stage” — that is, when water levels were 25 or 30 feet higher than they are today. Rivers entering the bays carried abundant sand the currents moved along the shore, and onshore winds swept the sand into small mountains that stretch hundreds of feet into the air.

The windswept dunes in the Silver Lake area are part of the largest collection of freshwater dunes in the world, and they’re believed to be the largest area living dunes of all those found along Lake Michigan. Stretching from Indiana to Ludington, Michigan, the Silver Lake dunes are a combination of parallel dune ridges and U-shaped depressions.

These dunes aren’t federally protected like those farther north, but there are restrictions on activities on the huge mountains of sand.

Michigan’s most famous dunes are located farther north and are called cliff-top, or “perched” dunes. The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore encompasses a 35-mile stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline, and also includes the North and South Manitou Islands. Perched dunes are also found along Lake Superior at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Michigan.

Photo via Michigan.org