Sugar Sand Beaches of West Michigan

There's sand everywhere. On the floor. In my hair. Between my toes. Grab a towel from the towel rack and sand will rain from it.

In the process of putting on their shoes the kids dump little piles of sand on the kitchen floor. It's on the car seats. Sometimes it gets into food with one or two gritty bites.

The sand invasion is because it's summer in West Michigan, and we've been heading down to the Lake Michigan beach several times per week. Today we made another trip to Hoffmaster State Park campground beach and let the kids splash around in Little Black Creek that flows directly into Lake Michigan. It winds a constantly shifting trail through the sugar sands until it spills out into the Big Lake. It's shallow and warm, with minnows to chase, and the kids love to splash in it and build sand castles. We climb up the dunes and run down them into the lake and the stream and in the process get sandy...and carry the sand on our wet skin and swimsuits to the car, to the house, to the bedrooms, to the laundry. Sand everywhere...

West Michigan sand is a very fine sand. Here's a close-up picture I took of some sand on the beach at Lake Harbor Park. I should have put a dime down for scale:




You can see it's a fine grained sand, over 90% silica. That's quartz. And on a hot summer day, when the moisture is just right it squeaks when you walk on it. When I moved to Iowa, I was shocked to learn sand didn't squeak everywhere. I just assumed it did. It's a phenomenon known as "singing sands"

Here's a good example of Lake Michigan sand squeaking under foot:



And there's tons of it stretching along the West Michigan coast for hundreds of miles, piling up into dunes...




and



It's all coming in from Lake Michigan, pushed out and up over the course of thousands of years. The sandy beaches come from the Lake. So it shouldn't be surprising that there's no muck on the bottom of the Eastern side of Lake Michigan. Just sand. Walk into Lake Michigan, and you're walking into a soft, sandy bottomed lake, looking down through clear, blue water at tiny ridges of white sand sculpted by the motion of the water.

The Great Lakes ecosystem isn't confined to the water itself. The Lakes have shaped the land and the weather around them, and have created unique ecosystems. The sandy dune habitats are one such system, formed over ten thousand years as the lakes push more and more sand up. The dunes form a series of dune ridges all along the 300+ miles of West Michigan coast, usually between one and four successive ridges extending from the beach itself. The dunes move and shift and grow week to week, year to year. Today we climbed a dune and could see where it has moved eastward. Trees stood on scraggly roots on the side near the lake, or had fallen down as the ground disappeared beneath them. On the inland side, some wide, once tall oaks had been covered near to their tops. Entire homes, and even old towns have been known to have been swallowed up by shifting dunes.

Almost as much as the Lake itself, it's these dune ridges I think about when I imagine the beauty of the lakes, and they're all made of this squeaking silica sand that seems to come from the lake in endless supply.