Sleeping Bear Dunes

My daughter and son in law have a small 4-passenger plane and flew from New York to Grand Rapids to visit us. Today, they took us to fly over Sleeping Bear Dunes along the the Lower Peninsula of Michigan in Leelanau County. The park covers a 35-mile stretch of Lake Michigan's coastline.

The park is named after a Chippewa legend of the sleeping bear. According to the legend, an enormous forest fire on the western shore of Lake Michigan drove a mother bear and her two cubs into the lake for shelter. The exhausted cubs drowned in the lake, but the mother bear stayed for days looking for them high on a bluff. Day and night she waited in hope that her cubs would finally appear.

Impressed by the mother bear's determination and faith, the Great Spirit created two islands (North and South Manitou Island) to commemorate the cubs. The wind buried the sleeping mother bear under the sands of the dunes where she waits to this day.