Our first stop was the most dramatic: Mount Baldy. You don’t expect it. One moment you’re rolling past cottonwoods, the next you’re staring up at a 126-foot-tall dune rising like a giant’s shoulder against the sky. It doesn’t feel static. It feels alive. And it is. Mount Baldy moves, several feet a year, a restless titan of sand sculpted by wind and gravity. In 2013, it swallowed a boy whole—he survived, miraculously—but the incident reminded everyone that this is no passive pile of sand. This is dynamic earth, always rearranging itself.
And yet, Mount Baldy is just the latest chapter in a very old story.
The Indiana Dunes stretch across 15 miles of Lake Michigan’s southern shore, an intricate patchwork of ecosystems that owes its existence to the last Ice Age. As glaciers receded, they carved out the Great Lakes, leaving behind a land of ridges, marshes, bogs, and—most notably—dunes. But the dunes here are not monolithic. They are layered, ancient, and varied. The landscape is a kind of chronological staircase, each ridge further from the water marking an older era.
These layers are known as dune succession stages, and they reveal the ecological patience of the world. Closest to the shore are the embryo dunes, constantly shifting, bare save for the tough marram grass that first takes root. Beyond that come the foredunes, still sandy but beginning to host shrubs and cottonwoods. Then the stabilized dunes, with black oak forests, prairie grasses, and carpets of ferns. Finally, the dune and swale complex, alternating ridges and wetlands, often far from the current shoreline but still bearing the imprint of an ancient coast.
As Henry Chandler Cowles, the pioneering ecologist who studied these dunes in the 1890s, once wrote:
“Nowhere else in the United States, perhaps nowhere else in the world, is there such an assemblage of ecological types within so small a compass.”
It was Cowles who first recognized the dunes not just as scenery, but as science—a living laboratory of succession, where the passage of time could be seen, touched, and studied. His work helped spark the American conservation movement. But it wasn’t easy. Industry had already seen the value in the sand—for glassmaking, steel production, development. It would take decades of advocacy by groups like the Save the Dunes Council to ensure these lands were protected.
Today, they are—but in a delicate balance.
The Indiana Dunes National Park, designated in 1966 and elevated to national park status in 2019, exists to protect the unique ecology of the region. Its mission is preservation: of biodiversity, of succession systems, of the rare species who live only here. It is a park for the patient, the curious, the reverent.
Just beside it lies the Indiana Dunes State Park, established earlier, in 1925. The State Park welcomes recreation—hiking, swimming, sunbathing, and camping. It does not protect as broadly, but it invites more fully. Together, the two parks form a philosophical duality: one guarding, the other sharing. They coexist like two halves of a whole—conservation and communion.
After walking several trails, witnessing the changes in terrain with each new turn, we made our way to the State Park beach. The crowds had begun to thin. The golden hour had arrived.
We sank into the sand and watched the sun melt into Lake Michigan, a shimmer of fire slipping behind the water’s horizon. The lake was calm, but the dunes behind us whispered in waves of wind. This was not noise—it was language. The speech of a land shaped by ice and heat and human effort. A land that nearly disappeared under smokestacks and shovels, but was saved—grain by grain, voice by voice.
We stayed after the sun left. We waited for stars. And slowly they emerged, not all at once, but in quiet succession. We lay on the cooling sand and watched the Milky Way reveal itself, remembering that this was once a sacred act for those who came before us—to watch the sky and listen to the earth.
The dunes do not ask for worship. But they teach reverence.
Reverence for time.
For change.
For fragility.
For return.
As the poet Jared Carter once wrote in his homage to the Indiana Dunes:
“Each dune is a book that writes and rewrites itself,
each wind a passage, each grain a word.”
That night, we read a few lines of that book.
We listened to the wind.
We let the stars punctuate the silence.
And we left, not with answers, but with awe.