Silver Lake Dunes - Tumblr Posts

Last weekend my housemate and I drove an hour to West Michigan's Silver Lake Dunes. I'd never been to any of Michigan's sand dunes before and had no idea they would look so alien. Our journey to and from the lakefront was challenging. At times we had to climb over steep sand and ice on our hands and knees. Initially, the dunes themselves were tall and vast, like a snowy desert. Pressing on, we encountered barely rooted trees sticking out of the sand, then an intermediary landscape of frozen sand, and then slick, treacherous ridges made of large balls of ice fused together. I'd heard from someone that they were created by waves successively freezing on top of each other. Lake Michigan itself was just as bizarre as the other landscapes. The water had somehow frozen and broken into thousands of huge triangular shards. They looked like broken windows. If we listened quietly in the near silence we could hear the ice cracking.  My camera doesn't do well with low light, so the film didn't come out as clear as I'd hoped, but it's nice to have some kind of evidence of what it looked like before it begins to melt.