Indiana Dunes National Park is located in northwest Indiana, on the shores of Lake Michigan. The features of this area will be described here, its wildlife and plants, as well as the management practices that are used to keep this natural landscape intact.
Indiana Dunes National Park is the only national park that exists within my state of Indiana. Only recently was it changed from a National Lakeshore to a National Park. Before this recent change, there was a National Historical Park and a National Memorial, but not a National Park. Located on the Indiana banks of Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes, it is within close proximity to the city of Chicago and its inhabitants. This National Park consists of beaches along Lake Michigan, sand dunes, marshes, and woods, among other things. The park consists of 15,000 acres of land, about 23 ½ square miles, which only partially is used by people; a large amount of the land at the park is off limits, set aside as part of a natural preserve, including the marshes, bogs, some of its forest land, and much of its prairie land. It includes an eastern and western section, spanning the area on Lake Michigan between Michigan City in the east and Gary in the west, being mostly in Porter County, but also including some sections in LaPorte County to the east and Lake County to the west. The eastern part of the National Park wraps itself around the Indiana Dunes State Park, which precedes the formation of the national park by fifty years.
The formation of this park in 1966 included buying up smaller pieces of land, probably through eminent domain laws, to help create the park. Included in the formation of this park, I have a family story to tell. My now deceased grandparents lived in LaPorte, IN, close to Michigan City, and are quite familiar with the whole Lake Michigan region of Northwest Indiana. While driving westward from Michigan City through Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, on U.S. route 12, my grandfather could point to a spot of land, now empty of any human buildings and allowed to regrow into woods, and part of Indiana Dunes National Park, and say that he grew up in a house on that spot, and would work the farm fields that surrounded the farmhouse. “Boy how things have changed since I grew up here!” he would say. I miss my grandfather, but always remember this, especially when driving through the National Park.
Because of its close proximity to the city of Chicago, it attracts people from that metropolitan area to come and enjoy its beaches. I was there a few summers ago, for the first time in years, and was quite surprised at how ethnically and culturally diverse the crowd was – Caucasians, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian tourists, and Mid-Eastern tourists were enjoying their time at the park side-by-side. The park has helped to bring tourist dollars to the area, including hotels, restaurants, stores, and boating.
According to the National Park Service’s website, there is a wide variety of biological diversity among the plants and creatures that make their home in the area that is part of the park. It is estimated that there are 1,100 flowering plant and fern species at home in the area. This includes orchids, buttercups, violets, and goldenrods. The prairies are home to many different prairie grass species, and are kept in their prairie states by the occasional controlled burns. The forests are home to several different types of trees, including the white pine.
Besides having a wide variety of flowering plants, ferns, prairie grasses, and trees, there is also a variety of animals and birds that can call this area their home. Bird watchers have been able to discover at least 350 different bird species in the park, including the blue heron, in which part of the park has been set aside as a rookery for this bird. Deer, raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, mallards, and seagulls are among the many creatures that make their home here. Some of the creatures that live in the park are part of the Indiana threatened and endangered species list, including a local species of rattlesnake, the bald eagle, and the Indiana bat, which like many other bats in the eastern half of the United States is threatened by a fungus that grows on its nostrils. There are other animals that have not been seen in the park for a long time; in some cases over a century – this includes elk, wolves, bison (remember it’s on Indiana’s official state seal!), cougars, the lynx, the bobcat, the black bear, and many others.
As for management of the park, it should be noted that the desire to preserve the sand dunes at the southern, or Indiana, portion of the Lake Michigan shoreline is what motivated preservationists to first get the state to create a state park, and then get the federal government to create a national park. With the approval for the creation of a national park, they stopped not just at preserving sand dunes, but preserving some of the prairies, bogs, marshes, and woodland that were in the general area as well. They’ve even dedicated a portion of the land to become a rookery for blue herons, a type of water fowl.
After purchasing land to develop into the national park, a process of natural restoration took place. This included the land where my grandfather was raised; like many other lands and properties that were purchased, the house and other outbuildings were razed, and the farmland was allowed to grow back into woodland. Some areas were restored back into prairie land, complete with a rich array of prairie grasses, which they occasionally burn, as part of their management practices, to stop other plant species from crowding out and smothering the native prairie grasses out.
Efforts were begun a little over a decade ago to restore a marshland that had been previously drained. They did this by filling in ditches to keep water from draining out, pulling out non-native plants and trees, and re-planting species that are native to marshland, as well as building levees with spillways to keep water in.
The sand dunes are naturally kept from erosion by the grasses that cover them. Unfortunately, too much human trampling has caused the grasses to disappear in spots, such as Mount Baldy, near Michigan City, leading to the dunes decreasing in size. The erosion has lead to efforts to cordon off sections of those dunes, which they then re-plant with grasses, in the hopes of avoiding further erosion. The sand dunes have been a blessing to geologists, in that they, along with other visible geological features, such as elevation of land, have allowed us to look into the past to see at least four other previous shorelines of Lake Michigan, from the time of the last ice age 14,000 or so years ago. The ridge upon which “Ridge Road” is named for, in Northwest Indiana, was at one time an ancient shoreline for Lake Michigan.
As for other management practices, there is a great deal of observation that is done by both biologists and geologists, in order to categorize the different species of plants and animals that make the park their home and notice any differences in frequency of a species, population of a species, and any changes to the land that need to quickly be brought under control.
Indiana Dunes National Park will continue to be a recreational spot, as well as a place to preserve natural habitats, well into the foreseeable future. People will continue to enjoy the natural beauty of its shoreline, its sand dunes, and the walking trails into its woodlands. Conservationists will continue to be able to turn to it as a place where efforts have been made to allow plants and animals of all types to flourish in their natural habitats without mankind’s intrusion. Indiana Dunes National Park will continue also to have a place in my heart, and many other people’s hearts as well.
Sources and Related Readings:
- Indiana Dunes National Park‘s official website
- http://www.nps.gov/indu/naturescience/index.htm
- http://www.nps.gov/indu/historyculture/index.htm
- Natural Areas in Indiana and Their Preservation, Lindsey, Alton A., Damian V. Schmelz, Stanley A. Nichols
