Indiana Dunes, for people who count parks
103 years from proposal to park, and the best argument for it is scientific.
Stephen Mather proposed a Sand Dunes National Park in 1916, the same year the Park Service was created, and held public hearings in Chicago where hundreds of prominent people testified for it. World War I killed it. Later administrations judged the increasingly industrial shoreline unsuitable.
It took a woman from Ogden Dunes and an Illinois senator to revive it. Dorothy Buell founded the Save the Dunes Council in 1952 with 21 local women. Paul Douglas, an Illinois senator fighting for Indiana land, spent fourteen years introducing bills and was called a millstone around Indiana's neck for his trouble. Johnson signed the national lakeshore into law on November 5, 1966.
It was redesignated a national park on February 15, 2019, and the redesignation is worth being honest about. It rode through attached to an omnibus spending bill rather than passing on its own. Nothing on the ground changed: no new land, no new money, just the name. Visits jumped about 17% in the first year, which is the entire case for the critics who call it a tourism play. The counter-argument is that the site had been in the park system since 1966 and the only question was what to call it. A superintendent put it best: it is not Yellowstone and it is not Yosemite, but it is not supposed to be.
The real case is the science, and it is a good one. Henry Chandler Cowles did his doctoral work on these dunes and published in 1899, and that paper essentially founded the study of ecological succession, the process by which plants alter their own environment until they are replaced by different species. He got there by teaching himself Danish to read a Danish botanist in the original, and later wrote that reading it turned the current of his life.
Why here. Lake Michigan has dropped in stages since the glaciers left, and each stage stranded a beach ridge. The result is parallel dune ridges lined up inland, each older than the one in front of it. So you can walk perpendicular to the water and cross thousands of years of vegetation development in a couple of miles: bare beach, then marram grass building the foredune, then open dune, then jack pine, then oak woodland. Cowles substituted space for time. The dunes are a time machine you cross on foot, and that methodological trick is now standard across ecology.
The numbers back it up. The Park Service ranks it fourth or fifth in biodiversity among all national parks, with roughly 1,100 native vascular plants in about 16,000 acres. That is around ten species per hundred acres. Yellowstone, roughly 140 times larger, runs about a tenth of a species per hundred acres. There are 28 native orchid species here, more than the entire state of Hawaii.
And there are steel mills on the skyline. The park is fragmented across three counties and parts of fifteen towns, with a state park sitting in the middle of it and a working blast furnace, a port and a power plant immediately adjacent. That is not a flaw to apologize for. It is why a century of people had to fight for it.
Official Indiana Dunes park site (nps.gov)
What lives in the dunes
Arctic plants and cactus in the same park, and one loss that made national news.
Arctic bearberry and prickly pear cactus, growing in the same park. This is the biodiversity argument in a single image. North-facing dune slopes stay cool and shaded and hold glacial-era relict species. South-facing bare sand bakes and drains instantly and functions as desert. Two ecosystems separated by fifty vertical feet.
The Karner blue butterfly is gone, and that is a first. Federally endangered since 1992, its larvae ate wild blue lupine and nothing else. In 2012 an unseasonably warm spring caused the larvae to hatch before the lupine had leafed out, because plants track soil temperature and insects track air temperature. The larvae had nothing to eat. A park biologist of twenty years called it the beginning of the end. Reported in 2024 as the first known endangered species to disappear from an American national park because of climate change. Last sightings are given as 2012 or 2014 depending on the source.
More than 350 bird species, because of geography. The park sits at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Migrants will not cross open water, so they funnel around the end of the lake and concentrate on this shoreline to rest and feed. It is a continental pinch point, which is how 16,000 acres logs a bird list rivalling parks a hundred times the size.
Pitcher's thistle, federally threatened, grows on Great Lakes dunes and nowhere else on Earth.
