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West Beach & Bailly/Chellberg. Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
Had to do a ‘dump and fill’ yesterday. That’s shorthand for dump the sewer tanks and fill the fresh water tanks. While we are paying a fairly decent price for this campground - $30/night - it only provides electrical hookups at each site. You can fill up your RV’s water tanks at a central station, and, instead of a sewer connection here at the site, you have to take it to a ‘dump station’ to unload your holding tanks. We can manage with our tank sizes for about five full days before sewer tanks are full and water tanks are empty, but after that happens then we really have to hitch up the trailer and mosey on over to the service area and take care of business. We don’t have to do a full hitch-up because we aren’t going more than about 20 mph, but still the full ‘dump and fill’ takes about an hour.
So that was our first chore after breakfast yesterday. It isn’t exactly a fun one, but is one of those things that goes with camping, so you get used to it. And it went without any
problems so we are done with all of that until Sunday, when we are changing campgrounds.
It was a gorgeous day yesterday, so we planned on doing some more exploration of the National Lakeshore. And I have to say that they really make it pretty easy to see what is available, pick what you want to do, and then get there and do it. The park map identifies eleven specific areas that make up the park with brief descriptions of what is available at each site. After speaking to a park ranger, and spending a bit of time at the visitor center, it is not difficult to pick your pleasures.
The National Park System has organized their world into two main divisions - Natural and Cultural. They classify parks based on what kinds of ‘resources’ they offer, and much of their bureaucracy is organized along that division because it really does take different skills and techniques to manage different resources. You don’t need to know how to authentically cut wood logs and make them look like they did in the 1800s, if you are working with bats in a cave. The dichotomy in their world view does make
some sense.
With that knowledge, I chose two different hikes yesterday - one to emphasize natural resources, and the other focusing on cultural resources. We gathered up the girls - they are allowed on all but the horse trail in this park - and headed out for a day of hiking in gorgeous weather.
We started the day by driving out to the the westernmost edges of the park along route US 12. To get there, you have to pass through the Port of Indiana, which is the industrial area that the park had to give up in order to engineer the compromise that could make it happen. It is indeed kind of strange to see huge steel mills right next to the main park road. And the truck traffic coming in and out of the port area is non-stop. But that is the price we paid to get the Lakeshore at all, so you grin and bear it.
Past the steel mills, and a marina with a flotilla of pleasure craft, you drive through wooded inland areas until the sign for the West Beach turnoff to the right. After about a mile, we came to the
end of the road and a good size parking lot. I suspect in the summer, and especially on a weekend, this place is just packed. But we were one of only about a half-dozen cars, mostly couples of varying ages who were at the beach yesterday. We leashed the girls and Joan packed up a supply of water for them and us, and we headed out on the Loop One trail.
Only about a mile long, the trail is called the Dune Succession Trail and what it is trying to show is how, as you go towards or away from the lakeshore, you encounter four different ecological zones which develop successively as the dune area ages. The trail at times slowly plods through thick sand, and at other times you are on boardwalks that go up and down the dunes with more than 250 steps. It isn’t a real easy trail, but is fascinating to see different dune life ranging from thick stands of small trees, to tenuous tufts of grass desperately holding on to the sand beneath it. The trail has numbered stops on it, but I didn’t find anything that describe them. I’ve noticed this happening a
lot at National Parks these days and suspect it is related to the cut in funding. But it would sure be nice if there was even a paper guide that would help interpret what you are looking at.
Without guidance you sort of have to fill in the gaps with what you pick up from the visitor center. These fine sands were deposited by the glaciers that carved out Lake Michigan. The glacier, at its thickest, is estimated at 2.5 miles thick, and that is a lot of pressure to be moving across land surfaces. As it pulverized whatever it encountered, the sand was carried with the ice. As the ice melted, at its southernmost tip, the sand fell behind. Deposits on the western edge of the lake were wind-blown to the eastern and southern edges to form the Dunes that we see today. Satellite photographs show at least nine layers to the deposits, suggesting that the lake had at least nine different borders over the last 14,000 years (some of the edges are below and some above where the edge is now.)
Grasses are the first things to grow in the sand and, with roots that can
grow 15 feet down, they end up holding on to clumps of sand which attracts more sand and more plants, which kind of grow into a more-or-less permanent system. Eventually, the grasses are replaced by hardier bushes and then even trees. It is that succession of eco-systems that this trail shows.
Part of the trail, towards the end skirts the lake and you get to walk on the beach. As usual, Smooch enjoyed the water, and Fleur frolicked in the sand. Joan was sort of mesmerized by the shimmering lake. Today, with just a little bit of wind, the lake was lapping at the beach.
After the dune hike, we packed everything up and drove a couple miles up the park road to the Bailly/Chellberg area. This gave us more of a cultural look at the area, showing buildings intended to represent two points in local history. The Bailly Homestead was a fur trading ‘town’ of sorts, consisting of several buildings all to support a trading system involving furs and other locally produced products. The Homestead area has several reconstructed log buildings intended to illustrate what the town might have looked like in the 1820s when not much
else was here. it also includes the Bailly home as it looked in 1917. And there is a trail to the Bailly Cemetery which, quite frankly, looks more like a mausoleum then a cemetery and seems strangely large and out of place for this part of the world.
On the way back from the cemetery you also pass through the Chellberg farm, a series of buildings preserving a Swedish farm from the 1900s. They are in the process of bringing farm animals back and have a flock of chickens, which wanted to follow Joan, and a couple of pigs and cows. In summer tourist season, they have volunteers dressed up as farmers and recreate scenes appropriate to the times. At this pre-season time, though, you have to use your imagination, which is fine, and build your own experiences. Even though this was the ‘cultural’ hike, the paths through the woodlands were soothing and gorgeous in their own way.
It really was two different experiences - the sand dunes and the woodlands. One of the discoveries we made last year was that National Seashores are more like National Parks than National Monuments. A Monument tends to be a place
preserving just one major artifact or landmark and you can usually see the entire thing in about a day. (Dinosaur National Monument is a definite exception.). A National Park, on the otherhand is usually a much bigger adventure and you have to allocate several days, or even a week to really appreciate its diversity. What we learned last year, exploring Cumberland Island, and Canaveral National Seashores, is that they are so big and complex that one day is not nearly enough to appreciate them. This year, for the four Lakeshores we are visiting, we increased the time allocated to each of them.
And I’m glad we did, it is paying off here at Indiana Dunes. This is really a complex park with lots to see and learn.
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