Hiking Sleeping Bear Point Trail, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Michigan

This was an amazing, relatively easy hike of the Sleeping Bear Point Trail in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

I started my hike at the Sleeping Bear Point Trailhead and hiked the loop in a counter-clockwise direction. Early in my hike I took a side trail down to the beach on Lake Michigan. This is an easy way to get to a little more remote stretch of beach. Then I proceeded around the loop trail climbing up and over and around several partially grass covered dunes. At the tops of the highest dunes, the views out to Lake Michigan and the Manitou islands were simply spectacular. But even in the valleys the trees, ghost forests, and animal tracks made the trail interesting. The highest dune was only about 200 ft (60 m) higher than the starting point. The last part of the trail was less sandy and passed through a grove of trees providing some nice shade to keep cool near the end of the hike. This 2.8 mile (4.5 km) hike was on the moderate side of easy only due to the difficultly of hiking in sand. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get out and see the Sleeping Bear Dunes up close.

Sleeping Bear Point Trail info: https://www.alltrails.com/explore/tra...
Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore info: https://www.nps.gov/slbe/index.htm

Equipment:
Camera: GoPro Hero12 Black: https://gopro.com/en/us/shop/cameras/...

Title card music by Lobo-Loco: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lob...

#hiking
#dunes
#sanddunes
#lakemichigan
#viewpoints