The parking lot at Indiana Dunes National Park’s Mount Baldy will grow bigger this year as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shaves the back of the dune to nourish the front.
Saves the Dunes Executive Director Betsy Maher praised the plan Thursday during a Green Drinks conference call.
The Corps of Engineers plans to use trucks to remove sand from the part of the parking lot Mount Baldy has already gobbled up and dump it at Crescent Beach, so it can drift westward to the face of Mount Baldy.
“That dune has been moving at a rate of sometimes up to 10 feet a year for decades,” Maher said. “There is no longer a natural dynamic where sand naturally accumulates.”
Manmade structures like the pier and breakwater at Michigan City and the Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor in Portage disrupt the natural flow of sand along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
“If you disrupt the littoral drift, then you create the erosion on the other side,” Maher said, so beach nourishment is needed. Sand dredged or removed from one place is needed to replace the sand that manmade structures block from sand-starved beaches.
“This is on hyperdrive in this area because of the creation of the harbor.”
“The park, I believe, was out of a lot of good choices. If they had waited any longer, the dune would swallow the comfort station,” Maher said. “This dune has already swallowed structures.”
Removing sand from the parking lot and putting it back on beach is a good solution because it’s putting sand where it’s needed, she said.
Indiana Dunes National Park Superintendent Jason Taylor outlined the plan in December 2024 at a meet-the-public event at the Indiana Dunes Visitor Center in Porter.
The process is expected to take 100 days, he said at the time.
“This is a good solution because it’s at least putting sand on the front of the dune where it’s needed,” Maher said. “It is a manmade solution, but it is mimicking a natural solution.”
“You want sandbars created during those low-water periods where you get more sand,” she said. The lake level is currently low; erosion typically happens when the lake level is high, with the difference measured in feet, not inches.
“If you have too much scouring and all the sand is gone already, then it’s not as resilient” and erosion gets worse, Maher said.
Save the Dunes’ mission includes protecting natural assets at the national park, but it also includes preserving public access to the shoreline. That’s why the nonprofit took legal action against Ogden Dunes, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and others over the town’s plan, now abandoned, to put a rock revetment along the shoreline.
“This is a hard-fought legal battle that we’re really excited about,” Maher said, but the case continues so the question of whether the DNR illegally issued the permit can be resolved. “That question still remains unanswered.”
DNR “is responsible for upholding the public’s rights along the shoreline,” Maher said.
Save the Dunes previously fought a similar legal fight in Long Beach, setting a precedent and inspiring a state law that locks in where the high water mark is calculated to indicate the boundary between private and public land.
Save the Dunes is committed to defending this public trust doctrine so all Hoosiers can walk along the beach. “We’re seeing a lot of public trust work popping up along the Great Lakes,” Maher said.
“The most resilient beach is a natural beach,” she said. “We get huge storms off our shoreline, and then you get this natural fluctuation in lake levels.”
“It used to be a 30-year cycle,” but it’s now less reliable, she said.
The Indiana Dunes are more than sand, though. Maher noted Indiana Dunes National Park is the fifth most biologically diverse national park in the United States.
The park has 15 miles of protected shoreline, 16,000 acres and 50 miles of hiking trails.
When it was created in 1966, it was designated as a national lakeshore. Since 2019, when it was designated a national park, the number of visits has grown from 2 million to nearly 3 million annually. It’s the No. 1 tourist destination in Indiana.
“Unfortunately, these environmental wonders have not historically been available to everyone,” Maher said, so Save the Dunes is supporting National Park Service accessibility efforts. “We hope to make the dunes a place that is accessible to all.”
That includes donating special wheelchairs that can be used at the beach. Visitors need to contact the park before arriving to make arrangements for their free use.
Habitat restoration and preservation are also important to Save the Dunes.
Save the Dunes administers grants for this work in Northwest Indiana, including working with the National Park Service, Northwest Indiana Paddling Association and Shirley Heinze Land Trust to clear logjams on the Little Calumet River to make it navigable.
Emerald ash borers, tiny lumberjacks that they are, felled trees and created many logjams.
So far, nine of 11 miles of the river have been cleared for canoeists and kayakers.
“We’ve sunk several million dollars into restoring this river collectively,” Maher said.
In the past 20 years, Save the Dunes has had a heavy emphasis on stewardship of the land.
“Restoration work is never done, but it’s certainly not something you can start and stop,” Maher said. Eradicating invasive species usually takes five to 10 years. “If you just treat it and walk away, they just come right back.”
“Currently, about 30% of the park is actively managed,” she said.
The park needs help with public access work, too, including updating exhibits, some of which haven’t been changed since the park was created, Maher said.
Resiliency, too, is important in order to address climate change and other threats to ecosystems. A “very complicated grant” of just under $1 million from the National Coastal Resiliency Fund is bringing together conservation partners across the region to address these threats with large-scale projects, she said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Doug Ross
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