Paul H Douglas Trail Hike followed by brunch at Tiny's, Miller Beach!

*PLEASE READ: This is a MODERATE hike, NOT EASY and requires significant stamina and agility due to loose footing and significant inclines. I hope to finish in an hour and a half so this will be a faster paced hike. Please plan accordingly.Also, the app will not let me enter the correct time: 9am-12pm, approximately, hike and brunch.

Let's meet at the Paul H Douglas Nature Center at Miller Beach at 9am and hike the trail to the beach. This is a 3.5 mile hike and is considered moderately challenging. Rick provides rich details of the history of this trail and area below. Afterward, join us at Tiny's for brunch, a super swank coffee bar and eatery with a full bar for cocktails as well. The owners are lovely, and the space is truly unique and a great addition to the Miller community. 555 S Lake St, Gary, IN 46403. Dogs are welcome on this trail but must be leashed.

From Rick:

I won't be on this hike myself, but i wanted to add a bit of "flavor text" because this is such an interesting area.

we will start the hike at the Douglas Center, named for the Illinois senator whose crowning achievement was saving the dunes as a national lakeshore, and enter Miller Woods, which includes the western most zone of dune formation in a vast arc along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan stretching to the Straits of Mackinac, constituting the longest chain of freshwater dunes in the world. It is the prevailing west winds which cause dune formation in our area, and since the southernmost point of the lake is just to the west of here, this is the very first area where it strikes the shoreline. Instead of the high, mountain shaped dunes familiar farther east, the dunes here are low ridges roughly parallel to the lake, known as swales, with ponds between them.

In these woods early in the last century Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir had a cabin where they pursued the relationship that he wished would result in a middle class marriage, but she preferred to maintain as a Bohemian affair.

In addition to the small interdunal ponds of varying sizes all over, there are two large lagoons that stretch across the whole east-west length of the woods with a small gap between them crossed by a bridge. These lagoons have a notorious history. At present, where blue herons catch fish and cattails wave, they are the source of the Grand Calumet river, and flow sluggishly to the west. In the late nineteenth century, they were the last stretch before the mouth of the Calumet River, and carried a substantial flow of some of the most polluted waters on earth from the Calumet industrial district (stockyards, steel mills, oil refineries) eastward into Lake Michigan at what is now Marquette Park.

The Calumet river and the Chicago river were so dirty that Chicago undertook a great engineering feat (the biggest earth moving project in the history of the world) and reversed the flow of both. The Chicago river was made to flow out of Lake Michigan through the Sanitary & Ship canal ultimately to the Mississippi river. The Calumet river was made to flow out of Lake Michigan at artificial channels dug in Calumet and Indiana Harbors, and into the Mississippi basin through the Calumet Sag Channel. The old mouth of the Calumet river at Lake st was blocked with sand, and the last stretch of the river was renamed the Grand Calumet, and allowed to flow slowly backwards.

The landscape is confusing and a bit unforgiving because there are ponds between many of the rises and we had to find the gaps between them to make our way to the next ridge. It is important to move slowly and find the gaps lest you get dead ended behind the next pond and have to retrace. Part of this area had belonged to US Steel early in the last century, and evidence of past industrial activity is all around, from a formerly circular pond turned to a crescent by slag dumped into it to abandoned railroad grades with the ties still slowly rotting in the ground. But these unnatural intrusions are worn by sand, wind and weather, muted, and not too intrusive. Nature's healing power has been at work. At one point we would be stopped by a chain link, barbed wire topped fence, but the dunes have drifted and will allow us to walk right over its top. Finally we will crest the last swale and see the beautiful, wavy, blue lake before us.

We will emerge on the beach about half a mile away from the southernmost point of Lake Michigan. The northernmost point of the lake in Michigan's upper peninsula has a nice park and a plaque. Here at the south point a breakwater separates the National Lakeshore from the USS plant with no legend to inform the occasional visitor of the location's distinction. Through some quirk of the currents, the water in this area is among the cleanest in lower Lake Michigan.

i hope you enjoyed this bit of history and lore,

Rick

to view photos of previous hikes by this group at this location, see below.

2011 https://4142298.xyz/ricks-hiking-fun-group/photos/4054922/