Lake Erie's Michigan Shores

Lands that we live in every day tend to get overlooked for scenic value and can often be under-appreciated.  This is as true of someone living in south eastern Michigan as it is for people living in coastal Orange county (yep, I know someone who got bored with the place, and they had moved there from Rochester, New York).  Take people in the Detroit metro area, for example.  They tend to think that pleasurable outdoor regions are far to the north and that the rest of the state is a common, boring region at best and a junk-heap at the worst.  Most residents of the area do not know of or have never been to gems like Belle Isle, Hines Drive, or the Detroit River walk.  We do not have much topographic variation here, nor do we have expansive vistas, or even a pleasant climate, but we do still have remnants of a lovely, gentle landscape.

Let's take a look at our closest Great Lake!

Lake Erie.  Long.  Shallow.  Greenish-blue.  Victim of a century and a half of pollution from Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland.  Formerly the most incredible bass fishery in the entire world.  Site of some of the most severe fighting during the War of 1812.  Surrounded by cities, farmland, and... cliffs?  Well, not so much in Michigan.  The cliffs are in Ontario, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.  We do, however, have some beaches.

And we also have extensive marshland and river deltas that provide for a lot of wildlife habitat.  In fact, the area south of the mouth of the Huron river is a large marsh that is being restored by the Michigan department of natural resources.  It is called Point Mouillee State Game Reserve, and is one of the largest wetlands restoration projects in the world.  Former natural management practices and agriculture impact on the area contributed to the demise of barrier islands in the region which would normally have survived lake level fluctuations  if left to their own devices.  Many of these have since eroded away, but with a little help, they can be restored and marshlands can build back up behind them again.  The results?

Yes, that is quite the pile of seagulls, but you can find a ton of other species here, as rich in diversity as a visitor to Pelee Island might find.  In the background you can see work crews.

Increased wildlife viewing opportunities, hunting opportunities, better flood and storm surge control, much more substantial beaches, and a healthier overall ecosystem that can tolerate increased human activity.  Sorry if that sounded preachy, but sometimes these projects require justification.  

Beavers have even made their home here again, after a long absence.  This means water quality is going back up, which is a very good thing for people who like to swim.

This one was looking straight at me!

If only they would eat zebra mussels... 

Anyway, what does the immediate inland area look like?  Not as marshy as you would think.  The marsh, after all, requires standing water.  There are plenty of islands, and both they and the mainland are pretty sandy, with the usual rich layer of humus that results from natural decay in an area rich in both marshes and forests.  Even the marsh and lake bottoms are sandy and pleasant to walk on.

There are the usual river trees, eastern cottonwoods, ashes, etc.  The invasive plant, "Giant reed" is also here, but efforts are underway to eradicate it (the thing sucks up water like you would not believe).  In many places, especially around the river mouths and deltas, there are wide expanses of open water.  This one is at the mouth of the Huron, which has a unique inland delta a mile inside the mouth rather than right at the terminus of the river.

Islands in the stream!  A marshy shoreline on the island surrounds an interior of built up sand.  This is one of the many islands where the Huron river slowly exits into Lake Erie.  

But why all the sand?  You see, at one point, after the last major glacial period, this entire region was underwater in what was known as Lake Maumee.  The, uh, corpse of this lake is called the Maumee plain:

The lake left this region with a rather flat landscape and a sandy bottom that has since been covered over with extremely rich humus and clay here and there.  More importantly though, when the lake was forming and when it was shrinking into present day Lake Erie, it was one heck of a gusher.  You think Niagara Falls looks impressive now?  Imagine a mile thick sheet of ice covering most of Michigan and neighboring lands melting away.  Glaciers are not just water though, they are also whatever they dragged along with them.  Boulders were left behind when the ice masses melted, and smaller stones, ground into lovely sand, would be deposited  in two kinds of spots:

1. The edges of glacial activity, or moraines.  See the line stretching from Lake St. Clair and down into Indiana?  That is a partial moraine.  I note it as partial because it was also where Lake Maumee had its shoreline and thus pushed tons of stuff onto both the moraine that formed there when glaciers melted into the lake, and also onto the Jackson Lobe, which was another glacial deposit that formed while still under the ice.  The Lobe is also known as the Irish Hills.  You can see the edges of it easily where the land stops looking pancake flat and more rolling.  Places where it is obvious?  Northville, Woodward ave. north of downtown Birmingham, driving on US 12 past Saline, the list goes on.

2. Sand got deposited as a side product of massive glacial melting.  To see how this works, try pouring a large bucket of water onto a beach with a slope or just some bare ground in general.  See how it takes all the junk with it and smooths out things while leaving a nice ridge of sand/dirt at the sides of your torrential river?  Try that but on a vastly larger scale.  Two of the best places in the world to see this firsthand would be the northern Mississippi river valley and floodplains south of the Illinois river, and the Ottawa river valley (and its little cousin the Petawawa river valley).  The primitive Great Lakes were swollen with glacial melt water, and overflowed down these two outlets to the ocean.  The shores of where they did not overflow had the same thing happen to them.  The best local example would be both overflow shoreline/moraine, the hills of Northville.  Want to see some 50-100 foot sand hills?  Main street and Clement Rd. in Northville is your best bet.  A mile down the road from there, you can see forested dunes in Maybury State Park.

So who cares about things that happened 10,000 years ago!  Why on earth would I even want to go down to the lakeshore?!  Well... they might not be oceans, but the Great Lakes pass for them pretty well.  There is much to be said for a lovely walk along the shore.  Moist winds that come off the lake can help lower blood pressure with negative ions (and just the lovely views) blowing in your nostrils.  In the summer, even if areas only slightly more inland are baking away at 90 something, the lake shore will be sometimes even 20 degrees cooler.  Fun stuff washes on shore, like shells, rocks, smooth driftwood, and the human caused oddity of Lake Erie sea glass.  Then there is the swimming.  The more the lake gets cleaned up, the more that water seems attractive.  Lake Erie is naturally cleaner (or was before we got to it) than the other four lakes because of how much filtering marshland surrounds it.  The lake also has a wonderful sandy bottom for the most part, and is incredibly shallow.  In the western ends of the lake, you can walk out quite a ways before things get too deep.

Where to go?  The yellow parts are beaches.  As you can see, there are far more of them than one would expect on the leeward side of the lake, and they are broken only by those river mouths and their associated marshes that also sit (or used to anyway) behind those beaches, which were once pretty extensive barrier islands.  

There are some drawbacks to the area.  It is not entirely unspoiled, and has a few factories and power plants left over from days when they grew like weeds because of the available water.  Enrico Fermi nuclear plant does power a substantial part of the state, and is an interesting looking piece of architecture.  

Visual pollution aside, overall, a nice walk.

You can also easily see Canada, the Detroit River entrance lighthouse, and ocean-going ships.

All in all, a nice little corner of Michigan to go visit, and one of the more interesting shorelines on Lake Erie.