Sleeping Bear Dunes Overlook Platform has been removed

Dunes Overlook and view south by Mike Carey

The Leelanau Ticker shares that the 50-year-old Lake Michigan Overlook platform on the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore has been removed:

The sizeable Lake Michigan Overlook deck at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was installed in 1986, Sleeping Bear Superintendent Scott Tucker tells The Ticker. The wooden structure provided sweeping views of the coastline and was the centerpiece of the park’s very popular Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive.

…“The geologic forces that have been working for thousands of years are still working today. And on average, the dunes are moving one to three feet a year from west to east,” Tucker says. “We knew this day was coming; unfortunately it came very quickly this spring.”

After considering other options like barricading the deck, Tucker made the call to have it carefully disassembled. Safety was the number one concern, but he also didn’t want it to collapse and mangle a large stretch of dune as pieces of it tumbled down to the lake.

“We also didn’t want to have resource damage of that decking falling over and then having to remove it from 400 feet of sand,” he says. “So we meticulously removed it over a period of about two weeks.”

Park officials already expected to remove the deck within the next several years as part of improvements to the entire Lake Michigan Overlook site. There is nothing that would prevent a new deck from being built as part of this overhaul, Tucker says, but it’s hard to say what will happen until the planning process is complete.

“We already have in our planning portfolio a 2028 plan to explore the next step for that location,” he says. “It’s a holistic bubble that deals with parking, restrooms…as well as visitor access. In a perfect world that would include ADA access.”

Read more in the Ticker and know that the entirety of the Pierce Stocking scenic drive remains open!

Mike took this photo back in 2019. Head over to Flickr for his latest!