Glen Arbor — The first time I saw Michigan’s sand dunes, I was alone with a bellyful of mushrooms. The second time, I nearly died.
Psilocybin mushrooms, to be exact. I was 20, a college kid at U-M. The hippy renaissance was in full swing. We took a boys trip Up North, visiting a buddy in Traverse City and camping at the Sleeping Bear Dunes.
It was right after the semester ended, early May, and it was cold. We weren’t prepared. We had a borrowed tent, a handle of Jack Daniels, mushrooms, an ounce of weed, and gas-station hot dogs. We slept in old sleeping bags inside the tent, on gravel barely covered by the floor’s lining.
I’d never taken mushrooms before. We took them the second day, and when I started feeling something, I felt the urge to go off on my own, to be alone for a while. I told my friends I was going for a walk and wandered off into the woods.
I had no idea where we were. I heard the sound of water and walked toward it, finding myself alone on the beach. I didn’t know the water was so close. I laid down in the sand and basked in the sun for a while.
I sat up and saw two islands across the lake, the Manitou Islands, and a long beach off to the east with a point in the distance. I headed down the beach. I walked for what felt like hours, my feet felt light, I had a tremendous grin on my face.
I didn’t know what mushrooms were supposed to feel like, but I felt connected to the lake, and I remember talking to my shoes, praising them, saying they were the best shoes ever for letting me walk like this.
That distant point, known as Pyramid Point, was 15 miles away. I didn’t know this. I kept walking and walking. I passed beach houses, empty before the summer, and didn’t see a soul.
Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t getting any closer. The sun was coming down, it was late afternoon, and I had to turn around. I walked back down the beach.
My friends came tumbling over the dunes when they saw me return. I pointed down the beach and told them, “I tried to walk there.” They laughed hysterically. We smoked a joint and went back to camp.
The next day, we trekked the Sleeping Bear dunes. We started from the D.H. Day campsite and piled over dune after dune through the barren wilderness, the cold wind blowing. The sun was bright, the sky translucent.
In the middle of the dunes, we found a refuge. A shelter built ages ago, a house, a temple. Driftwood logs, weathered by the sand, stacked up across a central pillar and a large rock. A space large enough to walk inside, a small chapel for weary travelers. Unmarked, off the trails.
An incredible, alien place. Beams of sunlight peeking between the stacked logs, illuminating the blowing sand. The view in the distance, steep slopes of sand cresting endlessly across the horizon, with an endless lakeshore stretching out 400 feet below them.
Later in life, I became fascinated with desert mystics. The early church fathers, monastics, who retreated into the desert and pushed the limits of asceticism to become closer to God. Why is the desert a place of solitude, why do we encounter God in the sand?
We continued on, down to the southwest end of the dunes, picking up the trail. An overlook at the end of them, looking down a steep sandy slope all the way to the lakeshore. My friends barreled down it full speed, but I was too tired from the hike to contemplate walking back up, so I stayed at the top.
We later heard that this happens often, people get carried away and end up stuck down there. My friends almost did, crawling back up the slope in fits and spurts. I flipped them off, making fun of them. Eventually they made it, and we hitched a ride back to camp.
Ten years later, on my first trip for Enjoyer, I found myself back at the Sleeping Bear Dunes. Under similar circumstances, hungover after a few days on the road with the boys. No camping this time, a swanky AirBnB instead. No mushrooms, I stopped tangling with them long ago.
We too trekked the dunes, but not as far. Just enough to reach the top and see the horizon. The trails were closed, the scenic overlook. I wanted to find that forlorn driftwood shelter but had no idea where to look in the vast expanse.
We went off to the beach. I stood on the shore and looked off to that distant point, and laughed at how preposterous the idea of walking there had been.
Something about the sand dunes, they draw me there for pivotal moments in life.
The next day I almost died on the sand at Silver Lake. Traversing another set of dunes recklessly behind the wheel of a rental dune buggy with my buddy Mitch, who wrote about it later.
Three days on the road, sleep deprived and hungover, had me feeling reckless. I gassed the buggy along the lakeshore, then took it around the steeper part of the dunes.
We made it fine on the first pass. Always foolhardy, I took us around for another pass, through a different section of the dunes. On the second dune, the rear face dropped off like a cliff. The buggy sailed over it, into the air, then hit the sand hard and flipped a few times end over end.
It felt like slow motion, and when we landed upright a few hundred feet down the dune, I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. The buggy had flipped, the roof was destroyed, but the roll bars held up and saved our lives. We were fine, apart from some serious whiplash, $3,000 in damage to the buggy, and my favorite Ray-Bans left buried in the sand.
Physical danger. That’s one way to meet God. Or at least get a glimpse of Him. The experience changed me. Always neurotic, I’ve been more relaxed about life since then. You can’t plan for everything. Sometimes you crash a buggy and almost die, but you get a good story out of it.
I’ve never been a good ascetic monk—my divine encounters come from excess, not deprivation. But two of them happened, a decade apart, on the sand dunes of Michigan.
The desert holds sway over our mystic imagination, a place to find oneself and encounter God in the wilderness. It’s biblical, really, the retreat into the desert wilderness.
The sand dunes are more than a desert. They’re more alien, more profound. Scattered all along the western shore of Michigan, they stand utterly unique in the American landscape. As a place of mystic retreat, they’re unassailable.
Forget Joshua Tree, or Burning Man, or Coachella. What you really want, spiritual seekers, are sand dunes. Find your way up to Sleeping Bear, or Silver Lake, or any of the many dunes across Michigan, and see what you encounter. Speaking from experience, you’ll find far more than just nature, in ways you can’t anticipate.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
