Sand dunes taller than a skyscraper, two wine peninsulas, one unforgettable Michigan road

A 117-mile drive with a lot going on

M-22 runs 117 miles along Lake Michigan’s northwest shore, and almost nothing on it is ordinary.

You’ve got sand dunes that rise 450 feet from the water, two wine peninsulas, a fairy-tale neighborhood built by one man over 52 years, and a Norman castle that used to host rock concerts.

Traverse City anchors the south end, Charlevoix sits about 50 miles northeast, and the road between them is the kind of drive you stop planning for once you get on it.

Ottawa people, missionaries and Michigan’s cherry legacy

The Grand Traverse region belonged to the Ottawa and Chippewa peoples long before anyone planted a single orchard.

A missionary named Peter Dougherty changed the landscape in 1852 when he put the first cherry trees in the ground on the Old Mission Peninsula.

By the early 1900s, cherry farming had taken over the shoreline.

Around the same time, Chicago and Detroit families started arriving by steamship and train, and the “Up North” summer tradition that still defines the region was already taking shape.

The park that won America’s Most Beautiful Place

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore covers 71,199 acres along 35 miles of Lake Michigan coastline, and in 2011, Good Morning America viewers voted it the Most Beautiful Place in America.

The park went in on Oct. 21, 1970, and what you see now is the work of glaciers from 10,000 to 14,000 years ago.

The dunes here are called perched dunes, meaning wind-blown sand stacked on top of old glacial debris, which is why they sit so high above everything around them.

Scale the dunes, then drive the bluff road

The Dune Climb is the park’s most popular stop, and the name tells you exactly what you’re getting into.

From the top, the bluffs drop 450 feet straight to the water and you can see the Manitou Islands sitting out in the lake.

Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive makes a 7.4-mile loop with 12 stops, passing through beech-maple forest and pulling up to dune overlooks and views of Glen Lake.

If you want one viewpoint, Empire Bluff Trail is the one people keep coming back to photograph. The Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail runs more than 20 paved miles for walking and biking.

Two peninsulas, 35 wineries and a lucky latitude

Traverse City sits right between two wine peninsulas, Old Mission and Leelanau, both of them federally recognized growing areas. Together they hold about 35 wineries.

The secret is geography: the region sits near the 45th parallel, which puts it at the same latitude as some of Europe’s established wine country.

Lake Michigan pulls double duty, softening winter temperatures so the vines don’t freeze and slowing spring warmth enough to push bud break past the last frost.

Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir all grow well here.

Cherry festivals, pie contests and 100 years of tradition

Traverse City calls itself the Cherry Capital of the World, and it produces a significant share of the nation’s tart cherry crop.

The National Cherry Festival started in 1925 as the Blessing of the Blossoms ceremony, and the Michigan Legislature made it official in 1931.

It runs eight days every summer with parades, air shows, pie-eating contests and concerts.

In 2026, the festival hits its 100th anniversary, running July 4 through July 11, and more than 500,000 people typically show up.

Eight million bricks and a “beauty is therapy” philosophy

Before it became a shopping village, the Village at Grand Traverse Commons was the Northern Michigan Asylum, built between 1883 and 1885.

The main building, known as Building 50, stretches a quarter mile long and went up from over eight million locally made bricks.

Founding superintendent Dr. James Decker Munson designed the place around a simple belief: “Beauty is Therapy.” Every patient room had a view outside, natural light and fresh air.

The hospital closed in 1989.

Today the restored buildings hold nearly 100 businesses, including boutiques, restaurants, a winery tasting room and a bakery.

The self-taught builder who made Charlevoix look like a fairytale

Earl Young was born in 1889 and moved to Charlevoix at age 11.

He never became a registered architect, but over 52 years he designed and built 31 structures in town, all of them from boulders he hauled in from Lake Michigan and Lake Superior shorelines and farm fields.

His roofs run in wavy cedar-shake curves. His fireplaces are massive.

His floor plans curve and bend.

The most photographed of his buildings, the Mushroom House, went up in 1951 with walls three feet thick and a layout so irregular that no one has ever pinned down the square footage.

The Sears president who built a Norman castle in northern Michigan

In 1918, Albert Loeb, acting president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, built Castle Farms from stone modeled after the barns and castles of Normandy, France.

At its peak the working dairy operation was the largest employer in Charlevoix County, with more than 90 workers, 200 Holstein cattle and 13 pairs of Belgian draft horses. The farm shut down in 1927.

Over the following decades it became an art gallery, then a rock concert venue.

Linda Mueller bought the property in 2001, restored it, and today it sits on both the National and State Historic Registries. Michigan’s largest outdoor model railroad runs on the grounds.

Hunt the beach for 350-million-year-old coral fossils

Michigan’s official state stone since 1965, the Petoskey stone is a fossilized rugose coral that lived roughly 350 million years ago in a warm, shallow sea that covered what is now Michigan.

Each stone shows a tight pattern of six-sided shapes, the preserved skeletons of individual coral polyps. Its lesser-known cousin, the Charlevoix stone, carries a smaller honeycomb pattern from a different coral group.

Fisherman’s Island State Park, the Mt. McSauba Recreation Area and Lake Michigan Beach are the go-to hunting spots. Come in spring, when winter ice pushes fresh stones onto the shore, and look for them wet.

Drawbridges, lighthouse piers and sunsets from the channel

Charlevoix sits where Lake Michigan, Round Lake and Lake Charlevoix all come together, so water shows up in almost every direction you look downtown.

During summer, the bascule drawbridge rises every half hour when boats are on the channel, and people stop and gather to watch it. Lake Michigan Beach is a short walk from downtown along the water.

Ferry Beach on Lake Charlevoix runs shallow enough for kids and has a playground nearby.

Walk to the end of the south pier and you’re at the South Pier Lighthouse, which is where most people plant themselves when the sun starts going down.

Northern Michigan runs four seasons and every one of them counts

Summer is when the beaches fill up, the National Cherry Festival takes over Traverse City and the wineries run at full speed.

Fall turns M-22 into one of the Midwest’s best foliage drives, with harvest season running alongside.

Winter brings skiing, snowshoeing, fat-tire biking and cross-country trails, plus quieter towns and tasting rooms where you don’t need a reservation.

Spring delivers cherry blossoms across the orchards, fresh Petoskey stones along the shoreline and a Sleeping Bear Dunes with room to breathe.

There’s no bad time to come, just different reasons to come back.

Explore Charlevoix, Michigan’s lake town with a lot of character

You can see a surprising amount of Charlevoix on foot.

Walk the Park Avenue neighborhood on the self-guided Mushroom House tour to see Earl Young’s boulder-and-cedar creations up close.

Castle Farms at 5052 M-66 opens Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with gardens, a model railroad and more than a century of history to walk through.

For Petoskey and Charlevoix stones, head to Fisherman’s Island State Park at 16480 Bells Bay Road, open daily 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Then come back to downtown, watch the drawbridge, and walk the south pier to the lighthouse for sunset.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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