PORTER, IND. (WBBM NEWSRADIO) - The Indiana Dunes, the Midwest’s only national park, can be described as a true wildlife success story.
Nestled along the Lake Michigan shoreline, a large part of which is dominated by heavy industry- power plants, steel mills, a refinery-, the park is an oasis.
“This is the place for diversity,” said Bruce Roe, a supervisory park ranger for the National Park Service. “We’ve got a relatively small national park at 15,000 acres, but we’re about fourth or fifth in terms of the number of different plant species here, and that’s because we’ve got this wide variety of habitats. We go everything from dunes to wetlands, with a variety of prairie woodlands.”
Roe noted the Indiana Dunes has a remarkable bird population, with more phan 400 different birds being spotted at the park. That ranks within the top ten of all national Parks.
“We’ve also got a decent number of mammals, amphibians and of course insect life…We’ve had a couple different species reestablished,” the park ranger said.
Roe recalled that when he first started working at the Indiana Dunes there were no beavers. Now, he said, some believe there are too many in the park. The park ranger also said the nesting of sandhill cranes in recent years is also a momentous development.
The park, Roe said, is probably best known for the dunes and the 15 miles of beach they have along Lake Michigan. However, he noted that the Indiana Dunes also has more than 50 miles of hiking trails.
Looking ahead, Roe views the installation Marquette Greenway Bike Trail as a significant game-changer for the park.
“In the next four-to-five years, you’ll be able to bike from one end of the park, 21 miles, to the east end in Michigan City,” Roe said.
The national park is billed as “sand and solitude.”
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