Wednesday Walk - Through the Forest and the Dunes

Here is a hike to the beach through a thick forest for this #wednesdaywalk by @tattoodjay

This is a lookout trail in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park in Michigan. This trail is high up above some giant dunes and you can see quite far out in Lake Michigan.

Here's a panorama from the lookout where you can see a huge dune on the right. There is a beach there as well where you can take a steep walk down to the beach as well. It might be easier to sled down it though lol.

Here is a view from a different trail called pyramid point where you can see one of the islands on Lake Michigan. This one is way too steep to walk down and they have warning signs on paying a huge fine if someone has to go there to rescue you off the sandy cliff.

Now its time to head down to the beach, this is just another view of the dunes from within the forest pathway.

Along the way we noticed signs of fall starting already. I wonder if the whole forest will change all at once this year and be visible from space like it was last year?

There is a river that runs near the trail. Sometimes you can see river otters here but as usual I didn't end up seeing any. I only saw one scurry across the trail way off in the distance for a couple seconds.

The trees changed to evergreens and the forest floor got covered in ferns lower down.

This patch was looking quite green.

At the lower elevation on the trail they are already starting to dry out for fall.

This open field of ferns is quite orange already. In fall they turn really bright orange and complement the evergreens nicely.

This was a swampy marsh area with moss and grass growing over the boggy areas. I'll be posting more from here for #fungifriday as this environment is great for mushrooms.

Finally we made it down to the beach but unfortunately is was way too dangerous to swim with the waves creating rip tides. All we could do is wade out chest deep and get hit by the waves to cool down. Later in the day we found a cove beach that was shielded by the waves where we could actually swim.

That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)