A few miles up, the canopy has really closed in over you now — that green tunnel the road is named for — and this is a good place to pull off, get out of the car, and put your feet on the ground. Thorne Swift Nature Preserve. Thirty acres, and it packs almost everything the northern Michigan shoreline does into one short walk: cedar swamp, hardwood forest, shifting dunes, a boardwalk, and about three hundred feet of open public beach on Lake Michigan.
Take the boardwalk out. You'll go from the deep cedar smell — damp, green, ancient — over the swamp, and then the trees just... stop, and the dunes open up, and suddenly there's the whole enormous lake in front of you, flat and blue to the horizon. It's the best kind of surprise, the forest handing you an ocean.
This little masterpiece exists because a woman named Elizabeth Kennedy gave it away. In the early nineteen eighties she donated the land to the Little Traverse Conservancy, a local land trust that has quietly protected an astoni
shing amount of this coast — tens of thousands of acres, dozens of miles of shoreline, all so that places like this don't become another row of private cottages with private gates.
They say Kennedy gave it on one condition. Down near the beach there's an old white pine she'd climbed as a girl, back when the whole shore was wild — and her one demand was that this particular tree could never, ever
