News Release

Park Celebrates the Opening of the New Kettles Trail

News Release Date: October 7, 2019 Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (National Lakeshore) and the Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes (Friends) are inviting the public to help celebrate the opening of the Kettles Trail during a ribbon cutting ceremony at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 20. The celebration will take place at the trailhead on West Baatz Road near its intersection with South Fritz Road, west of Leelanau County Road 669. The Friends will provide light refreshments. Guided hikes of the trail will be offered following the ribbon cutting.

This trail is the first visitor amenity in the “Bow Lakes” area of the park. Congress added the Bow Lakes area to the National Lakeshore in 1982 specifically because of its geological features, especially the “kettle” topography. Superintendent Scott Tucker noted, “It is fitting that we are opening the Kettles Trail on what is literally the eve of the National Lakeshore’s 50th anniversary year. The Kettles Trail will provide visitor access to some of the best examples of the ‘ancient glacial phenomena’ that Congress cited when it established the park on October 21, 1970.” 

Work on the Kettles Trail involved crews from the National Park Service, Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes, the SEEDS Youth Conservation Corps of Traverse City, AmeriCorps YouthWork, and numerous individual volunteers. The new trail is three miles long, and the first 1,000 feet leading to an overlook are fully accessible via a compacted stone surface. The remainder of the trail is compacted earth and accesses steep hills, ponds, and bogs of the kettle topography.