Interlochen Public Radio
Views like this of Platte Lake, Lake Michigan, and the Sleeping Bear Dunes are the reason the National Park Service has slowly been acquiring land for a scenic road in Benzie County.
If you look at Benzie County on Google Maps, you’ll notice a dark green strip of land about five miles long between Platte Lake and Crystal Lake.
That’s where a long-proposed scenic road would run – between U.S. Highway 31 and M-22 – taking people from Beulah into Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
The land is mostly dense hardwood forest and it s extremely hilly.
“This is almost a 90-degree descent here we’re going to go down here, so we may want to keep our hands free,” says Andy Norman, a retiree of Michigan State University Extension who lives nearby.