Heritage Trail: Cottage Owners Vs Us

Editor’s Note: Sleeping Bear Dunes Superintendent Scott Tucker put a pause last week on the continuation of Segment 9 of the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail, the last section of the 27-mile pathway to be built. Jim DuFresne writes that this is nothing more than a battle between a small group of cottage owners and the rest of us who love that trail.

By Jim DuFresne

With any luck, or maybe a lot of luck, the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail in Leelanau County will someday be a 27-mile pathway – most of it paved, all of it handicapped accessible – that weaves through the heart of our beloved Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Currently, 22 miles are completed from Empire to an intersection near Good Harbor Bay, and it is already Michigan’s showcase trail. The pathway threads its way through such popular areas as the Dune Climb, Glen Haven Historic Village, and Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive; past a handful of lakes, beaches, and beautiful Crystal River; and up forested dunes so steep there are benches for the suddenly winded.

This is no rail-trail, flat and straight.  Whether you hike, bike, ski, or snowshoe all of it or part of it, it’s an amazing workout through stunning scenery, the best we have to offer in the Lower Peninsula.

Too bad we can’t finish it.

Planning for the Heritage Trail began in 2005, and it was officially dedicated in 2012 when the stretch from Glen Arbor to the Dune Climb opened. Right from the beginning, the Little Traverse Lake Association has fought the completion of the northeast end, Segment 9, which extends 4.25 miles around the north shore of their namesake lake to finish at Good Harbor Beach, an NPS day-use area.

The Detroit Free Press calls the association “a neighborhood group.”  TART Trails, which has been instrumental in the planning and fund-raising for the Heritage Trail, was more direct. In a Traverse City Record-Eagle article last July, TART officials announced that they have “intentionally decided not to engage with a small but vocal group of homeowners on Little Traverse Lake who have been outspoken in dissent of . . . Segment 9.”

The key phrase here is “small but vocal.” There are no membership rolls on the association’s website, but it can’t be too big. A slow drive along Traverse Lake Road last fall and a crosscheck on Google Earth revealed no more than 50 homes line the north shore and probably less.

But these are no little cottage-on-the-lake places. Most are multi-story houses set 100 yards or more south of Traverse Lake Road, with boathouses and docks and, according to Zillow, values in the seven-figure range. I suspect many of them are generational cottages; they never get sold; they just stay in the family.

On the north side of Traverse Lake Road is Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, and there lies the controversy. The Heritage Trail would parallel the road but not as a bike lane. It will be a dedicated pathway with a strip of trees shielding it from the Traverse Lake Road. Cottage owners would probably never see or hear bikers or walkers from their front porch.

The trail would lie totally in our national park, not their private playground.  But this small group of cottage owners has the money and connections to prevent a non-motorized, paved trail from being extended through federal land that the rest of us pay to use, whether it’s that $25 park entry fee or what we hand to the IRS at the end of the year.

They began in the courts, naturally, but couldn’t find a legal argument as to why the National Park Service should be prohibited from building a trail within its own park. They didn’t win any cases, but they managed to stall the construction for years. I can’t fathom what the legal fees were for them or us, the taxpayers.

Then, they commissioned an independent analysis by a Traverse City consulting firm of the impact building the trail will have on the environment. I’ve read the 25-page Heritage Trail Segment 9 Tree Survey report. It’s not something you want to do late at night while lying in bed.

It points out that 7,268 trees would have to be removed to build the trail, and that became the association’s rallying cry. What they don’t bother to mention is that in the same paragraph, the report states that almost 82% of them are either saplings or small trees 4 to 9 inches in circumference.

It also states that if constructed as currently planned, Segment 9 will pass through a Critical Dune Area as designated by the State of Michigan. Then, it includes a map of the protected area, showing that it extends south of Traverse Lake Road to the shoreline of the lake itself in places.

The association is campaigning hard on the protection of critical dunes and wetlands. But obviously not on their side of the road, and this seems a bit hypocritical.  I can’t imagine how much land was cleared to build these “cottages” so they could have a view of the water. That’s why you own a place up north, to have a deck and dock on a lake, and Little Traverse is a gem.

In the end, after years of trying everything else, the association found the golden egg.

They teamed up with the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, who last August sent a letter to Michigan’s U.S. senators and the U.S. Department of the Interior Director in opposition to the trail. In it, they stated that Segment 9 potentially infringes – no one really knows – on the tribe’s treaty rights in the area and “threatens to disrupt delicate wetland ecosystems which are vital to the environmental health of the region.”

Two weeks later, the Board of Trustees for Cleveland Township, which the trail passes through, voted unanimously to rescind their previous approval of Segment 9 and now are in opposition to it.

Last week, Superintendent Scott Tucker announced that the park was pausing the design of Segment 9 of the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail.

Is it getting shelved like the 35-mile Bay-to-Bay Backpacking/Kayak Trail along Lake Michigan was 10 years ago after a couple of cottage owners in Glen Arbor complained about it at a hearing? Never to be heard from again?

“It could very well be,” said Kerry Kelly, former director of Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes, whose group has been heavily involved in the fundraising and maintenance of the Heritage Trail from the beginning.

The only hope is that many of the concerns raised by Grand Traverse Band officials will be addressed in the final engineering design of Segment 9, a collaboration of the Michigan Department of Transportation and the Park Service that is slated to be finished by the end of the year.

“Everything comes down to the Tribe,” said Kelly. “The Heritage Trail will only be finished if the Park Service and the Tribe can come to an agreement.”

But not if 50 cottage owners have anything to do with it.