Another Wild Alice - National Parks Trip Part 2
Lessons from an Indiana Dunes hermit
Indiana Dunes National Park was an afterthought. I hadn't even heard of the place when I began sketching out the rough plan for this National Parks trip. Honestly, I didn’t even know Indiana had a Lake Michigan coastline. My middle school social studies teachers did a piss poor job of teaching me basic United States geography. Or perhaps more probably, I was just a piss poor student.
I knew I was headed for Yellowstone, which has been on my bucket list since forever. I settled on a northern route that would take me through Badlands after sleeping over at New River Gorge.
There’s a whole lot of territory between West Virginia and South Dakota. Since that’s pretty impossible to drive in one fell swoop, I started looking for cool places to camp along the way. That’s when I noticed one little National Park blip on the map right on the southern shores of Lake Michigan - Indiana Dunes National Park.
That was my stop.
It was only a quick visit, and I settled on hiking the Diana of the Dunes Dare. The trail honors the daring and free spirit of Alice Mabel Gray, a local legend also known as Diana of the Dunes.
Alice Gray was raised in an upper-middle-class family and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Chicago. In 1915, this free-spirited young woman shirked her comfortable conventional life and moved off-grid to live alone in the sand dunes of northern Indiana. She spent nearly a decade there in makeshift lakeshore shacks, bathing naked in Lake Michigan and running along the shore to dry.
"I wanted to live my own life— a free life. The life of a salary earner in the cities is slavery, a constant fight for the means of living. Here it is so different, Alice wrote in her diary.
A newspaper article reported on her duck-shooting prowess and likened her to Diana, the Roman goddess associated with wild animals and the hunt. Thus, her moniker “Diana of the Dunes” was born.
Progress is often a dirty thing and it was destroying the fragile ecosystem of the Lake Michigan dunes. In the early 1900s, the region was booming with industry in the form of steel mills and power plants. They still cover much of the landscape, sandwiching Indiana Dunes with rust and soot and smog on either side. On top of the encroaching industry, the massive dunes were being carted away to be made into glass jars and trinkets.
We can trace the salvation of the tiny sliver of the Lake Michigan shoreline that is now Indiana Dunes National Park directly to the hermit Alice Gray. She may have originally settled alone in the wild dunes to escape mainstream society, but the love of that landscape motivated her to help save it from … well, mainstream culture.
“Besides its nearness to Chicago and its beauty, its spiritual power, there is between the Dune Country and the city a more than sentimental bond—a family tie. To see the Dunes destroyed would be for Chicago the sacrilegious sin which is not forgiven,” Alice once spoke in a meeting to arouse interest in the Save the Dunes movement.
The Diana of the Dunes Dare is a hike that lets you walk in Alice’s footsteps, and when you do, it is easy to see how she fell in love with them.
I am grateful to have happened upon Alice’s dunes and her story. She’s just the kind of wild, freethinking, earth-loving, convention-bucking woman I aspire to be.