Saugatuck

Lia and I arrived in Saugatuck on the Chain Ferry, a small hand-cranked boat that has hauled passengers across the Kalamazoo River since 1857, the ferryman turning a crank wheel while sailboats and kayaks drifted past. It felt like crossing into a different decade — one of gallery storefronts, ice cream parlors, and gabled Victorian inns strung along a river that opens, just beyond town, into the vast blue of Lake Michigan. Artists have been coming here since the 1910s, when the Ox-Bow School of Art set up on the river bend, and the whole village still carries their unhurried, paint-splattered energy.

Mount Baldhead and the dunes

On the far side of the ferry crossing, a wooden staircase climbs Mount Baldhead, a nearly 200-foot dune shaped by centuries of lake wind. Lia and I took it slower than the local kids sprinting past us, and were rewarded at the top with a sweeping view of the Kalamazoo channel bending out to Lake Michigan, freighters and sailboats reduced to toy scale. We slid — there is no dignified way to descend a sand dune — down the back side to Oval Beach, routinely ranked among the country’s best, where the water runs through startling shades of turquoise before deepening to navy.

Galleries and the riverfront village

Back in town, Water Street and Butler Street are a compact grid of galleries, boutiques, and clapboard storefronts painted in the kind of confident colors only a summer resort town attempts. We ducked into a half-dozen small galleries, watched a glassblower at work, and ended up at a riverside patio with whitefish tacos and a view of the marina, where wooden Chris-Crafts idled among newer sailboats. As the sun dropped, the whole riverfront glowed amber, and the little passenger ferries kept crisscrossing the water like they had somewhere important to be.

Getting There

Saugatuck sits on Michigan’s western shore, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Detroit or forty minutes south of Grand Rapids via I-196. Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids is the closest major airport, roughly forty-five minutes away. The town itself is small enough to walk end to end, though the seasonal Chain Ferry and passenger ferries are worth using just for the ride across the river.