Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is one of Michigan's premier places to experience near-pristine nature and animals living and thriving in their unspoiled habitats. But for the national park's neighbors on Little Traverse Lake, some critters within Sleeping Bear Dunes are thriving just a bit too much: beavers.
Little Traverse Lake, at about 640 acres, is drained by Shalda Creek, which meanders about 3 miles through Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore to its outlet at Good Harbor Bay on Lake Michigan. Lake residents say the thriving beaver population has built eight to 10 "colossal" dams on Shalda Creek, slowing to a trickle the ability to mitigate heavy spring, early summer and fall rains. The result has been flooded properties and basements,
failing septic systems and black mold costing tens of thousands of dollars to mitigate.
"The flooding problem has been getting worse and worse," said Little Traverse Lake resident Doug Verellen.
Historically the park had an understanding with neighbors on removing beaver dams. That seemed to change in the 2010s, residents said — possibly coinciding with the Obama administration's March 2014 declaration that more than 34,000 acres of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is protected wilderness.
"Now we're in a position where we have to kind of beg the Park Service to allow us to remove dams," Verellen said. "And by the time that can occur it's too late; you have dealt with the problem for a while. Previously, it was proactive; now it's reactionary."
Verellen said that within the last few years he attempted to kayak from Little Traverse Lake to Lake Michigan via Shalda Creek. "I was actually able to get over the first couple of beaver dams," he said. "But then there were some that were just colossal downstream, and I wound up just doing a lot of portaging."
The Bohemian Road (County Road 669) culvert under Shalda Creek was rebuilt during summer 2020 to improve mitigation of high Little Traverse Lake levels, a Michigan Department of Transportation project that used federal funds via the Federal Lands Access Program. Amid this spring's record rainfalls, water reached the very top of the revamped culvert, and months later is still far above typical summer lows — lessening the ability for the area to handle the next period of heavy rain.
"I've been coming up here for 79 years, and as far back as I remember, that same culvert would drain the lake all the way down," Little Traverse Lake part-time resident Geoff Kammerer said.
"But right now, the water has no place to go."
Farther upstream, Leelanau County's Cleveland Township was proposing additional drainage improvements, two 3-by-6-foot, reinforced concrete box culverts on either side of the existing culvert on West Traverse Lake Road. The township proposed to pay for the $1.1 million improvement through a special assessment district on 172 Little Traverse Lake area parcels. But township officials earlier this month rescinded the special assessment plan, and later announced the township was shelving the project altogether, after its contracted engineering firm issued a report saying the effectiveness of any culvert improvements was "highly contingent on no downstream impediments (i.e. beaver dams)" in Shalda Creek. The engineers, Gosling Czubak of Traverse City, reached a similar conclusion on an earlier study for the township in 2015.
"As a longtime, 22 years, Cleveland Township supervisor I am tired of dealing with this issue, as is the township," Cleveland Township Supervisor Tim Stein wrote in a guest column in the Sept. 10 edition of the Leelanau Enterprise.
"The key to a solution rests with the National Park Service, and without a suitable agreement to keep the Shalda Creek downstream drainage out of Little Traverse Lake free of impediments (i.e. beaver dams), as noted in both the 2015 and 2026 engineering studies, Cleveland Township will take no further action, financial or otherwise, on the drainage at the Shalda Creek crossing at West Traverse Lake Road."
Free Press messages left with the National Park Service, and with Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Superintendent and Manager Scott Tucker, were not returned as of Wednesday afternoon.
In July, as Little Traverse Lake levels were 10 inches above normal summer lows, the Little Traverse Lake Association was granted permission by the National Park Service to remove two beaver dams nearest Bohemian Road. They were removed July 26, and the lake association reported water levels at the bridge "quickly dropped 5 inches over the course of 24 hours."
Said Kammerer: "The Park Service said when the water levels get high enough that they are in people's crawl spaces and backing up their septic fields, let us know and we'll let you go in there and remove the first two dams.
"That's a little late."
Dam-building a way of life for beavers
Beavers are relatively clumsy and slow on land, making them easy targets for wolves, bears and other predators. In the water, however, they are strong swimmers. By building a dam, they raise water levels to surround their dome-shaped homes, called lodges, with a protective moat. The dams slow down fast-moving streams and create deep, calm ponds. The beavers build hidden underwater entry tunnels into their lodges, letting them come and go safely without ever being exposed to predators on the surface. As streams freeze over in the winter, the beavers can access their underwater caches of stored tree branches and food safely beneath the ice.
Beavers build dams by chewing down trees, arranging logs and branches in a crisscross pattern, and sealing the structure with mud, stones, and vegetation to block the water flow. Beavers find a shallow stream or small river where they can control the water level. They use their strong front teeth to gnaw through tree trunks, then drag heavy logs or float them through custom-dug canals to move them easily to their dam site.
The world's largest beaver dam complex— in Canada deep inside Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta — is visible from space in satellite images and on tools like Google Earth. It measures almost 2,800 feet long, more than twice the length of the Hoover Dam. Found by a researcher in 2007 while reviewing satellite imagery of the remote wilderness, the dam complex has been built and expanded continuously since the 1970s by successive generations of beavers.
A female beaver typically has 20 to 30 offspring, called kits, over the course of her 10- to 12-year lifetime. That means the Shalda Creek beaver dam issues aren't going away on their own — and are likely to worsen, Little Traverse Lake residents said.
In addition to expensive flood mitigation in basements and repairs to septic fields, Kammerer said one of his neighbors had to move out of their home as toxic black mold was mitigated, at a cost of $50,000 to $60,000. An elderly couple who live along the lake have health problems to which mold may have contributed, he said.
"Put the cart behind the horse, remove the beaver dams and the culvert will handle the water just like it's done my whole life of 79 years," Kammerer said.
"It's a serious problem, but the federal government doesn't care about the people on this lake and their health. They care about beavers."
Contact Keith Matheny: kmatheny@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Sleeping Bear Dunes beavers create big dam problem for neighbors
