Quoted By:
Indiana dunes national park/state park
I live in NWI with all this stuff right outside my back door for context.
It’s an overlapping park, the state has part of it, and the feds have part of it, and in some places both of them control it. It used to be free to local residents until covid, where it stayed open, except without the Illinois tourists it made no money. So they started charging locals.
Now that the fips are back it’s just as much of a shit show on that front as it ever was, every year it’s just miles of Illinois plates parked alongside highway 12 because it’s a 2 lane road and they think that means you can park there. Every year the park and police stations and towing companies get a bajillion negative reviews on all platforms because of “illegally towing my perfectly legal parked car”.
There’s garbage all over the place in the busy season, it’s just rough.
It’s wedged between two gated rich people communities, so if you stray too far anywhere you end up in karenville.
The conflicting governance of the state/national park means conflicting rules. The state runs a yearly permitted hunt of deer, the feds refuse to let guns into the park, so you have to enter the park and hope the state stops you and not the Feds on those yearly hunts.
If you ride a bike anywhere in there they try and kick you out, and direct you to the calumet trail, which is under a foot of water most of the year and isn’t suitable for bikes as such.
And then where the calumet trail goes, is also national park, so you can’t bring a bike to the place the trail goes to.
It’s like the one good thing about this area and it’s just miserable.
