9 & 10 News
December 15, 2020
The park service says they’ve set a record for the most number of visitors ever.
The new visitation figures show they hit 1.6 million visitors this year.
That beats the previous record by more than 10,000 people and the year isn’t even over yet.
The superintendent says COVID-19 has encouraged people to stay close to home and enjoy the great outdoors.
“We had the busiest July ever, the busiest August ever, the busiest November ever, but the asterisk there is we didn’t have as many face-to-face visitor interactions,” said Scott Tucker, Superintendent of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
Prehistoric Remains Found at Sleeping Bear Dunes
Prehistoric remains were found and officials are trying to return them to their proper descendants.
In 2017, a visitor to the park found the bones after some high waters uncovered them at the beach. At that point, the visitor took them home, and around one year later the visitor returned the bones to a park official. Even though everything in the park is protected and should not be removed, no charges were filed in the case.
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The remains were then sent off for testing. First, they were taken to the Leelanau County medical examiner s office and then to a lab at Western Michigan University. The reason that this is coming to light now is that the park had to legally post notices in the paper in the Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan.