Ask a longtime Ferrysburg resident what changed on the north side of the Grand River in the last two years, and you might get a shrug. The dunes are still there. The beach is still there. Pine Street Café still opens at six.

That answer is about eighteen months out of date.

Between the 2024 upgrades at Ottawa Sands and the May 2025 opening of the Idema Explorers Camp, the 345-acre park at the corner of Ferrysburg has quietly turned into one of the most substantial pieces of new public infrastructure on the West Michigan lakeshore. If you live inside city limits, you now have three distinct dune preserves, a paved loop trail, a universally accessible kayak launch, and a food-truck night within a five-minute drive of your driveway. Most of that did not exist the last time you probably updated your mental map of town.

This is a walk through what's actually here now, arranged the way a resident would use it rather than the way a visitors' bureau would list it.

The Ottawa Sands buildout, in specifics

The old sand-mining site at 18280 North Shore Drive has been Ottawa County parkland since 2018, but the version most locals remember is the early one: gravel lot, a few informal trails, an 80-acre pit lake with no rules posted. That park is gone.

What's there now:

• A 1.6-mile paved loop around the inland lake, walkable in flip-flops or a stroller
• A universally accessible kayak launch on the Sag of the Grand River
• Expanded and paved parking with a new restroom building
• Catch-and-release fishing only, artificial bait, no watercraft on the inland lake to keep zebra mussels and New Zealand mud snails out
• Trail connections into North Ottawa Dunes and, from there, into P.J. Hoffmaster State Park

Ottawa County describes the property as sitting inside a 2,479-acre corridor of interconnected dune lands. That number matters more than it looks. It means the trail you pick up behind the Ottawa Sands lot is not a self-contained loop. It's an entry point into the largest continuous stretch of protected freshwater dune habitat on this side of the lakeshore.

What Idema Explorers Camp actually is

The camp opened to the public on May 23, 2025, after two years of construction and a $3.48 million gift from the Bill and Bea Idema Foundation, according to Ottawa County Parks. The count is exact: three treehouses, five yurts, ten tent pads.

For a resident, the interesting question is not whether to book a night three miles from your own bed. It's what the camp changes about the park during the day. The answer is: a lot. New ADA-compliant restrooms and showers. A communal fire pit near the natural-surface trail. Signage that finally makes sense of which trail goes where. Reservations run on a rolling twelve-month window, which is why the yurts book fast for October color weekends. If a niece or a college friend is visiting and asks where to stay, the answer has changed.

Three dune preserves inside one small city

Ferrysburg is thirty-nine square miles on paper and much smaller in practice, and yet it contains three separate protected dune areas with different characters. Most residents can only name one.

The Kitchel-Lindquist-Hartger Preserve is the one most people mean when they say "the dunes." The preserve's own site notes it was founded in 1971 when Constance and Gerald Lindquist and Harold Hartger donated the first sixty acres to The Nature Conservancy, and it's been owned and operated by the City of Ferrysburg ever since. If you have only walked the parking-lot loop, you have missed roughly three-quarters of it.

The third-Wednesday habit

The city runs a "Summer Time Fun" food-truck night at William Ferry Park on the third Wednesdays of the summer months. It is not a festival. It's a low-key rotation of trucks in a neighborhood park, which is exactly what makes it a resident's event rather than a tourist one. If you have lived here for a while and always assumed the food-truck scene was a Grand Haven Coast Guard Festival thing, this is closer to home and quieter.

The city's calendar also lists a July 15 Summer Concert in the Park and civic meetings that residents can attend, worth a bookmark at ferrysburg.org if you want to stop finding out about events the day after they happen.

A resident's late-summer loop

Here is how the pieces connect on a single day, if you want them to.

Start at Pine Street Café at 401 Pine Street. It has been in the neighborhood since 1991 and came under new ownership in December 2022 with a chef running the kitchen, according to the café's Yelp page. The menu rotates every few months with weekly specials, so a regular can order the same breakfast for a decade and still find something new on the board. Doors open at six on weekdays, eight on Sunday.

From Pine Street, it is a short drive to the Kitchel-Lindquist-Hartger trailhead. The Harold Hartger Trail starts at the parking lot near the outdoor classroom, follows Berwyck Street for a stretch, then turns north into open dune. Rolling dunes and interdunal wetlands dominate the middle section. The Connie Lindquist Trail on the other end of the preserve runs through Eastern Cottonwood, Willow, and Hairy Puccoon on the west, into Red Oak, Sassafras, Eastern Hemlock, and Pine on the east. Deer are common. Strung together with the Marjorie Hendricks and Meime vandenBerg trails, you get roughly four miles.

Then move to Ottawa Sands. If the trail felt like effort, the paved Lake Loop feels like recovery. It's flat, shaded in stretches, and slow enough to hold a conversation on. If you brought a kayak, the Sag of the Grand River launch is a hundred yards from the parking lot.

North Beach Park closes the day. Seven acres, 745 feet of Lake Michigan shoreline, and a sunset that lands due west over open water rather than through pier structures. If it is a third Wednesday, William Ferry Park has the food trucks. If it is not, Pine Street Café closes at four.

What "already there" gets you

The single most useful thing about living in Ferrysburg in 2026 is that the town has quietly stopped being a corridor between two better-known destinations. The Grand River Greenway now terminates at Ottawa Sands. The Idema Camp draws people who were previously camping at Hoffmaster or Grand Haven State Park. The paved Lake Loop is short enough for a weeknight, and the dune network behind Coast Guard Park is large enough for a serious morning.

For a resident, the practical upshot is that the itinerary a visiting friend now wants runs almost entirely inside city limits. You do not have to drive them to Holland or up to Muskegon State Park to justify the trip. You can hand them a yurt reservation, a trail map, and a Pine Street Café hash-brown recommendation, and the weekend fills itself.

Whether Ferrysburg stays this quiet as more of the buildout gets discovered is a different question. The county is not marketing Ottawa Sands as a regional destination the way Grand Haven State Park has been marketed for decades, but the trail counts, the treehouses, and the paved loop will do that work on their own over the next few summers.

The residents who use it now are the ones who will remember what it was like before the third Wednesday of the month started requiring a parking strategy.

If your relationship with Ferrysburg is shifting from a place you live to a place you want to stay in for the long run, the Sandi Gentry Team knows every street between the Kitchel-Lindquist trailheads and the Grand River. Discover the difference — request your free home valuation or start your lakeshore search at our Ferrysburg neighborhood page.