At a Glance

• Approximate Street Address: End of Lake Breeze Drive, Pentwater, MI
• Just south of Pentwater, Lake Breeze Nature Preserve protects a diverse coastal forest and pristine vernal wetlands. A stone’s throw from Lake Michigan, the preserve is a quiet haven for wildflowers, wildlife, and nature lovers alike.
• Trail length: No trail.
• Before you visit, check out our preserve guidelines. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Visitor Information

The entrance is located near the south end of Lake Breeze Drive, west of Ridge Road in Pentwater Township. Parking is available along Lake Breeze Drive in front of the preserve sign. Lake Breeze Nature Preserve is a Category 3 LCWM Nature Preserve. Category 3 preserves have no designated trails. These preserves are open to the public, but access may be difficult.

There is no trail at Lake Breeze, but adventurous nature enthusiasts enjoy wandering through the forest of birch, pine, hemlock, maple, and oak. The preserve boasts some very large white pine and American beech, and huge rotting stumps can still be seen from when the area was last logged nearly 100 years ago.

Conservation Value

Lake Breeze Nature Preserve is forested with red oak, American beech, red maple, white pine, and bigtooth aspen, among others. Ephemeral wetlands in the northeast part of the preserve are host to diverse communities of plants, amphibians, and invertebrates. 

Together with a privately owned conservation easement immediately to the south, Lake Breeze Nature Preserve helps protect more than 100 acres of coastal forest and wetland habitat from development.

History

Humans have shaped the landscape in the vicinity of Lake Breeze Nature Preserve for thousands of years. Native Americans altered the landscape around the preserve by hunting, farming, burning, and the establishment of villages and trails. However, the most significant changes followed the arrival of European colonists, who extensively logged forests in the area at the end of the 19th century. Around the time of European colonization, vegetation on the preserve was dominated by white pine mixed hardwood forest, with a large area of beech-sugar maple-hemlock forest just to the south. Both forest types were historically very common along Great Lakes shorelines in this part of Michigan. 

The lack of old-growth trees on the preserve today suggests that the property that is now the preserve was likely clearcut and used for agriculture in the late 1800s. By 1938, most of the property was covered in young or mid-successional forest, except for some areas along the western boundary that remained cleared. After residential development began to displace other land uses around the preserve in the mid- and late 1900s, and the cleared areas were either developed or allowed to naturally revegetate. 

This property was originally purchased with funds pooled from 18 families with homes in the Lake Breeze Association, wanting to prevent further development along Ridge Road. The group donated the property to the Land Conservancy in 1990, creating our second nature preserve.