Indiana Dunes National Park to start charging admission to pay for upgrades

The Indiana Dunes National Park will start charging an entrance fee on March 31, 2022, for the first time in its 55-year history.  

Back in August, when the park was seeking feedback on the then-proposed fees, Superintendent Paul Labovitz had said the revenue would help to pay for a backlog of more than $30 million in maintenance, saying the park was “kind of beat up.”  

And, in this week’s announcement, the park noted that the dollars also will help to build its portion of the Marquette Greenway, a collection of paved multi-use trails that will stretch 60 miles from Chicago to New Buffalo. 

The fees come as the number of visitors has grown from 1.7 million to more than 3 million since the park changed the last word in its name from “Lakeshore” to “Park” in February of 2019, which did nothing to change the revenue it gets from the National Park Service.  

Would you pay to enter Indiana Dunes:Would you pay to enter Indiana Dunes? 

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The fees will be as they were proposed last summer: A pass, good for up to seven days, costs $25 per car, $20 per motorcycle and $15 per person who walks, bikes or boats into the park (up to a maximum of $25 per family group). By boat, that includes kayakers and power boat riders who walk on shore. There will be a fee of up to $100 for commercial buses, too. 

Starting March 1, you’ll be able to buy an annual pass just for Indiana Dunes National Park for $45, which is less than the $80 annual pass that gains entry to all national parks. (For ages 62 and up, annual passes to all national parks cost $20 per year and $80 for life.) 

It won’t cost you anything if you are just passing through the park on roads or trails or by boat on the Little Calumet River or Lake Michigan. But the fee will be required if you stop in the park to walk a trail, use the beach, eat at a picnic shelter or use other amenities. 

Out of the revenue that the fees would bring, Labovitz has said, the feds require 55% to be spent on the park’s maintenance. Another 20% would go into a fund that’s shared by national parks that don’t have a fee, a fund that has benefited Indiana Dunes so far. 

The park encompasses more than beaches, including wetlands, forests, a historic farm, a bog and unique habitats.  

The challenge for Indiana Dunes, though, is how its 15,000 acres are scattered along 15 miles of Lake Michigan shore with multiple entry points. Large parcels of the park are separated from each other by industries and private land.  

The park also wraps around the separately run Indiana Dunes State Park, whose separate fee structure won’t change. 

The Indiana Dunes passes will be sold at the Indiana Dunes Visitor Center, on Indiana 49 just outside of the park in Porter, and at the park’s Paul H. Douglas Center in Gary. Also, passes will be sold at Recreation.gov and seasonally at the West Beach entrance in Gary, which, until now, has charged a $6-per-car “expanded amenity fee” from Memorial Day to Labor Day.  

Park officials said they’re also making plans to sell passes at gas stations or other nearby retailers, though those details haven’t yet been confirmed.  

But officials also said this week they don’t plan to build fee-collecting stations at each parking lot. And, although the park will hire three to four extra employees to sell the passes, park spokesman Bruce Rowe said it doesn’t intend to hire more staff to enforce the fees. 

If you buy the week-long pass, you’ll get a paper receipt to show or to display on your car’s dashboard. The annual passes come with a plastic card and hang tag for your car, along with a receipt. If you buy a pass at Recreation.gov, you can print a receipt at home to display; otherwise, Rowe said, staff can go online to confirm if you’d bought a pass. 

None of this changes the free passes to all national parks across the U.S. for fourth graders, park volunteers, residents with permanent disabilities and U.S. veterans and members of the military (details at www.nps.gov/planyourvisit/passes.htm).  

School groups can get a waiver from the fees if they contact the park’s offices three weeks in advance. 

And all national parks are open for free on five days: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the first day of National Park Week (April 16 in 2022), the anniversary of the Great American Outdoors Act (Aug. 4 every year), National Public Lands Day (Sept. 24 in 2022) and Veterans Day. 

Other major parks with Lake Michigan beaches in Indiana and southwest Michigan charge admission during the summer, and Michigan state parks require a paid state “passport” all year, while some tiny township beaches don’t charge. 

For questions, call the Indiana Dunes National Park’s information line at 219-395-1882.