Stretches of sandy beach re-emerging from the depths. Docks reaching out farther and farther into the bay. 

They're the hallmarks of lower-water cycles throughout the Grand Traverse Bay watershed. And if recent statistical trends are anything to go by, Traverse City might be heading for lower water levels for years.

According to Heather Smith, Grand Traverse Baykeeper for the Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay, water levels for Lake Michigan and Lake Huron – which she says “are hydrologically considered a single lake because of the flow of water through the Mackinac Straits” – recently dipped below the long-term average for the first time in a decade.

“Right now, we are just under the long-term average,” Smith says, citing recent data from the United States Army Corps of Engineers. “We’re down two inches from last month, and we’re down eight inches from a year ago.”

While Smith is quick to note that current water levels hardly qualify as “low” based on a broader historical timeline – “We’re still over two feet above the lowest low on record,” she tells The Ticker – she also acknowledges recent trends feel surprising given what local shorelines have looked like for the past five years.

“We’ve been living in a very high-water world for a long time, and I think it’s just kind of a shock for folks to see the water levels go back down again,” Smith says. She’s mostly referencing the period from 2019 to 2021, when high water became a legitimate point of crisis locally.

In February 2020, The Ticker reported how record high water levels had inflicted some $1 million in damages in Traverse City, ranging from flooded boardwalks and parking lots to eroded shorelines and roadways. Property owners with homes near water responded by installing boulders and retaining walls to stabilize their shorelines and stave off erosion. Some areas, like Bluff Road on Old Mission Peninsula, are still dealing with the fallout.

But what a difference five years makes. In 2020, Lake Michigan-Huron repeatedly broke monthly high-water mark records, with water levels regularly hitting numbers 20 inches above the long-term average. As 2024 drew to a close, though, water levels in Michigan-Huron were consistently measuring 5-6 inches below that same long-term average. Between last year’s mild winter and a low-precipitation summer and fall, Smith says Lake Michigan has been losing more water by evaporation than it’s gained back through rainfall and snowmelt.

“That’s the formula for lake levels: precipitation and evaporation,” Smith explains. “We had very low ice cover last winter, and with no ice cover or very low ice cover, there’s going to be more evaporation. And then, just in general across the Great Lakes basin, 2024 was below average for precipitation. So, when you have lots of evaporation because of low ice cover, and then low precipitation, that’s a recipe for receding water lines.”

What will northern Michigan’s shorelines look like come spring or summer? According to Smith, it’s still early to forecast what the rest of the winter will bring. While northern Michigan has received considerable snowfall this winter – per the National Weather Service, Traverse City has tallied 60.1 inches so far, 63 percent over the normal-to-date amount of 36.8 inches – it’s also experienced major warming patterns that have limited accumulation and kept water temperatures warm. A recent MLive report noted that water temps on Monday were “still warmer than any January 6 in recent memory.” As such, ice cover on Lake Michigan is virtually nonexistent, sitting at 2.21 percent compared to a season-to-date norm of around 5 percent.

Another winter of low ice cover could spell further evaporation, and Smith says most forecasts are indeed calling for Lake Michigan “to drop at least another inch or two into February and March.” In other words, northern Michigan could be in for a shallow-water summer. Things could also dip further in the coming years: Smith says typical Great Lakes cycles see 10-15 years between high water and low water, which means 2025 could simply be the midway point between 2020’s peak and the next brush with truly low water levels. The last low period came in the early 2010s, culminating in January 2013 with an all-time low water level 29 inches below the long-term average.

As waters recede, Smith is hopeful locals won’t forget the intensity of 2020’s high-water crisis, but will instead use these in-between years as an opportunity to prepare for what's next.

“We tend to get into trouble when we’re at our highest highs or our lowest lows,” Smith says. “That’s when there’s stress on the ecosystem, stress on our infrastructure, stress on personal property. So, this is a good time to prepare. In these middle years, we need to not lose sight of the fact that we're going to be faced with really high highs and really low lows once again, and that those extremes are only predicted to become more extreme with the changing climate future we're facing.”

The Watershed Center is going to spend the next few years beating the drum for “coastal resiliency best practices,” and pushing locals to ask the question: “How can we exist on the shoreline in the most harmonious way?”

“We’re encouraging people to think about building structures further back from the water's edge. We’re encouraging people to allow grass, willows, and other native deep-rooted vegetation to naturally grow on the shoreline, because those are really great erosion prevention mechanisms for our high-water years, and they provide a lot of ecological value, too. This really is the time to think about what we can do – not just as individuals, but also as communities, in terms of zoning and planning policy – to better withstand and recover from future extremes.”