Feb 26 2008
Dunbar Rd. Lotus Beds
I always kind of laugh when I leave I-75 and drive towards Downtown Monroe on LaPlaisance. The causes of the chuckles are the “Lotus Bed” signs that direct a visitor to Dunbar Road.
Don’t get me wrong. The lotus beds are beautiful. They are a community treasure. And they have a unique place in Monroe’s history.
But to get to the beds, one has to pass a prison facility, the door-to-nowhere ruin, a DTE dump site, a party island and I-75. Oh, and did I mention that the site has one of the ”best” views of the DTE coal plant?
But that is the “nature” of Monroe. It is a sometimes chaotic blend of the VERY industrial and the VERY natural. Both inhabit the county and in close proximity.
What a tourist or community visitor actually perceives when visiting the site is arguable. Does the beauty of the lotus beds outweigh the industrial turmoil of this patch of land and water? I wonder.
But there is no doubt that the Dunbar site is the most accessible location to view lotus flowers in Monroe County. Visitors just need to take LaPlaisance Rd. past the triple set of railroad tracks and make a very quick left onto Dunbar. All one has to do is pop out of the car when the flowers bloom in June. No hiking is needed.
There are very few visitor facilities at this viewing location. There aren’t even any parking spots. One just has to abandon the car on the road shoulder and walk to the water’s edge. The road is a dead end, so there is little to no traffic to worry about.
The view is actually quite good in this area across Plum Creek. “Creek” does not seem to be the correct noun at this location. The waterway is wide and slow in this area. And, since the DTE plant processes pretty much the entire flow of the River Raisin and deposits it in Plum Creek, this location can lay claim to being the end of one of SE Michigan’s great rivers.
It would be wonderful if, in the future, some arrangement could be made to connect this lotus bed site with the DNR boat launch at Bolles Harbor. That would require a pedestrian passage around a DTE disposal facility. I have no knowledge of the logistics involved with this, nor the environmental state of this area. But it should probably be in some individual’s long-term plan for the area.
I placed a pin at this location on Google Maps here:
Note: Given that it is February as I post this, it was not possible to get a good shot of the lotus for this blog post. So, I used a U.S. Department of Agriculture photo from this site. It is in the public domain, but the photographer is Robert H. Mohlenbrock: