Dorthe Friberg stood on the beach at the foot of Mount Baldy and gestured toward Lake Michigan.
"It's so beautiful, all the colors," she said as the water, taupe near the shore and varying shades of turquoise further out, lapped at the sand.
Friberg, from Copenhagen, Denmark, said she grew up by the ocean, and climbing and playing on dunes.
"But it's different here," she said Monday, noting the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and this country's network of national parks. "And then you have the water. That's probably the main attraction for me."
A few small groups of people explored the beach Monday, just days after it reopened following a four-year closure. Climbing on Mount Baldy is still closed to the public, as it has been since Nathan Woessner, then 6, of Sterling, Ill., fell into an 11-foot hole on the dune on July 12, 2013, but park officials announced in May they would reopen the beach, and did so July 13.
The dune has been closed, except for ranger-led hikes that started two years ago, since the incident involving Woessner, who has fully recovered. Scientists have been working to determine what caused the hole that Woessner fell into and others found in the same vicinity, and have said decaying trees under the dune's surface caused the holes.
Sandra Donaldson, who rents out living quarters in Chicago to students and interns from overseas, brought several of her tenants, including Friberg, to the beach because she wanted to show them the dunes.
After a stop at the visitors center, Donaldson found out the beach was once again open, so that's where she decided to go.
"I've been coming here for years. Baldy used to be open. I know it was open before the accident," Donaldson said. "I knew about Baldy. I knew about the history and we used to climb it but it will likely never be open."
Park officials have not said when the dune itself might reopen to visitors. The dune was partially blocked off for marram grass restoration when Woessner fell in the hole and, without a constant flow of hikers, the native grass is returning on the previously bare dune.
Park officials have said they hoped the grass would stabilize the dune, which is shifting southward each year toward the parking lot behind it.
Laura Delp, her husband Walter and son Josiah, 8, came to visit the beach while on vacation from their home in Little Rock, Ark.
"They don't have sand there," she joked.
She and her husband used to bring their three older children, who are now adults, to Mount Baldy every year while they were on vacation and she didn't know the beach had closed and then re-opened, or that the dune itself was closed.
Her older kids, she said, used to climb the dune and then jump in the water. The family was last at Mount Baldy eight years ago.
"It's just bad to see this," she said of the blocked-off dune, "but I know they've got to do what they've got to do."