Lake County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Lake County

Six and a half miles of legally undisturbed Lake Michigan dune-and-swale natural community — that is what Illinois Beach State Park preserves of an ecosystem that originally ran continuously for the entire 26-mile Illinois Lake Michigan shoreline before the 19th-and-20th-century rail, port, and industrial buildout consumed the rest. The preserved corridor sits awkwardly sandwiched between the decommissioned Zion Nuclear Power Plant site (Commonwealth Edison's twin-reactor station, in service 1973-1998, permanently shut down following the discovery of degraded steam-generator tubes and cost-prohibitive replacement economics, with the spent-fuel casks still onsite in dry-cask storage pending permanent federal repository assignment) and the Waukegan industrial corridor along the Lake Michigan waterfront. The dunes-and-swale geology is an ecosystem rarely preserved at this scale — sand dune ridges and parallel wet swales formed by post-Pleistocene Lake Michigan shoreline regressions, with the dune ridges hosting black-oak savanna and the swales hosting calcareous sedge meadow per Illinois Natural Areas Inventory classifications.

Lake County IL's 444 sq mi wrap the Chicago North Shore commuter band from Wilmette north to the Wisconsin state line, making it the third-most-populous county in Illinois (after Cook and DuPage) and the wealthiest by median household income per US Census ACS data — anchored by the Lake Forest, Highland Park, Lake Bluff, and Glencoe lakefront mansion belt where Marshall Field, Cyrus McCormick, and the early-20th-century Chicago industrial families built their summer estates. Naval Station Great Lakes north of Lake Forest is the only US Navy boot camp in the country (every Navy enlisted sailor since 1991, when the consolidation of Orlando and San Diego boot camps completed, has trained here — roughly 38,000 recruits per year per Navy MyNavyHR statistics). Illinois Beach State Park's campground accepts rigs to 50 ft with electric hookups across 240 sites year-round — the only Lake Michigan-shoreline state-park RV-friendly base in Illinois. Chain O'Lakes State Park (15 miles inland on the Wisconsin border, accepting rigs to 35 ft with electric hookups on 151 sites) is the alternative inland-lake base. Lake County prohibits overnight RV street parking in most suburban municipalities under uniform North Shore town codes; commercial campgrounds line IL-83 and US-41 corridors.