Silver Lake, Michigan 3D Wood Map | Laser-Cut Birch Depth Chart
How the Water Becomes Wood
A chart is a stack of flat sheets until the water's real soundings tell it what shape to take.
- SurveyReal bathymetric sounding data sets every contour line before a single cut is made.
- CutEach depth band is laser-cut from its own sheet of Baltic birch, up to nine layers deep.
- StainWater layers are stained by hand, reading darker the deeper the water runs.
- StackThe sheets are registered and stacked in sequence, and the bed's true shape rises out of the wood.
- EtchDepths and place names are burned into the grain itself, never printed on it.
- FrameA solid Baltic birch frame and acrylic glass finish the piece, ready to hang.
Silver Lake and its dunes in laser-cut Baltic birch, 13.5 by 31 inches: the lake, the two thousand acres of bare sand between it and Lake Michigan, and the shoreline where the two waters nearly touch.
Silver Lake sits in one of the strangest landscapes in the Midwest, pinned between Lake Michigan and a field of live, walking dunes that swallow trees whole and give them back decades later. The state park here contains Michigan's only dune area where you can drive your own off-road vehicle on the sand, which is why summer weekends sound the way they do. At the dunes' northwest corner, Little Sable Point Lighthouse has stood in the open sand since 1874. On the chart, the lake's basin steps down in birch with the dune field rendered between it and the big water, the whole precarious geography in one frame.
Each contour is cut from its own sheet and stacked by hand, names engraved, acrylic glass over the face, solid Baltic birch frame.
Jeep families, cottage families, and everyone who has climbed the dune barefoot in July and regretted it: this is your sand and your water.
Mears and the village of Silver Lake sit along the east shore, with Hart just inland and Little Sable Point at the corner of the dunes. The coast continues south on the Muskegon to South Haven chart, all of it on the Lake Michigan chart.
- 13.5 × 31 in
- Solid Baltic birch frame
- Acrylic glass front, ready to hang
- Free next-business-day shipping on orders placed by 2 PM EST
- 14-day returns
Live from the water