Headlands Beach runs about a mile along Lake Erie at the mouth of the Grand River, east of Mentor and just west of Fairport Harbor. At 35 acres of sand it is the longest natural beach in the state, wide enough that even on a July weekend the crowd thins out if you walk five minutes east. The bottom shelves out slowly and the water stays waist deep a long way from shore, which is why the beach fills with families. There are no lifeguards anywhere on the beach, and inflatable rafts and floats are prohibited because of how fast a Lake Erie offshore wind pushes them out.

The beach exists because of engineering. The federal breakwall at the east end, first built in 1827 to protect the harbor entrance at Fairport, interrupted the eastward drift of sand along the lakeshore and the sand piled up behind it. What accumulated is now the park. Ohio opened it in 1953 as Painesville Beach State Park and renamed it Headlands Beach two years later. CNN put it on a list of the twenty best beaches in the United States in 2013.

Behind the sand, at the eastern end, is Headlands Dunes State Nature Preserve, a strip of true dune habitat that holds plants normally found on the Atlantic coast: sea rocket, beach pea, seaside spurge, beach grass and purple sand grass. The preserve is also a migration funnel. Birders work it hard in spring and fall, and monarch butterflies stage here in large numbers in late August and September before crossing the lake. Stay on the boardwalk and marked paths through the dunes; the plants are what the preserve exists to protect.

A paved hike and bike trail runs behind the dune line for the length of the park, and the northern terminus of the Buckeye Trail begins here, with the first 1.5 miles inside the park before it heads south. Beach glass hunting is a local obsession, best after a storm has churned the shallows. The Fairport Harbor West Breakwater Light stands at the end of the pier at the east end of the beach and is the photograph most people leave with.

Facilities include restrooms, a concession stand in season, a shelterhouse that seats 40 and can be reserved through reserveohio.com or by calling (866) 644-6727, and a large paved lot at the west end off Headlands Road. The park is open from a half hour before sunrise to a half hour after sunset, and the office number is (440) 466-8400. Fairport Harbor Lakefront Park with its own lifeguarded beach and marine museum is immediately east across the river, and Mentor Headlands has a short row of restaurants at the park entrance.