Dead River

Leave it to the good folks at Atlas Obscura to find a local oddity I had never heard of: Dead River in Zion, which flows towards but usually never quite reaches Lake Michigan. Here's a satellite image from Google Maps, which indeed shows the river dead-ending at the beach. As Atlas Obscura mentions, the Chicago River was once the same way - an inconsequential current flowing out of inland marshes, before the dredging of the river's mouth at the lakefront made it permanently navigable.