NC Cape Hatteras National Seashore - Three Morning Walks

For my Christmas expedition, I winter camped at Cape Hatteras National Seashore (NPS) on the Outer Banks in North Carolina for a short four-day week and had the time before each day's exploration to do a few miles walk on the beach front. The Outer Banks is unique in the world for its dynamic barrier island chain that sits 20 to 40 miles offshore from the mainland. Each morning my trusty hiking hound Amos and I climbed the tall dunes in front of our campsite to reach the foreshore and dune front. 

Foreshore sandbar 

Constantly shifting sand shoals form in the inlets, off the four capes, and along the wild beaches. The shoals are littered with the wreckage of sailing vessels and a few modern ships including German U-boats. This contact zone of Atlantic Ocean with the Outer Banks is known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic where over 3,000 wrecks have occurred.  A wreck marker (Ocean Pursuit 2020) just off the breaker zone near my campsite interested Amos immensely as there was always a seal hauled out on the buoy platform. A new smell for a coonhound nose! This recent wreck was at one time beached here but the migration of the island to the west has now left it a hundred yards off the beach in the breaker zone. 

Shells cast ashore by big waves

While there are sections of the 200-mile-long Outer Banks that are heavily developed with beach resorts and historic villages and towns, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore conservation landscape protects 70 miles in a wild stretch from Nags Head to Ocracoke Inlet. There are ten NPS National Seashore units in the U.S. and I'm making a point to visit all of them in winter when I most love to camp at the shore. No crowds except for a hardy few (also the nicest) people. No biting insects. We arrived to our campsite on Christmas Day at the Oregon Inlet campground greeted by campground hosts Dylan and Megan, NPS volunteers (and their cat) who maintain this windy year-round seaside campground. We loved chatting each morning on the top of the dunes, sharing the sunrise. I loved hearing their story and how they came to be full time NPS National Seashore volunteers living and working out of their little camper in Cape Cod, Fire Island, Cape Hatteras, and Assateague. (Megan does work a P/T remote online job that supports their F/T volunteering.) 

Whelk egg cases

Our morning walks of two to three miles included much admiring the nature of waves, sand, and dune structure. The accretion and erosion of sand by currents and wind make the Outer Banks possible and the rapid pace of change in the landscape was observable from morning to morning. Dune morphology is a science unto itself and though nothing will stop a dune from traveling except to haul it away in dump trucks, knowing how and why dunes take on the shapes and rate of travel they do was a bit of an obsession for me. Armed with Dr. Dirk Frankenberg's  Nature of the Outer Banks (1995) I quickly dogeared and dampened (in fog, mist, salt spray, and rain) my copy brought from home that prompted me to buy later a back-up copy.

 

Sharp, steep dune field and mineral sand windrows

The dune front is sculpted in wind-driven sharp peaks of fine sand with steep faces, built by both winds coming off the ocean and the mainland. With less vegetation to stabilize them these dunes appear hummocky and are quick to migrate over campsites, roads, houses, restrooms. The NPS keeps a fleet of sand moving equipment to reopen the highway, entrance roads, and campsites, but it is their policy that dunes will go where they will when they want and if that means having a built structure buried, then let it go.  Historic structures are maintained, however, until they can be moved. 

Pea Island NWR sand cat

The current owners of the Oregon Inlet Lifesaving Station, North Carolina Aquariums, are trying to figure out what to do with this historic and beautiful structure as the USFWS Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge works weekly to keep the access road into and around the old station from being swallowed up. They need and want to move it, but to where?  We took a morning walk to the station, a short drive across the Oregon Inlet bridge from our campsite, and found it in the center of an encroaching dune field. According to Frankenberg, a plant coverage of 45-60% allows for dunes to migrate and at this site, fully exposed to strong coastal winds, it feels like the dunes are trying hard to claim the old station house.

Oregon Inlet Lifesaving Station, built 1898

It needs to go, but where?

As we walked among the back dunes looking for animal clues, I found a few late blooming Cottony Goldenasters which send out blankets of rhizomes to help hold sand in place.  In these protected but temporary spaces of vegetation, the stabilization of sand offered by spreading plants like Seaside Goldenrod, Goldenaster, and Pennywort allows little thickets to form in the dips and valleys.

Goldenaster

Seaside Goldenrod

The entire Outer Banks barrier island complex is moving westward towards the mainland by hundreds of yards per year with this process amplified by rising sea levels and increased intensity of coastal storms. The quantities of sand being moved by currents and winds is hard to wrap your head around, even more so when you think that each grain of sand has a history hundreds of millions of years old, all of having eroded out of Piedmont quartz, feldspar, mica, and schist.  Heavy minerals like iron oxides and magnetite form designs on the upper beach and in the back dunes where with some digging you can find layers of black sand feet thick that mark big storm events. A Google Earth view (see below) of the ever shifting shoals and bars in the Oregon Inlet is a good way to imagine the ocean bottom from the beach out fifty miles and all of it constantly moving. 

Newly formed runnels

Wind-flattened older runnels

Packed and loose sand boundary

Ripple marks 

Bedding layers (top) and antidune patterns (below)

Interference ripples - wind vs water currents

After walking around the back dune and foredune at the north and south end of the Oregon Inlet each morning, I decided I wanted to see more of the workings of over washes, storm surges, and inlet formation.  I didn't have far to go driving south on Highway 12 across the newer Jughandle Bridge to find the historic 1750s settlement of Rodanthe, one of three in a chain of early English settlements.

Highway 12 permanently closed at Rodanthe

Once a prominent Outer Banks cape at the point of land furthest east in North Carolina, two hundred years of wind, wave, and landward drift have eliminated both the wide cape and its expansive interior maritime forest. All that is left now is a narrow strip of sand on which the small resort town clings. From Rodanthe north to the Oregon Inlet the current strip of barrier island coast is now under the jurisdiction of the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and is being allowed to do what barrier islands want to do - move and change! Established in 1938 with an original 5,800 acres of conservation land, it has lost almost a thousand acres to the sea since. I stopped at the Visitor Center and stood on the observation deck to see the Atlantic Ocean bearing down on the highway just yards from the parking lot to the east with the waters of the Pamlico Sound flooding into marshes at high tide to the west. There wasn't anywhere to walk! A morning birder, helping out with the Annual Christmas Bird Count, recalled a time when they would walk from the deck through the shrub thicket for an hour to reach the sound. "Now it comes to us as the tides get higher and higher!"

The Atlantic to the east...

...Pamlico Sound to the west.

Further south at the beautifully preserved Chicamacomico Life Saving Station,  Amos and I got out for another stroll but this time we walked down the street to where the dunes have obliterated the old highway - the reason for the Jughandle Bridge - and where the sea washes over the narrow island.  Storm surges have claimed blocks of resort properties and though I wanted to go out to see the edge of the town standing in the ocean, a local resident cautioned me against it saying that the area has been officially closed.  She suggested I pull up a Zillow real estate view to see where these resort houses once stood with their property lines still indicated on the website map. "What were we thinking, building out there like that?"

Exposed cross-bedded sand layers in a blowout

Lost Rodanthe properties and old Hwy 12

Oregon Inlet - NPS campground (north), Oregon Inlet Life Saving Station (south)

For our three morning walks Amos and I explored almost ten miles of beach and dunes to include our excursions to Rodanthe and the Oregon Life Saving Station within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. After breakfast and a short rest, he was ready for more exploring the larger landscapes of the Outer Banks. These walks were lessons in how dynamic the sea and barrier island interface are and while talking to a NWR volunteer at the Pea Island Visitor Center - just how precarious our sense of stability really is. For Don, a long-time resident of Nags Head and year-round volunteer at Pea Island NWR, his experience of living and working on the Outer Banks as a naturalist and birder have been immensely rewarding but "always tinged with reminders of how temporary all of this is - especially on days when the ocean washes over the parking area, under the center, and into the sound." 

Oregon Inlet Campground, Christmas Day

Notes:

Cape Hatteras National Seashore https://www.nps.gov/caha/index.htm

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge  https://www.fws.gov/refuge/pea-island

Chicamacamico Banks (Rodanthe,Waves, Salvo settlements) https://www.rodanthewavessalvonc.org/brief-history.html

The ten National Park Service National Seashores are:

• Assateague Island National Seashore, Maryland and Virginia
• Canaveral National Seashore, Florida
• Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts
• Cape Hatteras National Seashore, North Carolina
• Cape Lookout National Seashore, North Carolina
• Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia
• Fire Island National Seashore, New York
Gulf Islands National Seashore, Florida and Mississippi
Padre Island National Seashore, Texas
Point Reyes National Seashore, California