North Peninsula State Park

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Hi Blog! 

After leaving Savannah, Georgia, we found ourselves camped in Ormond Beach, Florida. Our campground is just north of Daytona Beach on the Atlantic Coast. The last time we stayed here, we ventured into Daytona Beach. We found the area very commercial; so, for this visit, we decided to check out the North Peninsula State Park further north at the border of Ormond Beach and Flagler Beach.

It felt wonderful to put our feet on beachy sand!

Nestled between the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Intercoastal Waterway on the west, the North Peninsula State Park has almost three miles of undeveloped beach and marshland. The 534 acre beach park was added to the Florida Park Service in 1984. In addition to dune restoration, the park has a 2.5 hiking trail along with extensive inland waterways accessed by boat and kayak launches.

 

This beach is graced with colorful orange sand and subtropical plants, making for a scenic walk (or sit):

We parked at the High Bridge Road Beach Access, a popular place for surf fishing. A little snowy egret was patrolling near the fishermen, hoping for a free meal.

North Peninsula State Park boast a golden orange coquina sand beach. Coquina is sedimentary rock composed of assorted fragments of shells. The pounding surf grinds it down to form a rough sand known as coquina sand.

Highway A1A runs through the park with a sand dune separating the beach from the highway. The road is not heavily traveled in this stretch -- at least mid-day on a workday -- and we rarely noticed the highway noise over the sound of the surf. We walked over a mile before we even saw another beachcomber.

In fact, the beach was so quiet, we found this sandpiper taking a nap!

We encountered several speckled crabs. We wondered whether they were good to eat. Turns out, they are edible, but a lot of people don't eat them because of they're so much smaller than blue claw crabs, which is what they're often compared to, and the meat-to-shell ratio isn't that good.

Recent storms brought up a number of interesting things and deposited them on the beach. Have you ever seen a barnacled bottle cap?

Nap time over, time to look for lunch.

Speaking of looking for lunch, we spotted a small hawk surveying the marsh lands on the other side of A1A. In the 1930s and 1940s, dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway impacted valuable marsh along the historic Smith Creek. Since 2009, about 100 acres of spoil site from those dredging activities were restored to natural tidal marsh conditions. This salt marsh restoration area now provides valuable habitat for fish, aquatic plants and birds.

The north end of the State Park ends at Flagler Beach. Past the park boundary, much of the beach access is private, so while you can walk on the beach, many of the stairs over the dune are owned by the various condos along A1A. We made this our turnaround and began the mile-and-a-half walk back.

Once we reached our public beach access, we could have walked another mile south, but our tummies were grumbling, so we decided to call it. We had walked three miles and filled our pockets with sea glass, shells and coquina rocks!

We ended our outing with lunch at Lagerheads Bar and Grill, a very casual, beachy place with good food. We enjoyed palm trees and ocean views while eating our grouper sandwiches. The only thing this beach bar was missing to make it full-on "Key West Qualified" were free roaming chickens!