Back to the Beach at Gulf Islands National Seashore

After some unseasonable rainy days and cold weather down here on the Gulf Coast, we finally got a sunny day (although still pretty cool).  We decided to take advantage of the sunshine and explore the beach along the shore of Gulf Islands National Seashore on Santa Rosa Island south of Navarre.

The way we were dressed, you'd wonder if that was a pile of snow behind us.  Nope.  The sand here is nearly pure white.

The white sand and clouds, the bluebird sky, and the tan-and-gold dune grasses made for a dramatic scene as we started our walk from a public beach parking lot, along Gulf Boulevard:

This promised to be a pretty predictable walk, with nothing but the road, the sand, the sea, sky and dunes.  However, we should know that nothing is predictable.  We got a clue that this would be a hike of discovery when we chanced upon this robot-looking thing that we guessed was a water line connection, much like a fire hydrant.  Nothing confirmed our guess one way or the other.

We hadn't walked more than a hundred yards or so along the road when we encountered a plow pushing sand off the road into the dunes on either side.  We decided to walk around the plow by finding our way through the dunes out to the beach.  It was a short but striking detour:

As it happens, our detour was fortuitous for at least two reasons.  The first was that we encountered the great blue heron we had seen several days ago nearby in our hike on the Dunes Trail.  He was just as put out with our presence as he had been the other day:

The second reason our detour was fortuitous was this little mini-soccer ball, abandoned casually in the dunes as if someone had kicked it from the beach and lost track of where it landed.  It was very clean, leading us to conclude that it had been lost only recently.

Kathy scooped it up and put it in her pack.  She announced, "I'll name it 'Franklin!'" See if you can guess why she picked that name:

No sooner had we gotten back to the road off our detour when we encountered what looked like a Frisbee lying next to an orange flag.  We examined it and determined that the entire assemblage was a survey marker -- marking what, we do not know.  Perhaps the location of that presumed water line one of whose outlets we saw earlier on our walk.

On we hiked.  Again, almost as soon as we turned our attention to our walk, we stumbled on this expired moth or butterfly.  It looked like it might have dried out, so it was very hard to tell what its original colors were.  What we do know is that Monarch butterflies are common to Gulf Islands National Seashore, so it might have been a Monarch buttefly.  We will never be sure...

The surprises just kept on coming.  Not more than a hundred paces later, we spotted these little mushrooms, firmly rooted in the sand.  How often would one expect to see mushrooms in the sand?  Not often, we wager.  Yet, here they were:

After some walking, we found our way to a picnic area, where we stopped for a snack and a rest and a view of the Gulf:

Looking at the striking sand and water and sky, we decided it would be fun to hike back to our Jeep along the beach.  And so we did.  It must have been the right decision, because, very soon, we encountered a member of the beach patrol who gave us a nod and went about her duties:

One small section of the beach must have unique currents, because it was the only spot where we saw freshly-beached jellyfish --

 -- and not just one, but two:

Many seashells were washed up on the clean, white sand, but most were broken.  Nevertheless, Kathy found a couple of specimens worth noting -- this HUGE partial sand dollar --

-- and this beautiful partial conch shell:

We were clearly not the first ones on the beach today.  We ran across an old gent wading in shallow Gulf water scooping up prize shell specimens from just below the tide line.  We also found these fetching sand sketches:

And the ever-present sapphire sky:

Our last little surprise was this convocation of pipers resolving some important matter among themselves.  They were so busy conferring that they paid us no attention, even though we approached very close to their meeting-place:

And, before we knew it, we were back to our Jeep, nearly 4 miles under our boots.  It was lunch time and we both had a powerful hunger, so we repaired to a local restaurant, Andy D's, for some tasty beach food.

Tomorrow we move to Davis Bayou Campground, which is also a unit of Gulf Islands National Seashore, so, in a few days, we'll have another perspective on this beautiful protected area along the Gulf shore.