St George Island

I fulfilled a longtime wish today and visited St George Island, on the northern Florida Gulf coast near the panhandle town of Apalachicola. I had heard that this island has one of the finest beaches in the nation, and indeed it does! The sand is soft and white, almost like sugar. The beach is at least fifteen miles long; the easternmost nine miles are state park, and the last five miles of that stretch are accessible only by foot or boat. I had a nice walk and got in some fine horizontal slotation. It was a cool day, only about 60 degrees, so I had to wear jeans and a sweatshirt most of the time, but the air was crisp and clean...just a perfect fall day!

A crisp north wind was blowing, and had been stronger earlier in the day and yesterday afternoon. The breeze created lee side sand patterns behind the many shells strewn about the beach. To put this pic in scale, each of the sand streaks are only an inch or two long.

The beach at St George, windswept and deserted, presents a myriad of shapes and designs, all created by wind and water. By the way, the lumps in the sand to the lower right of the picture...especially visible if you blow the pic up...are airholes, probably created by critters living under the surface. The Gulf is to the right of the pic...the pond is water that flows into depressions in the beach at high tide.

The interior of the island is covered by forests of slash pine and cabbage palm, as well as sand dunes. The dunes lie between the beach and the forests, and probably protect the trees from all but the most severe hurricane storm surges. The Gulf is beyond the dunes in the rear center of the picture.