Trip Report: Assateague Island National Seashore

I've been to Assateague before, my parents insist, but given that I was two years old at the time this past weekend felt like the first time. Emily and I made a semi-spontaneous decision that we needed to get the heck out of D.C. Three hours later, we were erecting a tent on sand, oceanside.

Camp

Assateague is a barrier island straddling Maryland and Virginia just off of the Delmarva Peninsula. It is managed as unaltered nature, with one awesome exception: wild horses. The horses have roamed freely for several centuries and are 100 percent wild.

Look but don't touch

The island is divided into a Maryland state park, a National Wildlife Refuge, and a National Seashore, where we camped and hiked. Going in April means that the weather is too cold for swimming, but also too cold for crowds - we had the island almost to ourselves - and also that it is too cold for mosquitos. I cannot stress this last point enough.

Crowd-free, mosquito-free

Night was cold but clear, and far enough from the East Coast megalopolis to avoid major light pollution. While I shivered and drank a glass of wine, Emily pulled out a star chart and we spent time constellation-spotting. Around 4:00am, I popped my head out of the tent and may have even glimpsed the Milky Way. Dawn brought the type of sunrise you normally only see on the cover of a book of prayer devotionals or a church bulletin.

Sunrise

The next day we hiked through dunes, forests, and swamps. The landscape is unique both in its vegetation and topography, as well as the fact that beach, dune, forest, and marsh are packed in so close together. The island is less than a mile wide while having 37 miles of beach, so each ecosystem sits in a precarious balance of environmental conditions.

Dunes

To top it all off, there is a NASA launch facility adjacent to the southern portion of the island. If you go, be sure to swing by and check out the rockets!