Qualla: Assateague Island National Seashore

Assateague Island National Seashore: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beached Paws/Ferrell Santacroce, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk the Dunes Trail at Assateague, and at one point you cross a crumbled stretch of asphalt half-buried in sand. The sign explains what it was: Baltimore Boulevard, the planned main street of a beach resort called Ocean Beach, Maryland. In the 1950s, developers sold 5,850 lots along this road. They paved Baltimore Boulevard, ran power and water, and started building cottages. Then the Ash Wednesday Storm of March 1962 hit the Mid-Atlantic coast, sustained gale winds across a four-day period of astronomical high tides, and ripped almost everything man-made off the island. The roads were gone. The cottages were gone. The development company decided the place could not be built on, sold all its land to the federal government, and Congress turned the wreckage into a national seashore in 1965. Ocean Beach, Maryland is one of the rare American cities that was unmade by weather. The asphalt under the sand is a tombstone for it.

Image: Beached Paws/Ferrell Santacroce | CC BY-SA 4.0

Assateague Island National Seashore: Thirty-Seven Miles of Barrier

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erik Anestad from USA, CC BY 2.0. Assateague Island runs 37 miles along the Atlantic coast of Maryland and Virginia, never more than a mile wide. The island is part of a chain of barrier islands that stretches from Maine to Texas, built by the southward longshore drift of sand eroded from the Appalachian Mountain...

Image: Erik Anestad from USA | CC BY 2.0

Assateague Island National Seashore: The Wild Horses

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit VitaleBaby at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Bands of feral horses roam Assateague Island. Local legend tells a romantic story - that they descend from Spanish horses who swam ashore from a wrecked galleon. The likelier truth is more mundane: seventeenth-century mainland farmers turned their horses loose on the island to av...

Image: VitaleBaby at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Assateague Island National Seashore: Piping Plovers and the OSV Zone

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fritz Geller-Grimm, CC BY-SA 2.5. Piping plovers, listed federally as a threatened species, nest in shallow scrapes in the open sand of Assateague's beaches between April and August. The park closes large sections of the over-sand-vehicle (OSV) zone during plover breeding season to keep four-wheel drives from run...

Image: Fritz Geller-Grimm | CC BY-SA 2.5

Assateague Island National Seashore: The Rolling Island

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beached Paws/Ferrell Santacroce, CC BY-SA 4.0. Assateague is moving. The whole barrier island migrates westward over time, sand washing over the dunes during storms and depositing on the bay side - a process geologists call barrier island rollover. The migration is accelerating as the sea rises and storms intensify. At the no...

Image: Beached Paws/Ferrell Santacroce | CC BY-SA 4.0

Assateague Island National Seashore: Camping, Crab Pots, and Mosquitoes

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit VitaleBaby at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The National Park Service maintains 148 campsites for tents and RVs on the Maryland side, divided between oceanside campsites west of the main dune and bayside campsites on a peninsula reaching into Sinepuxent Bay. The bayside sites have better wildlife viewing - horses grazing w...

Image: VitaleBaby at English Wikipedia | Public domain