A Night on the Island

You'll pass the campgrounds along here, and they're worth a word, because camping on Assateague is a legendary experience — the kind of thing people do once and either swear by forever or swear off entirely. There's no lodge, no cabins, no resort. Just tent and RV sites tucked behind the dunes, on the sand, under a huge dark sky, with the surf as your soundtrack all night long.

The magic is that you're camping in the horses' living room. It is not unusual to unzip your tent at dawn and find a wild horse standing over your picnic table, which is exactly why every campsite has those tall steel food lockers — because a horse that learns to raid a cooler becomes a genuine menace, and a fed horse is a dead horse in the long run. So campers keep every crumb locked away, and admire their four-legged neighbors from inside the tent.

Two honest warnings if you ever try it. One: the wind and the weather come straight off the ocean with nothing to stop them, so stake down hard. And two — the bugs. In high summer, the greenhead flies and salt-marsh mosquitoes off this island are the stuff of legend, and not the good kind. Bring the strongest repellent you own. But time it right, on a breezy night in spring or fall, and falling asleep to the surf with wild horses grazing in the dark is about as close to the old, untamed coast as you can still get in America.

And if you'd rather stretch your legs by daylight, watch along here for the Life of the Forest trailhead — a short, shady loop back through the island's wind-stunted maritime pine forest, out to a quiet little overlook of the bay. After all that open sand and sky, the cool and the hush of those trees feels like stepping into another world.