You've heard me mention Ivan and Sally, and I want to sit with that for a minute, because you cannot really understand this place without understanding the storms. This is hurricane coast. Living here means living with that.
September of 2004: Hurricane Ivan. A huge, powerful storm that came ashore just about right here as a Category 3, and it hammered this park. It destroyed the fishing pier, as I told you. It flattened the old lodge on the beach. It chewed up the dunes, drowned the roads, and scattered the campground. For a while, a lot of this park was just wreckage and bare sand.
Then September of 2020: Hurricane Sally. Slower, wetter, and cruel in its own way — it stalled right over this coast and pounded it for hours, tore that chunk out of the rebuilt pier, flooded everything, and stripped the beach all over again.
Two direct hits from named hurricanes in one generation, on one small park. And in between and around them, dozens of lesser storms and near-misses, because that's just the deal you make when you live where the Gulf can reach you.
But here's the thing, and it's the reason I love this place. Every single time, they built it back. Not smaller, not meeker — better. A tougher pier. A greener, stronger Lodge. Restored dunes, replanted sea oats, a whole park re-imagined to stand up to the next one and to heal a little faster after it. That's not just engineering. That's a decision, made over and over, to not give up on a beautiful, dangerous place. The storms keep score. But so far, so does the coast.
Photo: The United States Naval Research Laboratory, data superimposed by HachHachJayy · Public domain
