Gulf State Park

Orientation heading south into Gulf Shores on Highway 59 — Alabama's Gulf coast. Get your bearings before the beach.

Boone Merrick here — pleased to make your acquaintance. I'll be riding shotgun with Ranger Quinn all the way today, and any time this coast turns up a story worth telling — and it will, plenty of them — that's when I'…

Reach down and grab a handful of this beach sometime and really look at it — how blinding white it is, how fine and soft, almost like powdered sugar. Squeak it between your fingers. Folks come from all over the world…

This whole park — the roads, the first cabins, the very idea of it — was born in the hardest years this country ever had, and built by young men who had nothing. Let me tell you about them. It was the 1930s, the dept…

Look at the dunes as we go — those rolling hills of white sand — and notice the tall, graceful grass growing all over them, waving in the sea breeze, tipped in late summer with heavy golden seed heads that catch the l…

That pier you walked out on — I promised you its life story, and it's a good one, because that pier is about the most stubborn structure on this whole coast. It has been killed and it will not stay dead. The first bi…

Before we part ways, I want to make sure you don't drive off without really watching the water, because the Gulf out here puts on a free show every single day, if you know what to look for. Let me point a few things o…

The marquee: a 1,540-foot concrete fishing pier, one of the longest on the Gulf. Park in the pier lot and walk the deck out over the water. Day-use parking ~$10. ~30 min.

The beachfront Lodge (a Hilton), rebuilt after Hurricane Ivan as a showpiece of resilient, green design — LEED Gold, storm-hardened, opened 2018.

Now that you've seen Lake Shelby, let me tell you why it's stranger and more special than it looks — a big bowl of fresh water sitting right up against the salty sea. You'd think, this close to the Gulf, that any wat…

That trail system that spins out from the Nature Center — the Backcountry Trail — is one of the finest things about this park, and it carries a good man's name, so let me tell you about both. First the trail. More th…

A look north from the coast road: behind the dunes lie Gulf State Park's freshwater lakes, the Nature Center, and the Hugh S. Branyon Backcountry Trail — 28 miles through seven ecosystems.

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 wit…

Some warm night from late spring into the fall, long after the beach umbrellas are folded up and the crowds have gone home, this quiet dark shore hosts one of the oldest ceremonies on earth. The sea turtles come home…

I want to introduce you to the rarest resident of this whole park, and you will almost certainly never see it, because it's tiny, it's shy, and it only comes out at night. It's a mouse. But not just any mouse — the Al…

Back on the coastal highway, eastbound: the open Gulf-front drive between the park core and Orange Beach — sugar-white sand, snowbird winters, and the barrier-island coast.

We talk a lot about the birds and the turtles migrating to this coast, but there's another migration here that's just as regular and a lot more fun to watch, and it's made of people. They call them the snowbirds. Eve…

I told you a lot of this park was rebuilt with money from a disaster, and it's such a strange and hopeful story that I've got to give it to you properly. This is the tale of how the worst thing that ever happened to t…

Orange Beach back there calls itself the red snapper capital of the world, and behind that boast is a story about how this coast learned to farm the sea. Let me tell you, because it's cleverer than you'd think. Here'…

When you eat Gulf shrimp — and if you're on this coast, you'd better — you're tasting the work of a fishing culture that's been going on out here for well over a century. And its heart is a little place just west of u…

I've saved one of the strangest and most wonderful stories of this coast for you, and it happens just west of here, on the shores of Mobile Bay. They call it a Jubilee, and it is one of the rarest natural events on ea…

Rolling into Orange Beach — the eastern coastal community, its back bays and bayous, and Alabama's deep-sea fishing capital.

Everybody thinks Mardi Gras belongs to New Orleans. But I'm going to let you in on something the folks around here are mighty proud of: the very first Mardi Gras in America was not in New Orleans at all. It was right…

Look off to the west sometime, down the long arm of sand that trails away toward the sunset. Way out at the tip of that peninsula, about twenty miles from here, stands an old brick fort called Fort Morgan — and one Au…

The park's east beach unit at Alabama Point — protected dunes, boardwalks, and the wild edge of the coast just west of Perdido Pass.

You're going to cross Perdido Pass in a minute, so let me hand you its story first, because even the name has a little mystery in it. Perdido. It's Spanish, and it means 'lost.' The Lost Bay, the Lost River, the Lost…

The finale: the dramatic tidal inlet where the back bays meet the Gulf, crossed by the high Perdido Pass Bridge. Jetties, boat traffic, and the end of the road.