Nags Head to Cape Hatteras · any car · full day
Shifting Sands
The Outer Banks is a sandbar, and it is moving. A full day driving south from Nags Head to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, about how much of this place the sea has already taken. Any car.
The route
You start at Jockey’s Ridge, the tallest dune on the East Coast, which is walking southwest a few feet every year. Then a dead-end street in South Nags Head where the pavement simply stops at the water and more than half of one legal lot is now ocean. Bodie Island Lighthouse — the third one, because the first two did not survive. Oregon Inlet, which did not exist before a single night in September 1846 and has walked two miles south since. Pea Island, Rodanthe, and the bridge they finally built over the stretch of road the ocean kept taking.
The finish is the point of the whole thing. You stand inside a ring of stones in the woods at Buxton — the foundation where the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse stood from 1870 until 1999, by which time the sea was 120 feet away. Then you drive to the lighthouse itself, 2,900 feet inland, where they moved it. Standing in one spot and then the other is the part people remember.
What you need
Any car — there is no sand driving in this one. It is about seventy miles each way, so it is a full day and an early start. Fill the tank before Hatteras Island, and check NCDOT for road conditions before you go: NC 12 is the only way down and it closes in weather. One thing to plan for — the game finishes at Buxton, not back where you started, so the drive home is yours.
Get your team pass
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