The park system protects many pristine beaches, long stretches of sand or secluded rocky coves just as awesome as a 14,000-foot mountain peak or 5,000-foot-deep canyon. Surfers in the water, wild ponies on the shore at Assateague Island, Maryland. It was my first time in North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and I was in awe over the wild nature of the land and seascape-the exact emotion that our national park system is supposed to induce.
No boardwalk crammed with souvenir shops. There was just so much of it, spreading north and south as far as I could see: only sand, dunes, and ocean.
