Touring Cape Cod 2: Beaches, Beech Forest and Dunes

We didn’t miss the second bus and were soon at the Beech Forest trail entrance. It reminded me of Finland: no people anywhere, beeches and pines everywhere. It was an actual though small forest. There were cars parked in the parking lot, but no one was on the trail; they had likely brought bikes and taken off on the bike trails.

The trail was quite varied: there was the titular beech forest, but also more sandbars and pines. In the middle there was a pond overgrown with multicolored petals which made it look like it was part of a pointillist painting.

At the far side of the trail we encountered a branch of the trail that led uphill and was covered with a thick layer of fine, beachy sand that seemed to be spilling over from whatever awaited at the top. We decided to go have a look. Walking uphill in fine sand was a new type of exercise for me, something fancy gyms should consider including as an alternative to a stair machine.

What we discovered was a landscape of dunes and pines and the heat reflected by the sand. It was scorching, so we soon returned down the hill to the forest, which in contrast now felt amazingly cool. Finishing the loop we finally we came across a few other people: birdwatchers dressed in camo with giant lenses on their cameras.

We took the bus to Race Point Beach through the dune landscape we’d seen stretching into the distance from the hill. There was a building behind the grassy dunes that we went to inspect. It was the Old Harbor Life-Saving Station Museum, from the 19th century. It was very comfortable inside, to the point that I would have liked to stay, were it possible. It had sparse period furniture, to show how life guards used to stay there while working, and it was surprisingly cool despite no AC, with a gentle sea breeze passing through the whole building through its large, open doors. It was situated in a little valley between the dunes; it felt isolated but not claustrophobic, like being inside a crater on some beach planet. The back porch faced the dunes and I spent a good while there taking pictures with each of the cameras I’d packed (there were admittedly several cameras; a film version of the picture, if successful, will quite likely be included in the next set of subscriber prints, to be shipped after the current batch, in 3 months or so).

There was still plenty of time left in the day before it was time to return to Boston so we decided to take advantage of the free bus rides on offer all along the cape at least that weekend and go check out a town further south called Wellfleet, where we’d arrive right on time for dinner. I’ll leave the trip to Wellfleet and the surprisingly adventurous attempt to get back to Provincetown in time to make it to the last ferry to Boston for a 3rd installment.