Which is how on a weekday afternoon, I parked at the Snail Road access trail off Route 6 in Provincetown and began walking. You just had to look for it.Īs public use of the Seashore takes many forms, so does work to protect the area. An empty beach, a quiet forest, an endless expanse of sand and weather-beaten shacks. “You just have to learn to deal with it.”īut there was another Cape, he told me-one you could find if you were willing to trek off the touristed path. “The Cape in summer,” a longtime Eastham resident told me, with the resignation of someone who’d given up hope that the pressure would ever ease. Along the way I didn’t see another soul, a welcome solitude.įor two days I’d navigated traffic and tourists: the throngs of fellow visitors on Provincetown’s Commercial Street the afternoon jam of cars packing Route 6 in Wellfleet the army of beach seekers at Marconi. It had been a meandering journey, slow and uncertain as I traipsed around scrubby trees and wavy patches of dune grass, climbed and scampered down small hills of sand, all in an effort to make it to the sea. For the past 45 minutes I’d hiked under an intense July sun, through the sandy landscape in a southern section of the Province Lands, a barren, beautiful, 3,000-acre piece of Cape Cod National Seashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The weathered dune shack appeared like a beacon, rising out of the sand as though it had been waiting for me. Today, more than 4.5 million people visit the Seashore each year.

In eliminating development along the Outer Cape, the Seashore’s creation opened up a tourist economy beyond anything even the park’s early proponents could have imagined.

National seashore beaches