St. Vincent Island (National Wildlife Refuge)
Apalachicola, FL · Big Bend
There are no roads, no resorts, and no way here but by boat: St. Vincent is 12,300 acres of wild barrier island where the Gulf rolls onto miles of empty white sand backed by cabbage palms and shifting dunes. Hire a shuttle across the quarter-mile cut from Indian Pass, then walk a shoreline littered with shells and leaning palm trunks, scanning the treeline for the 500-pound sambar deer that an experiment turned loose here a century ago. Nothing out here is staffed or stocked, so come self-sufficient, and the only footprints you are likely to cross will be a shorebird's.
