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St. Vincent Island (National Wildlife Refuge)

Photo: St. Vincent Volunteers / Ray Ainsworth (USFWS) / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 · source

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St. Vincent Island (National Wildlife Refuge)

Apalachicola, FL · Big Bend

About

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.

Highlights

Getting there

Indian Pass boat ramp, County Road 30-B, Port St. Joe, FL 32456

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Wild Florida Gulf Coast Beaches9 places

Wild Florida Gulf Coast Beaches

Florida's wildest Gulf beaches make you work for them: some you reach only by boat, others by a long walk past the last paved road. These are the undeveloped barrier islands and protected state-park shores with no resort strip and no high-rise wall, just sugar sand, dunes, shelling, and the kind of quiet you earn. Pack your own water and shade.