Big Talbot Island State Park in Duval County, Florida

Photograph: Big Talbot Island State Park Beach.jpg by KeysPhotography.com · CC BY 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Duval County attraction

Big Talbot Island State Park

Duval County · North Florida & First Coast

The island where Boneyard Beach lies, its shore covered in the bleached trunks of oaks the sea has pulled down.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Big Talbot Island State Park covers 1,679.82 acres about twenty miles east of Jacksonville on A1A North. It was established in 1982 and is run by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The island is built on hardpan, a rock-like sedimentary soil, which makes its beaches darker than most Florida sand and leaves shallow shelves where mollusks, crabs and oysters live. The island is eroding, and that is what created the thing people come for. Boneyard Beach, reached along the Blackrock Trail, is strewn with the skeletons of trees that grew on the bluff until the sea took the ground from under them and laid them out on the sand, bleached and bare. It is a photographer's beach rather than a swimming beach, and swimming is not advised there. The park also has nature trails, bike trails, a fishing pier, a boat ramp, picnic pavilions and other beach access points. The habitats run from beach and coastal scrub to hammock, estuary and tidal marsh, with live oaks and cabbage palmettos through them, and alligators, sea turtles, manatees, bald eagles and Florida scrub jays all using the park. It opens at 8 in the morning and closes at sundown

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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