Blowing Rocks Preserve

Last September, when the PBC Photo Walkers group was still pretty brand new, we visited Blowing Rocks Preserve , an incredible barrier island sanctuary located on Jupiter Island, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian River Lagoon. Its amazing 73 acres includes a beach, estuary (a place where freshwater and salt water meet), dunes and tropical hammock. The preserve includes an educational center, native plant nursery, boardwalk, oceanside path, and a butterfly garden (we had intended to visit the butterfly garden but the weather started to turn bad).

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Unfortunately, the park does not open until 9am so our group met at Coral Cove beach, just south of Blowing Rocks, for sunrise pictures (Coral Cove will be a future blog post). That beach is actually not too far from Blowing Rocks and maybe one day I'll be motivated to park at Coral Cove and walk up the beach to Blowing Rocks so I can get there by sunrise. Of course this will be more possible when the time changes this month and sunrise happens an hour later.

What really makes this beach extremely unique in South Florida is its rocky Anastasia limestone shoreline (which is the largest on the Atlantic coast). During extreme high tides and after winter storms, seas break against the rocks and force plumes of saltwater up to 50 feet skyward!

The spray of water in the picture above (which is small here but was incredibly high when some of the waves hit) came from the little hole as seen in this picture below. In this shot the water was being sucked back into the whole.

I was warned prior to this trip that I should bring protection for my camera and I honestly thought that person was somewhat exaggerating. As you can see, their advice should definitely be heeded.

Photo courtesy of Dina

The day we were there, some massive beach clean up effort was going on at beaches all around the area. This one boy scout was slacking off on his clean up duties while walking up and down the beach without a care in the world.

It was actually hard to pick my very favorite of this trip but this is the one I chose to be my Palm Beach County photo of the week on DPC.