08/24/2026
This is a great place to hike and visit in the off-season.
There is a real forest on the Outer Banks, and it exists because of fresh water sitting on top of salt water. 🌿
Buxton Woods on Hatteras Island is the largest maritime forest left in North Carolina, several thousand acres of live oak, loblolly pine, dwarf palmetto and American holly growing on a sandbar in the middle of the Atlantic. The trees survive because rain soaks into the dunes and floats there as a freshwater lens above the denser saltwater underneath. The whole forest is drinking out of a bubble.
Walk into it and the wind just stops. The oaks are bent flat toward the sound side from a century of salt spray, their branches braided together into low tunnels you have to duck through. Between the ridges there are freshwater ponds that hold water year round in the middle of a barrier island. It is quiet in a way the beach a half mile away never is.
That freshwater lens is also what Hatteras villages have drawn their drinking water from, which makes the forest less of a scenic bonus and more of a reason people could live out there at all. 🌊
