Category: History
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Remote Lighthouses of the Dry Tortugas
Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida (April 2009) The end of the Florida Keys is not Key West. Not hardly. Islands of coral, sand and mangrove trail out further into the Gulf of Mexico. First come the Marquesas Keys. Further out still, some 70 miles from the civilized shores of Key West come the Dry Tortugas.…
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Franklin Island Light
Muscongus Bay, Maine (August 2009) The Franklin Island light (map) is the first lighthouse featured in this video I took while traveling Muscongus Bay in southeastern Maine. There has been a lighthouse on this rock since 1807 — one of the earliest places along the Maine coastline to be lighted — although this current structure…
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Fort Point Lighthouse
Stockton Springs, Maine (August 2009) Fort Point seems to be an odd name for a lighthouse but it makes perfect since once you understand the history of the area. There was once an older structure along this point on Cape Jellison at the mouth of the Penobscot River. Literally there was a fort here, Fort…
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Fenwick Island Lighthouse & Transpeninsular Line
Fenwick Island, Delaware, USA (2008) A lighthouse rose above remote Fenwick Island in 1859. It filled a critical 60-mile gap between Cape Henlopen and Assateague Island (map). The structure housed a third order Fresnel lens with an 83 foot focal plane in its slender white tower. Amazingly the same Fresnel lens operates today. This stands…
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Canal Park
Duluth, Minnesota (August 2007) Our journey through the upper Midwest brought us as far north as Duluth. Here a city rises along the westernmost deep-water port with access to the Atlantic Ocean. This is all the more surprising because it’s a good third of the way across the continent. Even so, ships — massively large…
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Currituck Beach Lighthouse
Corolla, North Carolina (March 2012) Our trip to Currituck Beach Light provided a nice opportunity for a drive-by sighting. Unfortunately that’s the best we could do during the winter. It’s open and free to the public between Easter and Thanksgiving (with a small fee to climb the lighthouse tower). However it’s closed during the winter,…
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Astoria to Florence, Oregon
Oregon USA’s Northern Coastline (May 1998) We took a detour about ten miles west of Tillamook, Oregon to the Three Capes Scenic Drive, putting most of the Sunday traffic behind us. We stopped first at Cape Meares and climbed up to the red lens of the lighthouse (map). Cape Meares Lighthouse Cape Meares is Oregon’s…
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Cape Hatteras Light
Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Buxton, North Carolina (March 2012) The Cape Hatteras Light dominates the surrounding terrain. Unquestionably it serves as the most well-known lighthouse along the mid-Atlantic and maybe the nation. The black-and-white spiral paint job beckons tourists down the spine of the Outer Banks. It takes more than an hour of driving south…
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Seattle, Washington to Astoria, Oregon
Including Cape Disappointment (1998 and 2012) Our first full day began in a southerly direction. We woke early at a generic hotel outside Seatac Airport, seriously jet-lagged, and arrived in Olympia while most sane people slept-in. It was Saturday. Eventually the Farmers Market opened and we wandered the booths. We climbed the hill to the…
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Cape Byron Lighthouse
Byron Bay NSW, Australia (October 1997) Cape Byron is the eastern most point on the continent, where “Australia greets the day.” Strange geographic trivia has always fascinated me, so I dragged my wife as far along the cape as possible. We were running short on time so we missed our goal by a few hundred…