_{The sky over East Harbor looking toward Provincetown.}

I walked to the beach at High Head yesterday. It’s a wonderful walk, with opportunity to see both the grandeur and structure of the Outer Cape. High Head is where the glacial scrape ends and the elaborate sandbar (that is Provincetown) begins. There’s a sharp drop between High Head proper and the valley that is Beach Point and East Harbor. And walking the dune road to the beach you get a palpable sense of how this area was once prized meadow for salt hay, and how it breached during storms in the 1840s, briefly making Provincetown an island. Up high you can also understand, if you pull from your imagination the modern rampart that allows traffic to flow into Provincetown, how difficult travel by road must have been before 1873 (when the first railroad bridge was built). Land travel before the railroad was limited to the Atlantic beach.

_{A baby turtle on the path.}

Upon starting my walk I nearly stepped on (what I think is) a baby snapping turtle. I climbed the tall dune trail and took in some glorious views under a rapidly changing sky. And on my walk toward the beach encountered a man dressed in 19th century top hat and tails. I was surprised, upon hitting the beach that I didn’t encounter a colony of seals (as this is where they often hang out).

_{The beach at High Head looking north.}

The beach feels remote — and you immediately understand why its nickname is ‘the great beach.’ A few years ago, I walked the beach south from High Head to Head of The Meadow, and there I picked up the bike trail which circles back to the High Head parking lot. On that walk, encountering seal remains and other dead wildlife, I had the palpable sense, of why Thoreau, in Cape Cod, wrote of it as “A wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it…There is naked Nature.” In our present day it remains a remote beach, not exactly cut off from tourists, but inconvenient enough that few of them find it. Maybe that’s why the seals like it.

_{View from the high dune toward the salt meadow and outer beach.}

_{A late Rosa Rugosa bloom on the trail toward the beach.}

_{Entrance to the beach at High Head.}

_{The path from the beach toward the parking lot.}

_{A delightful encounter.}