
St. Joseph Peninsula State Park is rather remote. To get there, you need to drive through Indian Pass, where the Indian Pass Raw Bar will tempt with its old Florida funk and fresh oysters. It isn’t anywhere near the beaten path – it’s about as far as you can get from I-10 in the Florida Panhandle, and in the midst of wilds between Apalachicola and Port St. Joe. But residental development has squeezed its way down this slender peninsula defining St. Joseph Bay, pressing hard against both sea and estuary, leaving the state park to be the last bastion of preservation along the peninsula. It protects the narrow tip, where the dunes are extraordinarily high, no matter how frequently they get battered by storms. At the very western end of the state park is the St. Joseph Wilderness, a wild landscape of coastal scrub and giant dunes, of glimmering white sand and emerald waters. It’s one of the few places in Florida you can pitch a tent on a beach and survey the stars, all to yourself, but it’s a tough hike through soft sand to savor that solitude.