At 11pm, Rett was asleep, but I was still awake on my phone inside our tent. I suddenly heard loud snuffling near our bikes, and I was 90% sure that Assateauge horses had arrived to investigate. I sat up, and became 100% sure when the moonlight cast a perfect horse-shaped silhouette on Rett’s entire side of our opaque rainfly! I quickly woke her up so that she could see that a horse was standing right outside her tent door, and I was also concerned that in their curiosity they could just knock the bikes over.
When I popped out they had already moved on a bit, apparently quickly judging that we had left no easy-pickings to be eaten. But now awake we got out to pee, and discovered three of them hanging out near the bathrooms. Mike the camp host was right: we didn’t need to wait long to see horses in the campground!
Assateague horses mowing the grass around the campground bathhouse.A small and less-small Assateauge horse fight over which one of them has to do the dishes tonight.
If there was any more activity through the night, we slept through it. When we woke up at 7am there were no horses to be seen as we walked over to the beach to watch the sunrise. It’s been too long since we’ve witnessed the sun emerging from water!
Assateague Island beach in the pre-dawnAn impudent yacht attempts to block the rising sun.The sun, or a nuclear blast beginning to form a mushroom cloud? Why not both? (Fission, fusion, let’s call it even!)That’s the Atlantic Ocean.She loves me, she really loves me! (Heart constructed with her Birkenstock EVA sandal footprints).
When we’d had our fill of the orange orb, we struggled back over the soft sand of the dune and back down the impeccably-swept campground driveway (feeling slightly guilty at sullying it with stray sand from our footprints). And there was a horse!
An Assateague horse eating some breakfast in the back of our campsite.
Four or five of them spent the next hour or so foraging near our site, mostly near the line of thick brush across the main campground road. Short in stature but with long tails, and eyes small but glinting, it was interesting how oblivious they seemed to our presence. They expressed neither interest nor fear as we moved about camp making breakfast.
A horse leaves our campsite for greener pastures.Rarely did the horses stop eating even for a second, but this one felt like taking a moment to mess with traffic.Assateague horse.Assateague horse.Assateague horse.I’m guessing this girl must be pregnant? (the horse, not Rett!)
The recent warmth continued and turned into a day when shorts were comfortable even if we weren’t doing a strenuous bike ride. We did, however, undertake a non- strenuous bike ride. Assateague Island has a rather-limited road network, and even fewer (front-country) trails, so we were able to explore essentially all of them with 10 miles of pedaling and a mile or two of walking. Normally we’d wear ourselves out trying to see “everything” in a place like this (and still fail mightily), so it was kind of Assateague to take the decision out of our hands.
There is an incredible volume of horse poop, and not because it accumulated over time; park workers regularly clean it up, so all this was fresh. But at least it gives clues to where horses spend their time!A Sika deer (a Japanese import) wisely decides to join us on the bike path.We ate lunch in this pretty shaded spot of beach on the bay side of the island.A horseshoe crab emerges from prehistoric times.This “sleeping” horseshoe crab (larger than both of my feet put together) is some good nightmare fuel.The “Life of the Marsh” trail was surprisingly good, with huge amounts of life visible below the elevated boardwalk loop.For this heron it must be like shooting fish in a barrel (and then eating them).The “Life of the Forest Trail” had the advantage of horses in the background, but the sudden presence of tall loblolly pines on this barely-there strip of land was also pretty cool.Marsh horses.Marsh horse.Like the grizzlies of Glacier National Park, I envy these horses’ ability to go anywhere in this confusing mixture of water and land, while us humans are confined to the roads and boardwalks.
We skipped the “Life of the Dunes” trail because it looked lame, but still got more than our money’s worth at Assateague National Seashore (where vehicle entry is $25, but bikes are free. And unlike all the other cyclists who were using their bikes as a “hack”, I’m happy to boast that we didn’t just take ours off the back of our RV. We used our bikes to visit the Seashore because that’s how we go everywhere!
We’ve used a variety of “bear boxes” to safely store food at campgrounds, but this is our first “horse box”! Built under the picnic table, it almost seems like it was built by bears snarking at dumb fingerless horses. The door on the far side had a simple friction latch, which a horse could easily knock open with his nose (if he knew how easy it was), while this side had no latch at all but a horizontal hinge at the top.The camp host Mike, second only to Sue at Glacier in looking out for cyclists, encouraged us to take wood from his stash (collected from leave-behinds from departing campers). He even supplied a firestarter, though with the steady ocean breeze and some super-dry wood, it was barely necessary.
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