
DATE: Sunday, May 18, 1997                  TAG: 9705160308

SECTION: CAROLINA COAST          PAGE: 06   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: COVER STORY 

SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NAGS HEAD                         LENGTH:  219 lines

DYNAMIC DUNE EAST COAST'S TALLEST SAND PILE IS SHRINKING AND SHIFTING

IT MAY be the least studied natural wonder.

Scientists are not even sure how Jockey's Ridge - the highest active sand dune on the East Coast, and one of the biggest tourist draws on the Outer Banks - got here.

Yet there it is, rising suddenly from a scrub forest, across the highway from a gas station and hang-gliding school: A mysterious moon-like mountain of fine, orange sand.

A desolate yet intriguing reminder of what North Carolina's barrier islands looked like before vacation homes and shopping centers took root.

Scientists are sure about one thing: Jockey's Ridge, a 414-acre state park wedged between the Atlantic Ocean and Roanoke Sound, is moving. Slightly south-westerly, to be exact. Shoved that way by stiff winter winds.

Blowing drifts have swallowed a miniature golf course, a house and an old junk yard already. Still threatened on the southern edge of the park are several rustic homes, a road, and a Baptist church.

Sheila Tames has lived on the south side of the park, on Soundside Road, for most of her life. State officials recently purchased her family home when the wandering dunes got too close. She bought a new one last year, just down the road.

From her front porch on a recent sunny day, a bulging pile of sand was climbing over a newly built sand fence. The drift looked like it could spill over the protective fencing any minute, cutting off her only way out of the community.

``I like it here. It's quite beautiful,'' Tames said as she chatted with family and neighbors. ``I just love the view - the wind, the patterns of the sand. They're very interesting to watch.''

The highest point in Nags Head, Jockey's Ridge also is getting shorter. In 1974, the main peak measured 110 feet tall. In 1995, the summit was 87 feet, according to some of the few geological surveys of the giant dune system.

Worried about the park's future, Outer Banks conservationists and state outdoors officials have won $26,000 in grants to begin some of the most extensive geological research ever performed on Jockey's Ridge.

Armed with sophisticated radar and dating equipment, experts from four universities are expected to descend on Nags Head this summer. They hope to once and for all determine the origin, the composition, the movement and, perhaps, the fate of these magnificent dunes.

``There's a lot of concern that Jockey's Ridge may disappear in our lifetime,'' said Marshall Ellis, a resource management specialist at the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Department. ``We obviously feel there's time to get the scientific data we need to make some important decisions.''

What local conservationists, headed by the group Friends of Jockey's Ridge, want to avoid is turning the dunes into another Wright Brothers Memorial. That hilly Kill Devil Hills monument to flight, also scoured by time and winds and just a few miles north, was saved with grasses planted on its slopes. In essence, those plants anchor the sand against erosion and keep it from shifting.

But that changed the hill's historic character. When TV crews shot a documentary of Orville and Wilbur Wright's famed aviation experiments, they chose Jockey's Ridge as the more realistic location, instead of Kill Devil Hill where the flight really took off. Before the plants climbed its sandy sides, Kill Devil Hill looked like Jockey's Ridge: barren.

Conservationists hope this summer's research leads to a protection plan that will leave Jockey's Ridge in its raw, open state. That way the nearly 900,000 visitors a year can still scale its steep approaches, race down the sides, hang-glide, sandboard, fly a kite, or just soak in its unusual, quiet beauty.

``The best case scenario,'' said Peggy Birkemeier, founder and president of Friends of Jockey's Ridge, ``is that we can identify its critical functions and develop a plan so it's not vegetated.''

And the worst case?

``We'd realize we can't control the movement,'' Birkemeier said. ``Then you'd have to look at vegetation, moving the park boundaries or other options.''

North Carolina is betting nearly $2 million that the dunes can stay sandy. Park officials expect to open a new visitor's center in early June - just in time for the summer tourist season - that will highlight the environmental features of Jockey's Ridge as the last of a dying breed.

``This really is a living laboratory, a living dune system - and there aren't too many left,'' Birkemeier said. ``We hope to educate people about the uniqueness of this all.''

Jockey's Ridge has not always been a three-peaked behemoth of sand. By analyzing soil surveys, scientists have determined that the dunes have been covered in grasses and scrub at least twice in their lifetime.

So when people talk about keeping the dune ``natural,'' meaning sandy, that's not necessarily a true statement, some say.

Karen Havholm, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, hopes to determine why Jockey's Ridge keeps changing from a grassy hill to a bald dune.

She speculated that a sudden influx of sand, some form of blight or fires ignited by lightning strikes, are the cause.

While there are few absolutes about this 1.5-mile-long stretch of dunes, most experts agree that Jockey's Ridge is between 1,000 years and 2,000 years old - fairly young, when discussing natural history.

Way back then, the Outer Banks were virtually barren. Wind whipped the dunes into towering drifts one day, then pounded them into pancakes the next. A lack of plant life and human structures allowed sand to fly around undeterred, ruling the landscape.

This ever-changing system, scientists believe, extended north to where False Cape State Park in Virginia Beach now sits. These days, the dunes are broken up into smaller beachfront bumps, have been built upon or have simply eroded away.

A close cousin, Run Hill in Kill Devil Hills, is slightly smaller than Jockey's Ridge. It, too, is eroding under pressure from wind, evolution and human development. But the pace has been slowed considerably with grasses, said Havholm, who also is studying Run Hill.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Native Americans were the first humans to try to live near Jockey's Ridge. But they were smart: They stayed behind the dune line, along the softer coast of Roanoke Sound. There, they farmed a little and fished and hunted.

Spanish and French explorers are thought to have seen Jockey's Ridge while exploring the Atlantic coast, and subsequently used it as a navigational marker.

``Jockey Hill'' first appears in a 1753 land grant, and ``Jockey Ridge'' first shows up in an 1851 newspaper article about Nags Head as a summer resort destination, according to published reports.

Like most aspects of the dunes, there is considerable debate over their name. One story traces the origins of ``Jockey's Ridge'' to the fact that the dunes offered a panoramic view of a nearby horse track.

Another suggests the name comes from horse races up and down the soft, sandy cliffs, while the flat tops of the dunes served as grandstands for spectators.

Stan Riggs, a leading dune expert and geologist at East Carolina University, believes that old river beds, now buried beneath sand and silt, once ran to the Outer Banks from the Appalachian Mountains.

These river links, Riggs says, likely carried the fine, quartz-dominated sand that now comprise Jockey's Ridge and other natural dunes.

``One of the great myths of the Outer Banks is that there's an unlimited supply of sand,'' said Riggs. ``Really, it's just the opposite: We have a negative sand supply. There's just a thin layer in many places before you hit rock underneath.''

Explaining the impacts of man-made development and vegetation on this fragile ecosystem, Riggs said: ``As we continue to lock up sand - not let it move around as much - the dunes lose their ability to re-build themselves. That's where we are today.''

To Riggs, the future of Jockey's Ridge is fairly easy to measure.

``You either grass it over or keep people off of it,'' he said. ``The other alternative is to pump sand up there - and that's not natural, and certainly not inexpensive.''

This summer, Riggs and colleagues will try to determine the origin and evolution of the dunes. They will use a new technology, which sends penetrating beams of radar into the ground and comes up with images - ``an X-ray of sorts,'' Riggs described - allowing scientists to see what lies beneath the sand.

Other researchers from North Carolina State, Old Dominion University and the University of Wisconsin will attempt to answer other basic questions: How much sand is needed to keep the dunes in tact? How much sand blows away naturally? Where does it go? How does it move? And how fast?

Riggs said that even if no new solutions are found, the research will provide an important educational foundation for the future.

``Right now everybody's up tight about their dune disappearing,'' he said. ``But no one really knows how this thing works. If we can help the public understand, maybe they'll feel better when the time comes to take some actions.''

in front of a bulldozer preparing the base of Jockey's Ridge for a new home development.

Four years later, after much debate in Raleigh and on the Outer Banks, the state acquired the land and set it aside for preservation.

Gray fox have created several dens inside the park, and can be seen skittering through the scrub early in the morning and around sunset, officials said.

Southern toads live in the sand, as do tiger beetles, which burrow themselves in tiny bunkers they dig themselves.

In the past 25 years, the steepest peak at Jockey's Ridge has shifted to the southwest by more than 1,500 feet. During most years, dune movement is about three to six feet.

In more extreme years, when the wind blows especially hard in the winter or when storms hit, the dune has moved 100 feet annually, officials said.

South of the park, a big drift of sand collapsed two winters ago and forced the state to allocate emergency money to clear Soundside Road, which was nearly buried in spots. Officials also erected a second protective sand fence. The first one had been covered years before.

``It's just Nature,'' shrugged Chris Tames, who lives on Soundside Road. ``The wind blows this way. What are you going to do?''

Officials hope to answer this crucial, seemingly rhetorical question by studying scientific data they'll gather this summer. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos including color cover by DREW C. WILSON

Patterns form when the grass blows in the wind on Jockey's Ridge

State Park in Nags Head.

David Sawyer, 18, of Manteo, flattens new sod at the new visitors'

center. Park officials expect to open the center in early June -

just in time for the summer tourist season. The center will

highlight the environmental features of Jockey's Ridge as the last

of a dying breed.

Conservationists hope to develop a plan that will leave Jockey's

Ridge in its raw state, so folks can continue climbing,

sand-boarding and hang gliding.

Graphic

JOCKEY'S RIDGE