
DATE: Sunday, May 18, 1997                  TAG: 9705180028

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NAGS HEAD                         LENGTH:  172 lines

THE MOVING MOUNTAIN JOCKEY'S RIDGE SHIFT IS MYSTERY, FOR NOW

It may be the least-understood natural wonder. Scientists are not even sure how Jockey's Ridge - the highest 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 schools: a mysterious moonlike mountain of fine, goldensand.

The 414-acre state park wedged between the Atlantic Ocean and Roanoke Sound is a desolate 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 is moving.

Slightly to the southwest, to be exact, shoved in that direction by stiff winter winds.

In recent years, blowing drifts have swallowed a miniature golf course, a house and an old junkyard. Still threatened on the southern edge of the park are several homes, a road and a Baptist church.

In the past 25 years, the steepest peak at Jockey's Ridge has shifted southwest by more than 1,500 feet. During most years, dune movement is about 3 to 6 feet.

In more extreme years, when the wind blows especially hard in the winter or when storms hit, the rate has been as high as 100 feet, officials said.

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

``It's just nature,'' said Chris Tames with a shrug. He lives behind the park. ``The wind blows this way. What are you going to do?''

North Carolina bought the Tameses' house when the wandering dune got too close.

The Tameses bought a new house last year, just down the road. From her front porch on a recent sunny day, Sheila Tames, Chris' wife, could see a bulging pile of sand climbing a newly built sand fence. The drift looked like it could spill over the protective fencing any minute, cutting off her way out of the community.

``I like it here; it's quite beautiful,'' she 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 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 determine the origin, composition, movement and, perhaps, the fate of the 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 monument to flight, also scoured by time and winds, was saved with grasses planted on its slopes. In essence, the plants anchored the sand against erosion.

But that changed the historic character of Kitty Hawk. Indeed, 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.

Conservationists hope to leave Jockey's Ridge in its raw, open state. That way the nearly 900,000 visitors it attracts each 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 scenerio,'' 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 visitors center in early June - just in time for the summer tourist season.

``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. Scientists say the dunes have been covered in grasses and scrub at least twice before. So it might not be accurate to equate keeping the dune ``natural'' with keeping it sandy, scientists 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 could be the cause.

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

Back then, the Outer Banks were virtually barren. The wind whipped the dunes into drifts one day and pounded them into pancakes the next. A lack of plant life and human structures allowed sand to fly around undeterred.

The dune system, scientists believe, extended north to what is now False Cape State Park, in Virginia Beach. These days, the dunes are broken up into smaller beachfront bumps, have been built upon or have simply eroded away.

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.

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 forms 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.''

In explaining the impact 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 rebuild 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 send penetrating beams of radar into the ground to produce images - ``an X-ray of sorts,'' Riggs said - of what lies beneath the sands.

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 intact? 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 uptight 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.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

DREW WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot

Visitors to Jockey's Ridge State Park - about 900,000 of them each

year - play on the East Coast's largest sand dune. This summer,

using a new radar-beam technology, scientists will try to learn how

the dunes began and where they are headed.

Graphic

THE RIDGE

How tall is it?

Among the three major dunes, the tallest is 87 feet high.

How fast is it moving?

Rates are not exactly known, but in the past 25 years, the dunes

have migrated southwest by 1,500 feet.