Discover Florida Nature
It's time to explore the natural Florida
 Florida
Nature: Blue Mountain Beach |
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 Blue
Mountain Beach is located between Santa Rosa Beach and
Grayton Beach
and is the highest point on the Gulf of Mexico in the United States.
Blue Mountain Beach is located in the South Walton area of Florida’s
panhandle, a 200-mile stretch of silky white sand beaches, towering
dunes, pine forests and crystal blue waters. Beautiful Blue Mountain
Beach has the distinction of being the highest point on the Gulf Coast,
which in Florida is only 345 feet above sea level. Blue Mountain Beach marks the beginning of the Eastern Lake Hike/Bike Trail, which meanders past coastal dunes, woodlands and through the rest of the South Walton beach communities. Mysterious Draper Lake is an impressive, scenic body of water in Blue Mountain, but has no public access to it. The community of Blue Mountain is virtually unspoiled, and includes a wide variety of vacation homes and condominiums with spectacular coastal views, but only a few commercial businesses. However, other nearby South Walton beach towns offer plenty of shopping and dining options. The first European settlers may have mistaken the Blue Mountain community's towering dunes for mountains after being at sea for months. They may also have been impressed by the lush vegetation covering the dunes, especially the spiky shape of the Gulf Coast lupine, which lives in the dune scrub along Florida's Emerald Coast. Blankets of rare, purplish-blue Lupines, which grow in only eight of Florida’s counties, with its fuzzy blue leaves and purplish blue flowers that look like tiny sweet peas, make it is easy to speculate that blue flowers covering tall dunes really do look like a blue mountain from the distance. The 19-mile paved Timpoochee Trail ambles along Scenic Highway 30-A providing hikers and bikers an opportunity to enjoy the scenic beauty of the coastal dune lakes, dense woodlands and architecturally stunning communities that make up the Blue Mountain Beach area.  Blue
Mountain Beach is just minutes away from Destin Florida. The quality of
life in the Destin area is phenomenal! To name a few of the area’s
recent national recognitions, Business Week magazine listed Destin as
one of the 18 best new golf places in the country to retire, Southern
Accents magazine's readers named Destin the number two beach destination
and the number eight golf destination in its second annual Great Escapes
Reader Travel Awards, and the Milken Institute listed the area as its
top Best Performing City in 2005 for small metros. The unique sand of the beaches in the Destin area is among the whitest and most homogenous of the world. The area celebrates the name "Florida Panhandle Pure & Simple" because of the clean and clear water, which appears vivid emerald-green due to its purity and the shallowness of the gulf. Consisting of small quartz particles, this sand came from a process involving the Appalachian Mountains and the Apalachicola River 20,000 years ago. At the end of the last Ice Age when the world temperatures began warming and the ice caps began melting, large volumes of water were carried by the rivers to the world’s oceans. The Apalachicola River, rising in the Appalachians, carried water to the Gulf of Mexico and continues today. This water carried the quartz particles from the rock that forms the Appalachian Mountains and deposited them in the Gulf of Mexico, just 125 miles to the east of what is now Destin. As the sea level began to rise, these quartz sands eventually formed a new shoreline. The sands today continually replenish and reach as far west as the Pensacola Pass, their final destination. Blue Mountain Beach has remained a virtually unspoiled area on 30-A until this day. There is the mysterious Draper Lake, with its large, expansive body of water but with no public access to it. Then there are Alligator Lake and Big Red Fish Lakes, two other smaller dune lakes in the area. You can see lily pads and marsh amongst the windswept oak and pine trees, but probably no alligators or big red fish as the names imply. |
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Blue Mountain Beach Florida
Blue Mountain Beach is located in the South Walton area of Florida’s panhandle and Floridian nature abounds here. Blankets of rare, purplish-blue Lupines, which grow in only eight of Florida’s counties, with its fuzzy blue leaves and purplish blue flowers that look like tiny sweet peas, make it is easy to speculate that blue flowers covering tall dunes really do look like a blue mountain from the distance.
The 19-mile paved Timpoochee Trail ambles along Scenic Highway 30-A providing hikers and bikers an opportunity to enjoy the scenic beauty of the Florida coastal dune lakes, and woodlands that make up the Blue Mountain Beach area. The unique sand of the beaches in the Destin area is among the whitest and most homogenous of the world. The area celebrates the name "Florida Panhandle Pure and Simple" because of the clean and clear water, which appears vivid emerald-green due to its purity and the shallowness of the gulf and is truly Floridian nature at its best!
Written by: Brenda Arnold
Blue Mountain Beach
Date published: 10/22/2013
4.5 / 5 stars
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