President Kennedy signed Cape Cod National Seashore into existence on 7 August 1961, having co-sponsored the bill as a senator for Massachusetts a few years earlier. What he protected was roughly forty miles of Atlantic shoreline and about 43,600 acres behind it, spread across Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans and Chatham. Sixty-five years on it takes close to four million visits a year and is the reason the Outer Cape looks nothing like the developed south shore.
It is also an unusual park, and understanding why makes the visit easier. The land was not empty when the boundary was drawn. Several hundred houses already stood inside it, and the legislation let them remain under conditions rather than clearing them out, which is why you will drive past private mailboxes on your way to a federal beach. The six towns kept their own zoning authority inside the park, an arrangement almost unheard of in the National Park System, and the compromise is the reason the Seashore exists at all. There is no single gate, no scenic park road and no grand entrance sign. What there is instead is a string of turnings off Route 6, each leading to a beach, a trailhead or a car park, from Coast Guard Beach in Eastham to Race Point at the tip.
The headline is the ocean shore. Six beaches inside the park charge an entrance fee and are guarded in high summer: Coast Guard and Nauset Light in Eastham, Marconi in Wellfleet, Head of the Meadow in Truro, and Race Point and Herring Cove in Provincetown. All six face open Atlantic water, all six are cold, and all six sit under a purple shark advisory flag that is a standing notice rather than a daily alarm. Herring Cove is the odd one out and the reason is geography: the Cape hooks so far round at the tip that Herring Cove faces west, so it is the only ocean beach here where the sun sets into the water in front of you.
Behind the sand the park is more varied than most people realise. There is a white cedar swamp you walk down into, below the level of the land around it, on a boardwalk in Wellfleet. There is an eight-mile tidal walk out along Great Island that is the hardest day hike on the peninsula. There is a glacial boulder the size of a small house in the woods at Eastham, a beech forest behind Provincetown's dunes, a salt marsh at Fort Hill that is worth a sunrise, three paved bike trails including a five-and-a-half-mile loop through the Province Lands that is the best short ride in New England, and a historic district of dune shacks out on the back shore where writers and painters have been holing up for a century.
There is a lot of erosion, too, and the park is honest about it. The outer shore retreats on the order of three feet a year on average and far more in a single bad winter. Two lighthouses inside the Seashore were physically picked up and carried inland in 1996. Marconi's wireless station, which sent the first transatlantic message from American soil in 1903, has largely fallen into the sea. Staircases get rebuilt, car parks get shortened, and the overlook you remember may be closer to the edge than it was.
Everything below is arranged so you can decide what a day here is for: a beach, a walk, a ride, or the history.
