When Colonel Charles T. Gray built a
small home here in 1885, the windswept dunes were a lonely place.
There were no roads or bridges to get there and if you did come
to settle you couldn't grow anything in the sandy soil. There
wasn't another settlement around for another five miles until
1890 when more military men arrived and named one of Walton county's
beach communities after Gray.
When US 98 was built in the 1930s Grayton Beach became less remote
but electricity still didn't arrive until the 1940s. The State
of Florida began buying land at Grayton in 1964 through a lease
from the Florida Board of Education and opened the state park
in 1968. In 1985, after years of lobbying by residents, Florida
bought the village's beach front and the dunes and forest land
to the west and north, virtually surrounding the village of Grayton
Beach with more than 2,000 acres of parkland.
The star hike for your dog at Grayton Beach is the nature trail
that is squeezed in the wild dunesland between the Gulf of Mexico
and Western Lake.You will find this double loop at the very end
of the paved parking lot. Your dog will be ushered into the Barrier
Dunes Trail through a tunnel of scrub oak twisted by the Gulf
breezes and salt spray. Although separated from the sunbathers
enjoying one of America's perenially top-rated beaches by only
a few yards, you are a world away.
The sand trail emerges on the shores of Western Lake - a coastal
dune lake found only in South Walton and remote portions of Africa
and Australia - where it joins the Pine Woods Loop and a totally
different natural community on the backside of the dunes. Sand
gives way to a wooden boardwalk for part of the trip. The tall,
slender pines afford a measure of shade on the shifting sands.
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