Hobe Sound, dunes, the refuge and Blowing Rocks

A town that chose to stay small

Hobe Sound is a strip of US 1 between the pines of Jonathan Dickinson State Park and the mansions of Jupiter Island, with a small downtown of a few blocks and the Bridge Road drawbridge across to the beach. The town has kept its height limits and its trees; the ocean side of the island is the Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge, three miles of dune and beach with no buildings in sight. The name, like the sound itself, comes from the Jobe people who lived here before the Spanish. Bridge Road is the whole downtown: a bakery, a hardware store, a couple of restaurants and the post office, and all of it closes early.

The refuge beach and Blowing Rocks

Drive to the end of Bridge Road, turn north and the road ends at the refuge beach: a parking lot, a boardwalk over the dune and the Atlantic. It is the emptiest beach on the coast on a weekday and the best place to see what the whole island looked like before the condominiums.

Two miles south, Blowing Rocks Preserve is the largest outcrop of Anastasia limestone on the Atlantic coast, and at high tide with an onshore wind the waves force up through holes in the rock and blow fifty feet into the air. Go at high tide in winter after a front for the show, and at low tide for the pools.

Jonathan Dickinson State Park

The park is the reason to stay a night. Eleven thousand acres of scrub, pine flatwoods and the Loxahatchee River, with a tower on Hobe Mountain, the highest natural point in South Florida at 86 feet; a boat tour upriver to the camp of Trapper Nelson, the hermit who lived there until 1968; and two campgrounds where the sky is dark enough to see the Milky Way. Kayaks and canoes rent at the river, and the trails are flat, sandy and long.

Getting here

Twenty minutes south of Stuart on US 1 through the park’s pines, or along A1A on the island from the Jupiter end. The Bridge Road drawbridge opens on demand; sit through it and watch the boats.