Jockey’s Ridge State Park’s 50th Anniversary

June 5-8, 2025: In Anticipation of a Monumental Celebration

By Steve Hanf

The vivid memories come swirling back, one after the other, not quite as numerous as the grains of sand that make up Jockey’s Ridge, perhaps – but not far off.

Ann-Cabell Baum grew up on the tallest natural sand dune in the eastern U.S. She played there with her siblings. Watched her mother stop a bulldozer and start a movement. And after all this time, she still feels that same sense of wonder and awe with every visit.

“How can you ever be in love with sand?” she marvels. “But you can. You can pick it up and it goes through your hands. It’s warm, and it warms your heart. It warms your soul. And you’re like, ‘How did this happen? How can all this sand be right here?’ I think it’s paradise, and I always tell people it’s my happy place.”

Before it was Ann-Cabell’s happy place, it was Carolista Baum’s happy place. Ann-Cabell’s mom and countless others helped save the dune from development in the early 1970s, paving the way for the million people a year who visit the Nags Head attraction to grow to love it, too.

It’s a story and a place worth celebrating, and June 2025 will feature four days of festivities in a 50th anniversary bash for Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

“It’s going to be awesome,” says Craig Honeycutt, the chairman of the Friends of Jockey’s Ridge State Park Board of Directors. “It’s going to be a four-day jamboree of goodness.”

Westward view of Jockey’s Ridge State Park, the tallest active sand dune system in the Eastern United States is constantly shifting due to strong northeast, winterly winds. Open year-round, the park has a visitors’ center, museum, small gift shop, restrooms, nature programs and two self-guided trails.

Working alongside Park Superintendent Joy Cook, the Friends group has a committee organizing activities and community volunteers for an event that figures to pack the dune more than a picture-perfect summer sunset. On Thursday, June 5, a special “Homecoming” for all the people who worked in some capacity at Jockey’s Ridge will take place. Friday will follow with educational hikes, music from special performers, groundbreaking on a lengthy extension of the accessible boardwalk, and a drone show.

Saturday will feature watersports on the sound, a kite demonstration, then the national anthem and a sparkling toast at sunset. In an homage to a much smaller ceremony 50 years ago, a group also will raise a North Carolina flag atop the dune just as Ann-Cabell remembers high school kids doing after the deed to the land was given to the state parks system, reclaiming it for the people. Sunday’s wrap-up will include sunrise yoga atop the dune, a disc golf tournament, horseshoes tournament, a sand castle building competition, and park cleanup.

“Celebrating the most special place on Earth,” Ann-Cabell says.

Now a Realtor in Raleigh, Ann-Cabell still finds her way back to the beach on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis. She’s on the Friends board that meets once a month and always enjoys chance encounters about the dune: One casual conversation with clients about the Outer Banks, for instance, eventually wound its way to the fact the couple had gotten engaged atop Jockey’s Ridge.

Chat with Ann-Cabell long enough and there’s a good chance she’ll ask when you last climbed it.

Ann-Cabell Baum, Gibbs Baum, Inglis Baum Walsh and George Barnes pose for a photo with the new sign to mark the occasion. More crowds will gather in June to celebrate the official 50th anniversary of Jockey’s Ridge becoming a North Carolina State Park. Photos submitted by Ann-Cabell Baum.

“Everybody’s had a different experience there and it’s just great to hear people’s stories,” she says. “It’s like a different experience every time. The sky is different, the wind’s blowing in a different direction. Sometimes it’s gray, sometimes it’s brilliant blue, sometimes you get purples and pinks. I love being on the dune and watching people that you don’t even know climb it, their reactions and you can hear them talking about how special it is. It’s amazing to understand how it has that effect on everybody.”

Granted, 50 years ago, Jockey’s Ridge was just a giant playground for Ann-Cabell and her siblings. Back when the bypass was a two-lane road and The Old Nags Head Casino occupied the spot where Jockey’s Ridge Crossing now sits, Ann-Cabell climbed the dune and frollicked over its 426 acres without a care in the world.

Her parents did have a rule about not crossing the street without an adult. And she remembers the blazing-hot asphalt forcing you to race from the beach side to the dune side as fast as possible. The bushes and shrubs that dot the landscape along the bypass today were nowhere to be found.

“There was just straight up sand and sand spurs,” she recalls with a laugh. “That was just our free escape. We could be king of the mountain, or queen of the mountain. We could be sand castle builders. We could chase each other around. We could play hide-and-go-seek. It was perfect, and we got to do that every single day.”

One day, though, they saw bulldozers, and hurried home to tell Mom. What followed, of course, was the stuff of legend: The diminutive figure of Carolista Baum blocking the construction crew and – as the story later emerged – stealing back that night to disable their equipment by removing the distributor caps and other key parts.

Two years later, after the community-wide SOS campaign – Save our Sand-dune – raised money and awareness a little at a time, Jockey’s Ridge State Park became a reality.

Sort of.

It wasn’t in danger of being developed any longer, but the park also didn’t have a whole lot going on. George Barnes was working at Goose Creek State Park in Washington when the first ranger at Jockey’s Ridge quit. Barnes visited a couple of times a week to take care of trash and was asked to become the park’s first superintendent.

Fifty years after Carolista Baum famously stopped bulldozers on Jockey’s Ridge on Aug. 15, 1973, family, friends and a crowd of folks who love the park gathered for the unveiling of an NC Historical Marker at a ceremony on July 7, 2023.

It was a job he held for more than 30 years, although the park certainly experienced a few changes from the start of his tenure to the end.
“There wasn’t anything much here – a parking lot, we had a truck that ran some days and some days it didn’t, and then the state brought a little trailer down that we worked out of,” Barnes recalls. “We had a telephone plug that ran into the trailer from a little adapter outside, and I was supposed to bring the telephone out, plug it in, stick it into the truck, and sit there from 8 to 8:30 and 4:30 to 5 in case anybody from Raleigh wanted to get in touch with us.”

He met Carolista right away and they became close friends. She loaned Barnes a more comfortable camper to park beside the state trailer, worked her connections in Raleigh to get a maintenance building constructed, and never shied away from telling Barnes of all the ideas she had in mind for Jockey’s Ridge.

“She was a feisty woman,” he says. “But I helped her, and she helped me, and we just became friends. Anything that was happening with Jockey’s Ridge, we both were supporting it.”

Carolista did not, however, have anything to do with the park’s first bathroom facilities. That, Barnes relays with a laugh, came courtesy of a visit from Howard Lee, who was Gov. James Hunt’s Secretary of the N.C. Department of Natural Resources and Community Development.

“He came down here one weekend and had to use the bathroom and there wasn’t one, so he went back to Raleigh and a few days later, we had about six portable toilets sent over to us,” Barnes says.

The park slowly transformed from local hangout – rangers picked up a lot of beer cans – to tourist attraction thanks to the efforts of Peggy Birkemeier. She turned some local Girl Scouts into Junior Rangers who published info about the history and habitats of the dune, and also raised most of the funds needed to build the accessible boardwalk. As the popularity of the site grew, Birkemeier founded the Friends of Jockey’s Ridge in 1990, which lobbied for the visitor center that was finished in 1996 (and just enjoyed a great remodel last year, by the way, if you haven’t been lately!).

Today, Barnes still lives in a house that backs up to the park, and while the 71-year-old has slowed a bit and can’t climb the dune like he once did, he’s looking forward to the 50th anniversary celebration.

“I hope there’s a whole lot of special people from way back that I worked with,” he says. “We had people say, ‘You helped influence us to become park rangers, get into saving nature and all of that,’ so hopefully a lot of these people will come back out. It’ll be a big surprise, because we’ve all gotten a little bit older now.”

This vintage 70’s hang gliding shot, from Jockey’s Ridge was part of a large collection of images donated to the Outer Banks History Center by historian and writer David Stick.

Honeycutt also lives steps from the dune, and his regular visits to the park are what led him to join the Friends group in 2019 and gradually move into the chairperson role.

Friends of Jockey’s Ridge has become more prominent recently. For all the lessons learned from Carolista’s fight against developers, a move by state officials to change the park’s status as an Area of Environmental Concern (AEC) led to worries about the future of Jockey’s Ridge. The park’s status as an AEC remains in limbo in the courts and government agencies.

“That was a strong reminder that you can never take it for granted that this place is protected,” Honeycutt says. “I’m very lucky to be able to do something cool, to protect it as well as celebrate it. I raised my daughter here. It’s a place of refuge, a place of inspiration. I feel incredibly lucky that I go out and play in a giant sandbox that’s constantly changing with the weather, so to have this gorgeous, unique natural resource is awesome.”

It’s certainly something worth celebrating. When Ann-Cabell looks ahead to the 50th anniversary party, it’s hard not to look back first.

Jockey’s Ridge State Park (from the west side) towering above the town of Nags Head, is part of a massive dune system spanning over five miles northward, partly protected by thick maritime forest meandering through the Outer Banks community.

“I mean, we get to do it all again, right? I know Mom’s kind of celebrated as the person who saved Jockey’s Ridge. But it was really a community of people who wanted the same thing, and she kind of banded everybody together, and then with some gentle persuasion it took root with pennies and dimes and quarters and nickels,” Ann-Cabell says. “So, the 50th is really about that again – a celebration of 50 years of the collaboration of the community, the courage that it took to stop a bulldozer, and really celebrate what we all love. We are so fortunate to have this beautiful natural resource and we have to take care of it for generations to come.”

Steve Hanf is a freelance writer who teaches the journalism classes at First Flight High School. His fondest Jockey’s Ridge memory is a long-ago visit when a baby (who’s now in college) decided to have a seat on the dune and taste-test some of the sand.

Author: Steve Hanf

Steve Hanf is a former professional sportswriter who teaches the journalism classes at First Flight High School. The dormant Nike Running Club app on his phone offers a reminder of the seven half-marathons and one full marathon he completed … several years ago.