Blowing Rocks Blew Me Away

I probably should not write about this place. I don’t want it to become crowded.

I’m beyond ashamed to admit that I’ve lived in South Florida for 40+ years and was not aware this place existed. 

For years I’ve marvelled at stunning photography of the rocky coastline along the Northeast US coasts long Maine & New Hampshire. I once saw some large rock formations along the St. Augustine coast and was sure this could not be found anywhere else in the state. I stand corrected. 

Being so used to flat, flat, flat sand beaches, these rocky cliffs and crags took my breath away! It so happens that one of the most dramatic shorelines in Florida, the rocky shore of Blowing Rocks Preserve, has sea caves and bluffs to explore. Stretching for more than a mile along Jupiter Island, a tall limestone terrace commands the meeting of sand and sea. 

In 1969, local residents preserved this area and turned it over to The Nature Conservancy. Today Blowing Rocks Preserve protects 73 acres of Jupiter Island, including tropical and oak hammocks, and the beach dunes.

You enter the park via a Seagrape canopy boardwalk . As you walk out to the beach, the aquamarine waters of the Atlantic ocean invite you, edged by the eroded limestone rocks. There are a few places where you can peer out from the shade of the sea grapes and look out over the dramatic coastline. 

If that’s not enough, when the tide is low, you can walk south along the beach, around fallen rocks and in and out of caves, as the waves strike the stone. Some of the caves are tall enough to stand in, with natural benches created by the erosive power of the tides. Almost all of them have “chimneys” exposing the sky above. It’s type of natural labyrinth with a stunning view of the sea. 

The rocks “blow” because it is said that, on rough and stormy days, particularly in winter, waves burst through the caves and send “geysers” of water through the chimneys or “blow holes” as high as fifty feet in the air.

And this isn’t just any limestone. Blowing Rocks preserve contains the largest Anastasia limestone outcropping on the U.S.’s east coast. 

A Florida state geologist described Anastasia limestone as a kind of “fossiliferous sandstone”, primarily composed of calcium carbonate from the remains of animals that lived and died here 120,000 years ago.

Most interesting to me is that Blowing Rocks Preserve is the result of a “happy accident” of the past when the part of Florida that is now Jupiter Island was a sand bar or the top of a reef that somehow held above the ocean when much of the rest of what is now Florida was inundated and drained as the seas rose and fell, and rose and fell.

This is a truly remarkable place. I don’t think I would ever get tired of that beautiful scene. Definitely one of Florida’s best kept secrets.

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