The Historic Whalehead Club is a large 21,000-square-foot home located on a remote tract facing the Currituck Sound. It is now owned by the town of Corolla. You may be able to see the Corolla lighthouse just slipping into the photo on the right. We visited it before touring the nearby Currituck Banks Reserve. Indoor photography was not permitted so I'm just including this shot of what would have been the front entrance facing the sound.
Currituck Banks was one of the three original National Estuarine Research Reserve sites dedicated by NOAA and the Division of Coastal Management in 1985. The entrance is right where Rt 12 turns from blacktop to sand. Unfortunately, the small parking area is routinely used by folks stopping to deflate tires and carpool on the sand portion. Keep that in mind when you wish to visit the reserve. There may not be a parking spot for you.
A long boardwalk leads out to the sound. Side trails lead you through a Live oak maritime forest. The reserve incorporates many ecosystems in the 965 acres of ocean beach, sand dunes, grasslands, shrub thicket, maritime forest, brackish and freshwater marshes, tidal flats, and subtidal soft bottoms. Currituck Banks Reserve is bordered by the Currituck Sound on the west and the Atlantic Ocean on the east. The Nature Conservancy and Currituck County own neighboring tracts to the north.
The Currituck Banks Reserve is part of a barrier spit that extends approximately 70 miles from Virginia Beach to Oregon Inlet. In the Outer Banks, inlets open and close naturally due to weather and geologic events such as storms and shoaling. While there were once several inlets in the area, the last of the inlets that connected Currituck Sound to the ocean closed in 1828 due to natural shoaling. As a result, the closest inlet is 50 miles away.
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