Cape Cod National Seashore

Beautiful and well maintained. Went in the off season of March.

Head of the Meadow, Pilgrim Heights, East Harbor, Moon Pond… wonderful places to explore, preferably with a bicycle, water bottle appropriate clothing for hot weather. A beautiful, secluded bike path off Rt 6 takes you past Moon Pond, right, and East Harbor on the left. Stay left to enter parking area (walk the bike here, very heavy gravel surface). Enter the trail and travel until you see the small bridge over a stream. Here you can find a choice of 2 trails. Both are good, but the one at right, goes up into Pilgrim Heights for fantastic views of Head of Meadow. Lots of bird and animal life up there, very natural surrounding, untouched. Back on the trail, continue to Head of the Meadow beach, for dune exploring (watch out for poison ivy!). Very beautiful vegetation here, esp in autumn and in spring. Head back on the trail to the main road and go up High Head road for some great views. It’s a residential area with very rough road surface. Views of Moon Pond, and harbors from there are fantastic!

One of the benefits of visiting the week after Labor Day is all the beaches nearly empty, there was plenty of parking, and entry was free!
However, the major major downer is that all the vendors aren’t open on the weekdays in September so I had to enjoy the views without an ice cream :”’(

If I lived here, I would live here. Beautiful, stunning, gorgeous. Love Marconi best of all. Dunes, waves, miles of beach. Heaven.

Amazing. There are fewer and fewer beaches nowadays where you can enjoy the sand and the ocean and not have to look at condominiums and pizza joints as your backdrop. The most outstanding thing about the national seashore is that they still let you have a bonfire on the beach. How ridiculously awesome is having a fire at night next to the ocean with no one else around? You need a permit, but it’s free. Kudos, NPS!

This place is beautiful. We went to Newcomb Hollow Beach (ended up there by mistake) and were impressed by the color of the sea, the fine sand and how much space you have to enjoy without being crowded. Very nice place to spend the day. We saw a family of seals which was unexpected.
$ 15 for parking, enough spots to park. The water was cold as you would expect, even in the summer.
Very close to Wellfleet when you can have great food.

The water is ice cold, and the trek down to the beach is a haul, but IMHO the National Seashore is the best beach on the east coast.

This was a nice beach. The shuttle ride was great. The beach was way too crowded for our liking. Literally packed with people.

If you visit Cape Cod and don’t take advantage of the National Seashore and all this gigantic and beautiful park has to offer, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU???
Many beaches, both bayside and ocean side — yes, you have to pay to park on-​season, but this is typical. The Seashore has to generate revenue somehow. FREE tours of some of Cape Cod’s lighthouses. Free tours of the Penniman House and Atwood-​Higgins house. Free access to the visitors centers. Awesome bike paths and hiking trails. Impossible to check everything out in just one week.
My only criticism: the Seashore map is a bit inaccurate. We had some trouble finding the Great Island Trail and the Atwood-​Higgins House using the map.

Great beaches, nicely maintained facilities, good size park lots, and stairs to the beach… but they tend to get crowded — so show up early or come here after 5:15 pm (for free entrance)

Went on a canoe trip for the first time thru the Salt Pond Visitor Center. The rangers Jon and David were amazingly knowledgable and helpful. My 70-​year old mother and 8-​year old son both liked the trip very much. We all got a good work out from paddling.
Do you know that the pretty-​looking mute swans swimming in the pond are part of the «evil empire» as our ranger Jon calls it. The swans poop and the mud snails eat the poop and produce microscopic worms called nematodes. it’s like poison ivy in the water – it goes into your skin and causes a rash.

If you don’t visit the Cape while in eastern Massachusetts you should be hit in the head with a tack hammer.
If you’re there during the summer tourist season the best time to visit is Tuesday through Thursday, avoiding most of the traffic and finding better hotel availability. It isn’t unreasonable to visit in a single day if you pick a hotel just west of the Cape Cod Canal.
A good one day visit would include a drive out to Race Point, by the Provincetown Airport to enjoy the beach and views on the sand dunes. A great place to go year round. You can then head south stopping at Cape Cod Light, and walking the short trail for outstanding views off of the bluff and gray seal and humpback whale spotting (season supporting) Then continue south to the main Visitor Center in Truro. Be sure to visit both Nauset Light and Light House Beach, along with the old Coast Guard Life Saving Building. From the same area you can hike through the Nauset Swamp (wear bug repellant in the spring/​summer) and view the sensitive area — no mud to worry about, most is on raised boardwalks offering a rare view of a swap. Finally as you head out of the park be sure to stop at Doane Rock; a glacial erratic placed there during the previous ice age. Toward sunset your chances of seeing wildlife are very high.
It is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Beautiful place to ride a bike, take a long walk or hang out at the beach. And it is right near Ptown!

I’ll boil it down to pure dum luck: we were spoiled by warm, blue skies on April 9, and we were so incredibly fortunate for it… enhanced the whole experience of traveling what Thoreau called the arm and fist of MA from Eastham up to Ptown!
Stop off points included the Visitor’s Center whereby I learned that the cliffs erode at an ave. rate of 3 feet per year! Then onto Nauset and Highland lighthouses, the Marconi Site where the first transatlantic signal stretched via cables from Europe to the US, Atlantic white cedar swamp hiking trail (only 1+ mile RT), and the shore view from the western end of the arm in Wellfleet, and traveling clear up to Provincetown, the former workingman’s Portuguese fishing village.
I was really pleasantly surprised by Ptown, as it holds loads of charm and character. Though the twilight hours when we arrived saw a petering out of folks, some stores were still open for perusing, and both the plethora of galleries as well as liberal raunch was definitely notable.
The PIlgrim’s monument is located here, in honor of the Pilgrims actually first landing here for a month before sailing over to Plymouth. Beautiful strolling along Commerical Ave before we headed over to the beach to join the cast of others who were all parked along to witness the glorious view over the Atlantic.

This place is amazing!!! We brought our bikes and was able to ride along the seashore. Pretty cool, huh. The ranger at the visitor center also runs tons of programs during the summer. One time, we went clamming in the salt pond behind the visitors center. The last time, we did a dune walk which was amazing since we also tasted some fruit along the way. You will not be disappointed except for maybe the traffic during the summertime. But, it’s well worth it.

Having cut my teeth on Point Reyes, Cape Cod doesn’t thrill me quite as much. There are some sections like Fort Hill which excite me with their diversity of nature and views, not to mention the classic whaler’s mansion exemplified in the Penniman House. Then there are areas like Pilgrim Heights where the Pilgrim Spring Trail leads to a grim gray marker and Small Swamp’s is a mystery tour (Swamp? Swamp? Where’s the Swamp?).
The sand dunes can be spectacular photo opportunities when they are clear of vegetation and the angle of the sun is right. We enjoyed visiting Marconi Beach, the Beech Forest Trail, and the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail. Don’t miss the Red Maple Swamp in autumn.
Provincetown is an easy ride from the Provincelands Visitor Center, so when you are sick of nature, you can comingle with tourists, gay, lesbian, and otherwise.

I love love love the National Seashore. I think my favorite beach is Nauset, but any beach on the Cape makes me happy. The hot sand, the crashing waves, the freezing cold water, and the dunes make you feel like you’re so far away from everything in your own little paradise. Beach parking can be expensive and the lots fill up fast, so get there early or stop by in the evening. They stop charing after 5 or 6 and the beach at night is a whole different experience.