We stayed at Fort Pickens Campground from March 22nd to April 5th. As you can see from the above picture, we had some storms come through that temporarily flooded the campground. Our campsite was one of the better ones. Some of the sites across the street were really under water.
Fort Pickens is a wonderful campground, but often times the road coming into the park floods over, so whenever there is a storm you need to check with the park office to see if the road has flooded or if it's still open. They evacuate the island if the flooding is going to get too bad. In fact, they were talking about evacuating before this storm came through. I'm sure glad that they didn't have to.
I took this picture from the truck as we were going off of the island. Normally the water from the Gulf comes up pretty close to the road, so it's doesn't take much to flood the road out.
We got to explore the Fort while we were at the park. Fort Pickens is the largest of four forts that were built to defend Pensacola Bay. Completed in 1834, it was one of the only forts never occupied by Confederate troops. It was abandoned by the army at the end of World War II.
There were an abundance of osprey at Fort Pickens. Hurricane Ivan pretty much devastated this area, and the saltwater killed many trees. The osprey love to nest in these trees, though!
One of the biggest treats of our stay at Fort Pickens was that we got to watch the Blue Angels practicing. They took off from the Pensacola Naval Air Station and flew right over Fort Pickens. We had also seen them practicing when we visited the National Naval Aviation Museum. It was more exciting though watching them from Fort Pickens - they came so close!
We didn't get into the water at all. It was really too cool and windy, and there weren't many good beach days. Still, we enjoyed our stay here and would love to come back some day.
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