Camping at Fort Jefferson

After a day trip to Fort Jefferson over 15 years ago, we knew that we wanted to return some day and stay overnight. We finally got our chance.

During the day, the national park is a busy place. Two ferry's drop off visitors from Key West to tour the fort and to snorkel around the moat. At around 3:00, the ferry's leave and only the rangers and campers are left on the island. Currently, there are also several brick mason's helping with the restoration of the fort as well. I will talk about that more in the next entry.

The night we stayed, there were 10 campers including Kevin and I. There were also two sailboats and a shrimping boat moored to the buoy's in the bay. With this small population, we could walk through the fort and around the moat without seeing another person. It was very peaceful but also awe inspiring to be staying at such a remote but historic location.

Another great advantage of staying overnight is the chance to talk to the rangers and the volunteers who take care of this magnificent piece of architecture and important historic fort. Since there are so few visitors after the ferry's leave, the rangers were happy to talk about life on the island and the challenges they face to keep the park safe and accessible. Again, more on that in a later entry.

For this post, I chose pictures to try to give you an appreciation of the size of the fort so you can understand how unique it is to be in a fort that size in the middle of the Gulf. I also included a picture of our camp site.

Due to the fact we took over 100 pictures but the blog only allows me to post 5 at a time, I will create two more entries regarding this trip.