The perfect beach has pristine sand. Pristine, that is, if you don’t count sand-washed pebbles, the occasional granite boulder, and a sand dollar or two. And the perfect beach is in Rhode Island.

Beaches get loved to death… the very people who come there to enjoy the surf and sun and sand usually end up trashing the place. That means that the perfect beach has to be remote, so remote that the beer cans and cigarette butts and empty sunscreen bottles that are the detritus of sun-loving vacationers never collect, because the vacationers never arrive.

The perfect beach needs clean cool water – the kind of water you find a dozen miles off the Atlantic coast. Water that flows by, touches the beach, and flows on to faraway lands.

And lots of sun. Enough sun to warm you between forays into the waves, but not so hot that the cool breezes are overwhelmed, making you wish only to get out of the sun and back into the air conditioning.

For your consideration for the title of "The Perfect Beach", I submit the beach below Mohegan Bluffs. It’s remote – Block Island is twelve miles from the mainland, then on top of that, you’ll have to work your way four miles from the harbor to the South end of island along a hilly and winding road.

Then, if that wasn't enough, you have to climb down the 163-foot face of Mohegan Bluffs to get there.

Okay, so it's not really that hard... You catch a ferry from Point Judith, ride it for an hour, then get a motor scooter to get to the Southwest Light, then you climb down 250 stairs to get to the base of the cliff. Only the last 30 feet or so is treacherous, where you risk skinning a knee or twisting an ankle on the lose rock and boulders of the bluff's face.

Once you're there, you've found the perfect beach.

Enough people go there during the summer to make it slightly less than private, but it's no where like the wall-to-wall carpet of tanning bodies you find at most public beaches.

Block Island Southeast Buy This Art Print At AllPosters.com

Looking out, you see only sand, Mohegan Bluff, and water stretching across the world to Africa.

Block Island, like the entire series of islands stretching from Long Island to Martha's Vineyard, is made from the sand and stone piled up by glaciers. The bluff, reaching 15 stories overhead, recieves the strongest part of the Atlantic's pounding. The wind and rain and freezing and thawing drops huge pieces of land down to the beach in a "slump", which the surf then washes away a little at a time. The pebbles and sand make the beach. Huge granite boulders, "erratics", pushed here from the mainland during the Ice Age 22,000 years ago, remain well out in the surf, telling the story of where the land once was.

Those boulders have wrecked more than a dozen ships, including the SS. Meteor, the Barge Texas, and the Schooner Jacob Winslow. To help protect against shipwrecks, a light house was constructed in 1875. Its green flashing light atop its 52 foot tower flashes every five seconds across the sea, warning of the rocks. In 1993, the huge brick lighthouse was moved in one piece back from the cliff face 250 feet to protect it from the erosion of the cliff face.

The name of the bluffs comes from a battle between invading Mohegan Indians and the local Manises Indians. In 1590, the Manises drove a 40-man war party of Mohegans off the cliff to their deaths.

Luckly, the steps make it easier (and a whole lot more pleasant) to get to the perfect beach.

Readers Comments About This Page:

Be the first! Add Your Comment!