← All hunts · Original two-clue page, kept as it was
A walking hunt · Nags Head, Outer Banks
A real beach access. A real plaque. No digging, no trespassing, no disturbing the wreck. Follow the first clue on foot. When you stand in front of the marker, the year on the plaque unlocks the next piece.
Find the public walkover where the beach road meets a street
named like a wound’s edge.
Milepost eleven-and-a-half. A short wooden path over the dune.
Before you even touch the sand, look at the corner of the highway
for a black-and-white state marker. It remembers an iron steamer
that never made Havana.
Read the marker. Enter the year the steamer ran aground. Four digits. Nothing else.
Wreck of the U.S.S. Huron
Steamer ran aground on November 24, 1877, near here, killing 98. Tragedy led to improvements in U.S. Lifesaving Service.
You are at the Bladen Street beach access, about milepost 11.5 on Virginia Dare Trail (NC 12). The state marker is B-31. In the gazebo at this same access there is an exhibit about the wreck — North Carolina’s first Historic Shipwreck Preserve. The iron hull still lies roughly 250 yards offshore. Look. Do not take anything from the site.
Ninety-eight did not come home. The station that should have watched was shuttered for the season. Walk the boards to the dune crest and face the Atlantic. The treasure of this first hunt is not buried. It is the ship you cannot see from shore unless the sea is very still — and the promise that the next mark waits where a long pier writes a straight line into the same water.
Next location (when you want a part two): Jennette’s Pier, a few accesses south. We can add that page when this one feels right.