Dry Tortugas and the Fort at the Edge of America

Dry Tortugas and the Fort at the Edge of America

Dry Tortugas National Park is 70 miles west of Key West — reachable only by seaplane or the Yankee Freedom ferry, a 2.5-hour ride through open Gulf that is either glorious or miserable depending on the waves. The park is seven islands, a coral reef, and Fort Jefferson, the largest masonry structure in the Americas — a hexagonal brick fortress that was never finished, never attacked, and now sits in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico looking like the set of a movie no one has made yet.

Fort Jefferson was built between 1846 and 1875 to control the shipping lanes to the Gulf, and its walls are 8 feet thick and 45 feet high and contain 16 million bricks that were shipped from Pensacola by schooner. The fort was a military prison during and after the Civil War — Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth, served his sentence here — and walking the casemates and gun emplacements, with the turquoise water visible through every embrasure, produces the surreal feeling of military architecture in a tropical paradise.

The snorkeling off the fort's moat wall is the best in the Florida Keys — the wall drops to twelve feet in clear water over a coral garden where parrotfish, angelfish, and nurse sharks cruise with the unhurried confidence of animals who live in a national park and know it. The water is impossibly clear, the reef is healthy, and the isolation means the marine life is denser and less skittish than anything nearshore.

Practical notes: The ferry ($190 round-trip) includes snorkel gear, breakfast, and lunch. The seaplane ($350+) cuts the travel time to forty minutes and provides aerial views of the reef that justify the price. Book weeks in advance. Bring sunscreen, a hat, and a camera with waterproof capability. There is no shade on the island except inside the fort, and the only freshwater comes from what you carry.