Cape Cod National Seashore

Thoreau walked this outer beach in the 1850s and wrote that a man could stand here and put all America behind him. President Kennedy, who spent childhood summers on the Cape, signed legislation protecting it in 1961 — nearly 40 miles of Atlantic coastline running through Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, and Chatham. The land beneath it is glacial, deposited by a retreating ice sheet some 18,000 years ago and still actively eroding. It was here before the Pilgrims landed at Provincetown in 1620. It will outlast us too.