Drive down West Fort Macon Road past the Food Lion and the Bojangles, and there's a good chance you've never noticed the gap in the tree line at the edge of that parking lot. No sign marks it from the road. No landscaping calls attention to it. But slip between the cars at the eastern edge of the Atlantic Station Shopping Center and you'll find a boardwalk heading into the only maritime forest left standing in Atlantic Beach.
That's not a marketing phrase. It's the literal description used by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, the nonprofit that fought to save this patch of woods in the 1990s and still maintains it today. Thirty-one acres, tucked behind a strip mall, make up roughly one percent of the entire town's land area. On a barrier island built almost wall to wall with rental cottages, condo stacks, and beach shops, that one percent is the whole of what didn't get built on.
The town recently added something new alongside it: four color-coded walking and biking loops, freshly signed, stitching the forest, the boardwalk, and the neighborhoods around them into routes residents can actually follow on foot. The forest was always here. The loops are what finally point you toward it.
One Percent of the Town
The Hoop Pole Creek Nature Trail runs about a mile round trip, starting on boardwalk, shifting to asphalt, then finishing on packed dirt and sand as it nears the water. It ends at the edge of the creek itself, where fresh water meets the salt marsh and Bogue Sound opens up beyond the reeds. Herons and egrets work the shoreline. The trail is shaded nearly the entire way, a rarity on an island where shade is otherwise in short supply.
The land almost didn't survive to become a trail at all. The Coastal Federation bought the property in 1997 using a 2.5 million dollar grant from the North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund, the very first parcel ever acquired with that fund. Before that purchase, the site sat at the center of what the Federation itself has described as a long and contentious fight over its future. Atlantic Beach was growing fast in the 1990s, and 31 acres of undeveloped waterfront in the middle of a resort town was not going to stay undeveloped by accident. It stayed that way because someone paid to make sure it would.
Today the property is zoned conservation, which means barring a change nobody has proposed, it stays exactly as it is. The Federation now describes it as the closest thing Atlantic Beach has to a central park. That's not really a metaphor either. It's the only sizable stretch of the town where the ground under your feet looks the way it did before anyone built a beach house.
The historical marker along NC 58 near the trailhead spells the creek's name "Hoop Hole," not "Hoop Pole." Local historian Jim Willis reportedly fixed that himself years ago, covering the wrong letters with a strip of black electrical tape. His research points to a hoop pole, a length of bark once used to bind the ends of a fishing net called a purse seine, as the real source of the name. No historical map has ever shown a "Hoop Hole" anything nearby, which suggests the marker's original spelling was simply a printing mistake nobody caught until Willis did.
A Landing Before a Shopping Center
Long before Food Lion anchored that shopping center, the same stretch of shoreline saw a different kind of arrival. On March 29, 1862, Union forces under General John G. Parke came ashore near here as part of the campaign to take Fort Macon, the Confederate stronghold a few miles down the island. It's a small footnote in a much larger Civil War campaign, but it means the ground beneath that unmarked trailhead has been a point of arrival for a lot longer than it's been a parking lot.
None of that history is posted anywhere along the trail. There's no plaque, no interpretive sign explaining the 1862 landing or the taped-over marker. You find it by knowing to look, or by walking the trail enough times to start asking questions about the place you're standing in. That's part of what makes it feel like it belongs to residents rather than to the tourism circuit down at the boardwalk.
Four Loops, One New Set of Signs
The town's other recent addition works in the opposite direction: it's designed to be found. The new AB Loops signage recently went in, marking four routes that carve the island into pieces a person could realistically walk or bike in an afternoon.
- Red Loop, 1 mile. Covers the west end of town and passes the sound-side Pelican Street Pier.
- Blue Loop, 3 miles. Starts along the boardwalk and stays close to the ocean for most of its length.
- Green Loop, 2 miles. Cuts through the heart of town, the most direct route if you're just trying to get somewhere on foot rather than tour the place.
- Yellow Loop, 3 miles. Runs the east end through the Cottage District, the older residential section of town.
Five large maps posted around Atlantic Beach show all four routes with their lengths and descriptions, so you don't need an app or a printout to figure out which loop you're on. The town's own framing for the project is straightforward: these are meant for exercise as much as for actually getting from one place to another, which is a distinction that matters on an island where a lot of daily errands are technically walkable but rarely walked.
None of the four loops currently routes directly through Hoop Pole Creek Nature Trail. The Red Loop comes closest, running along the west end near the shopping center where the trailhead sits. That's worth knowing if you've been meaning to check the forest out but keep forgetting where the entrance is. Park near the eastern edge of the Atlantic Station lot, look for the gap in the tree line across from the shops, and the boardwalk starts right there.
What This Actually Changes for Someone Who Lives Here
If you've lived in Atlantic Beach for any stretch of time, you already know the boardwalk, the beach accesses, the causeway traffic in July. What the loops add isn't new terrain so much as a reason to use terrain you'd otherwise drive past. A Tuesday evening walk around the Green Loop is a two-mile trip through the middle of town that most people currently do in a car without thinking twice about it. The Yellow Loop gives the Cottage District, one of the island's older and quieter residential pockets, a defined path instead of an assumption that you'd just wander it if you felt like it.
The forest is the part of this story that's easy to miss precisely because nothing about its entrance advertises what's back there. A half-mile of shaded boardwalk and marsh view sitting behind a Food Lion isn't the kind of thing that shows up on a postcard, but it's dog-friendly, mostly flat, and empty enough on a weekday morning that you'll likely have long stretches of it to yourself. For a town where the beach is the whole identity, having 31 acres that look nothing like the beach is worth more than its acreage suggests.
If you're the kind of resident who already has a favorite loop, or you've been meaning to find the Hoop Pole Creek trailhead and just never got around to it, this is the season to close that gap. The signage is up, the trail is shaded through the hottest part of the year, and the crowds thin out enough by September to make either one feel like it belongs to you again.
The Low Tide Living NC Team spends most days talking with people who are looking at Atlantic Beach from the outside, trying to picture what daily life here actually looks like. Conversations like this one, about a forest most visitors never see and a set of walking loops most residents haven't tried yet, are usually more useful than a market report. If you're curious what else locals know that the guidebooks don't, or you're ready to start your coastal search for a home near one of these loops, we're glad to talk it through.
