Block Island Walks the Bluffs

The south end of Block Island rises to the Mohegan Bluffs, clay cliffs standing some two hundred feet over the Atlantic in banded reds and grays, the brick lighthouse holding the corner above them, and a long wooden stair descending to a wild cobble-and-sand beach where the surf arrives unedited from the open sea. The bluffs are the island's cathedral, the walk along their rim its finest free hour, and the whole arrangement, wind, light, and vertigo, is the quiet coast at its most vertical.

The classic visit has three movements. The lighthouse first, the handsome brick survivor famously moved back from the eroding edge a generation ago, its little museum telling the island's long argument with the sea, then the rim path, tracking the cliff edge through bayberry and wind-bent shad with the horizon running unbroken to open ocean, and finally the stairs, a committed descent to the beach below, where the surf works the cobbles, the cliffs loom in their painted bands, and the swimmers, strong ones only, take the wildest water on the island. The climb back up is the toll, paid slowly.

The bluffs reward the edges of the day and the year. Golden hour turns the clay bands molten and empties the overlooks, dawn belongs to the birders and the surf-casters, and the off-season, per the September piece in these pages, delivers the whole rim in solitude, the winter storms rearranging the beach below annually like a landlord. The erosion is real and ongoing, the fences and setbacks are not suggestions, and the island's stewardship, nearly half its acres conserved, is the reason the walk exists at all.

Ride bicycles out the spring street road per the island's method, give the visit the full golden hour, and take the stairs down if the knees consent, since the beach's upward view of the cliffs is the island's grandest picture. Carry a layer for the wind, which is constitutional. The island's harbors and porches do its socializing, per its other pieces. The bluffs do its perspective, two hundred feet of it, and nobody leaves the rim unadjusted.