The Sand That Came Down from the Mountains

Reach down and grab a handful of this beach sometime and really look at it — how blinding white it is, how fine and soft, almost like powdered sugar. Squeak it between your fingers. Folks come from all over the world for sand like this, and hardly a one of them knows the wild journey it took to get here. So let me tell you.

That sand is quartz. Almost pure quartz crystal, ground down to a fine white powder. And it did not come from around here. It came from the Appalachian Mountains — those old, worn-down peaks way up north in Georgia and the Carolinas and Tennessee, hundreds of miles from this beach.

Here's how. Over millions and millions of years, rain and ice and time wore away at those mountains, cracking the granite, freeing the hard quartz grains locked inside. Rivers picked them up and carried them south — tumbling, grinding, polishing them the whole way down. The soft dark minerals wore out and washed away, but the quartz, being tough as it is, survived the trip, getting whiter and finer with every mile. And after that long, long river journey, the grains finally reached the Gulf, where the waves took over and spread them along this shore.

So when you lie on this beach, you are lying on the mountains. On a little piece of the Appalachians, worn to powder and carried a thousand miles and a million years to get to your beach towel. Every white grain is a mountain that took the long way to the sea. Not bad for a place to build a sandcastle.