Last weekend's nor'easter mangled the recreational beach at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, destroying the earthen parking lots and carving two fresh inlets into the strip of sand.
The two beach parking lots are closed indefinitely to vehicular traffic, said Liz Davis, head of interpretation and education for the Assateague Island National Seashore. The closest remaining parking area now is along Beach Road at the Toms Cove Visitor Center, which provides enough space for off-season visitors but not nearly enough for the summer.
The two beach lots, originally constructed from a clay base and a crushed shell top layer, will need to be completely rebuilt, said Michael Dixon, supervisory park ranger at the refuge, which covers the Virginia side of the island.
Hurricane Sandy's punishing winds and tides destroyed 95 percent of the parking lots in October 2012. Surveys immediately after last weekend's winter storm suggest the damage was worse this time around, Dixon said.
The repair work to lots 1 and 2 is expected to cost $800,000. The refuge doesn't have that kind of money on hand, so repairs won't be able to begin until it gets more funding, Dixon said.
"The caveat there would be the availability of funding to do so," he said.
A new refuge management finalized two weeks before the storm includes a proposal to relocate the beach lots about 1½ miles to the north, where officials hope they will be less vulnerable to storm damage. True to that assumption, that area saw only minor dune erosion and some surge over the dunes to the south, Dixon said.
The winter storm may have dumped historic amounts of snow along the interior of the mid-Atlantic; but at the coastline where Maryland meets Virginia, a swollenAtlantic Ocean left the deepest scars.
Waves scoured away sand, sculpting vertical walls into Assateague's once-sweeping dunes. In some places, the sea washed completely over the island, particularly at its northern and southern extremes. There, it left behind evidence in the form of new beds of sand.
Aerial photos taken Monday showed a pair of new inlets where once there had been sand just north of the Chincoteague recreational area and where the "hook" begins at the southern tip of the island. Such storm-generated inlets tend to fill back in within a few weeks.
In other words, the 37-mile-long island weathered the storm in typical fashion.
"It depends on what part of the island you're talking about, but we're fine," Davis said. "Barrier islands roll over. They're resilient and do their thing during a storm."
The refuge reopened Sunday afternoon, a half-day after the rough surf calmed and snow stopped falling. Crews removed dozens of downed trees to get most of the trails back open by Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a bald eagle's nest made popular by a refuge web camera managed to survive the storm intact. But the camera had toppled over in the high wind and was only showing upside-down images of the surrounding forest.
"Unfortunately, we cannot see into the nest without the camera so it's unclear how the eggs fared in the storm," refuge staff posted to their Facebook page. "It will be up to observations from visitors like you who tour the Wildlife Loop and help us determine if the eagles are still sitting on eggs and come late February/March feeding hatchlings."
On the Maryland side, a group campground on the ocean side and loop 1 in the campground, also on the ocean side, remained closed Tuesday, pending the removal of washed-up sand. The southernmost parking lot and the over-sand vehicle area also were closed.
The island's horses appeared to make it through the storm unscathed, Davis said.
"They are just fine. They really look good this time of year with their big coats on. They're heads were down eating. They know what to do," she said.
