We’ve lived so close to this park for so long and I regret not coming sooner. This park is 5+ miles from the Little Island Park Parking lot, where you have to park if you’re staying overnight. So, you have to hike, bike or boat into the primitive campground because its access is blocked by Back Bay Wildlife Refuge. But because of this, the Park is a serene oasis away from traffic, no RV’s, not a lot of people. A great place to get away from it all! We hiked in on the East Dike trail through Back Bay, about 5.4 miles, with everything for the weekend on our backs. The trail is a rock/gravel road, probably more suited to bikes as it was pretty hard on our feet. But beautiful views of Back Bay on the way to the Park. Once we made it to the park, we stopped in the Visitors Center, which sells cold drinks, is air conditioned, has clean full-service bathrooms and friendly attendants who answered all our questions we had about the camping. From the Visitors Center, it’s about another .5 or so of a soft sandy hike to the Oceanside Barbour Hill campground, where we stayed. Our campsite was #12 and the attendant told us it was one of the new sites this year. It was close to the pit toilet bathrooms, drinking water faucet, and outdoor shower. The campsite was very secluded, you can’t see it from the main road, it’s tucked back in the live oaks. Site #13 is close by, would make a great buddy site. The campsite has a picnic table and a hook to hang your food and trash at night. Fires are not allowed but small camping stoves are, so we brought a little pocket rocket butane stove to cook on. What we didn’t know when we made reservations here is that you actually have two sites to choose from at this campground. There is the #12 in the live oaks site and then is you walk a short distance to the Beach, you have a designated #12 spot on the beach that you can choose to camp at as well! It was awesome! We ended up doing most of the cooking and eating at the live oaks site and sleeping and hanging out at the beach since there is no picnic table or anything at the beach site. Such an amazing experience to wake up to the sun rising over the Atlantic ocean and sleeping under the stars. There were only two other tents camped out on the beach with us when we were there so it was still pretty isolated. If you want to be on the beach by yourself, just walk less than a mile down either way and there is not a soul. There’s tons of hiking, interesting things to see, beautiful nature. We saw dolphins playing in the ocean! The beach alive with crabs! Osprey catching fish! We saw an old graveyard and church steeple at Wash Woods, that’s definitely worth the hike. We walked to the North Carolina border. There’s a Loveworks and a buoy that marks the southernmost Virginia State Park. We hiked over 30 miles over the weekend, there so much to do, we are exhausted! We came in mid-June and the weather was gorgeous - 80s during the day and 60s at night. There were some biting flies and mosquitos but nothing a little bug spray couldn’t take care of. We did not see any snakes. At the end of our trip, we opted to hike back to Little Island on the beach through Back Bay. It was slightly shorter, 5.1 miles, but a tougher hike because of the sand. We came home exhausted, sunburnt, blisters, but just in awe of this amazing park. It’s definitely worth the hike!