Camp Helen and Lake Powell's Rare Dune Lake

At the western edge of Panama City Beach, where the shoreline gives way to something wilder, lies Camp Helen State Park. It sits on about one hundred and eighty acres pinched between the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Powell, and both the land and the water here are unusual. Lake Powell is one of the largest coastal dune lakes in Florida.

Coastal dune lakes are freshwater bodies that sit right behind the beach and periodically break through the dunes to swap water with the Gulf. They are extraordinarily rare, found in only a handful of places on Earth, including parts of Australia and Africa and this one stretch of the northern Gulf coast. People have lived beside this lake for a very long time.

Prehistoric shell middens and mounds show humans were here more than four thousand years ago. In the twentieth century the site took on a gentler role. From nineteen forty five until nineteen eighty seven, Camp Helen served as a company vacation resort for the employees of Avondale Mills, a textile company from Alabama.

Workers and their families came here to rest by the Gulf, staying in log and stone cottages and a lodge built in a rustic style on a bluff above the water. Several of those historic buildings still stand, restored.