The Outer Banks Scenic Byway travels through dramatic barrier island landscapes, coastal villages and national seashores and refuges. It crosses Hatteras Inlet and the Pamlico Sound by ferries. The byway presents history that’s ages old, starting with Native American sites and continuing with early exploration, the Civil War and World War episodes. In its coastal waters, shipwrecks tell the maritime history of the continent. The byway’s four historic lighthouses send beacons of light into a sometimes violent Atlantic Ocean.           

Natural beauty is found in a rare Maritime Forest, in live oak trees bent and shaped by the ever present wind, in migrating shorebirds, whirling gulls and coasting brown pelicans. 

At this northern end, the Outer Banks Scenic Byway begins in Dare County, North Carolina, at Whalebone Junction, the intersection of N.C. 12 and U.S. 158 and the entrance to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The byway’s route follows N.C. 12 down the Seashore’s Bodie Island and across Oregon Inlet, onto Hatteras Island and into the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. 

Villages surrounded by Cape Hatteras National Seashore dot the Outer Banks Byway corridor. For the Hatteras Island villages of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco and Hatteras, the N.C. 12 byway corridor is Main Street. After a 40-minute ferry ride provided by North Carolina’s department of transportation, the corridor continues through Cape Hatteras National Seashore to Ocracoke village in Hyde County. A longer ferry ride takes the byway to Carteret County and to Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge and Cape Lookout National Seashore. Again, small coastal villages like Atlantic, Sea Level and Stacy, are found along the byway’s main street where N.C. 12 has joined U.S. 70.

Scenic Byway Status In 1990, North Carolina declared the Outer Banks corridor a state scenic byway. In Sept. 2003, an Outer Banks Scenic Byway Corridor Management Plan was completed by North Carolina’s Department of Transportation in preparation for seeking National Scenic Byway status. The Corridor Management Plan explores the “six intrinsic qualities” of the byway – scenic, natural, cultural, historic, archaeological and recreational. 

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