Photographer Tim Calver

If Key West is the "last resort," then nearby Dry Tortugas National Park might well be the lost resort. Not that it's hard to find, what with the daily ferries, but the spectacle of Fort Jefferson—the largest masonry structure in the Americas, rising in the midst of hundreds of square miles of beautiful blue nothing—gives the place an air of mirage. It's Brigadoon as a Jimmy Buffett tune.

For the November/December 2001 Adventure's "King of the Keys" (read excerpt) photographer Tim Calver took to the Tortugas with little more than his cameras and a kayak. Here he reveals some of the park's stunning simple pleasures: releasing a rehabilitated sea turtle, climbing a lighthouse, skimming the surface of a coral dream.