Senior Editor
Beat: Things to Do, Attractions, Beaches
Shelby has covered the Panhandle from Pensacola to Panama City for eleven years and runs this desk. She owns the pages where accuracy has consequences: which town a park is actually in, what the Brooks Bridge work is doing this month, what a storm changed. She quotes fees as bands because the county revises them, and says plainly when a number is unconfirmed.
4 guides · 3 news posts
Last updatedShelby's most recent update to this site was .
Long-form
Reported guides to Fort Walton Beach, each with its own publication and last-updated date.
One of the largest military installations on earth sits behind this town, and the reason the beach road was ever paved. Most of it is closed. The best parts are free.
7 min read
Photograph: Unsplash
Two towns either side of one pass, sharing a beach, a bay and a sandbar. They are not interchangeable, and the right answer depends on things most comparisons never mention.
7 min read
Photograph: Unsplash
The town is on the mainland, the beach is on an island across the sound, and the expensive half of the coast is a separate city to the east. Sort that out and the week plans itself.
7 min read
Photograph: Unsplash
The air temperature tells you nothing useful here. What changes month to month is the water, the size of the crowd on the sandbar, and how much of the coast is open.
7 min read
Photograph: Unsplash
News desk
Shorter, dated pieces about what is changing in Fort Walton Beach.
How this was written. News published under Shelby Duval's byline was drafted by machine from primary sources — operator notices, government and municipal releases, published schedules — and every factual claim in it was matched to one of those sources before it published. A Fort Walton Guide editor can change or pull any of it. Our editorial standards.
Longleaf pine, steephead ravines and clear sand-bottom creeks, on a live weapons range. The permit is easy. The daily closure check is not optional.
Photograph: Unsplash
One four-lane bridge from 1966 carries everyone to the beach, and it is being replaced around the traffic. Approach roads have already moved once.
Photograph: Unsplash
A four-day civic pantomime at Fort Walton Landing in which the mayor is captured on the waterfront and the city is formally handed over to pirates.
Photograph: Unsplash