The true test of any wilderness is how well it answers this question: How small does it make you feel?

Wild areas have a way of upending the proportions we're used to, throwing off our sense scale entirely. Their vastness, when it hits us, immediately alters how we perceive ourselves in relation to the natural world.

Their power is enhanced and reinforced by their dwindling numbers. How many places on the East Coast can a person stand on the beach, turn 360 degrees and not see one solitary sign of civilization? I'd never been to such a place until earlier this week when I visited False Cape State Park.

Nestled in Virginia's far southeastern corner, the park occupies a 4,300-acre spit of land bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, North Carolina to the south, Back Bay to the west and Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge to the north.

I've looked forward to False Cape since I announced this monthly state parks series. Its remoteness and isolation make it one of the least visited parks in the system. While First Landing State Park draws as many as 1.7 million visitors a year, False Cape pulls in around 35,000. The vast majority of those go in the summer.

There's a tram that takes in day visitors for part of the year, but if want to stay overnight - and truly see the park - you have the choice of biking, hiking or kayaking the more than 5 miles from Back Bay NWR's northern border. Cell phones don't work, and your car is a distant memory sitting in Virginia Beach's Little Island parking lot.

The chance for a little wilderness adventure was too much for my dad, Bill Thompson, and high school friend John Hassler to pass up. So they joined me. We loaded up our packs and biked in via the beach, hewing closely to the rideable wash line between surf and deep sand.

Only a small sign exists to tell beach hikers and bikers that they've arrived at False Cape from Back Bay NWR. We eventually found our campsite near the ocean at the more distant False Cape Landing. The site was little more than a tent-sized clearing in the live oak canopy on the dunes. It was exactly as I had hoped: primitive, with not another camper in sight. I knew from talking to the ranger that we would be the only campers in the park that night.

The only problem was the wind. Out on the beach, the wind blew in from the northeast at what seemed like tropical-storm speed. We didn't stand out there long, but we got what we came for: That 360-degree view and sense of vastness in all directions.

We decided to camp closer to the bay, away from the wind. This site had the added advantage of being smack in the middle of feral hog territory. That's right, if its first claim to fame is the isolation and undisturbed coastline, the False Cape/Back Bay area also is revered for boasting Virginia's only population of wild razorbacks.

Like the feral Eurasian boars throughout the South, these pigs have survived and thrived since the 1500s and 1600s when European explorers and colonists brought them here. It's long been a goal of mine to see one in the wild. I figured this was a sure thing at the bayside campground.

After setting up camp, we hopped back on our bikes and explored False Cape's interior trails. The highlight was Wash Woods, a community that subsisted on fishing, hunting and cattle farming in the pine and live oak forests of this area from the 1870s to the mid-1900s. The ruins of Wash Woods - a cemetery and the steeple of the Methodist church that, in the 1920s, boasted 300 members - sit above a marshy wallow where Spanish moss hangs from trees over the gravestones. It had an eerie, almost ancient feel.

The sun began to sink fast on our ride back to camp, and the wind picked up a cold bite. We rode slowly, looking for hogs at every turn. We saw plenty of signs - tracks, wallows, rooted up areas - but no ungulates.

Had we come to False Cape the next night, we would have been treated to 50-degree temperatures. We picked what probably will be the last frigid night of the year. Nothing like a sleeping bag rated to 40 degrees when the low is 37.

We survived the night, and campstove coffee got us through the next morning as we packed up to leave. I'd like to say we narrowly escaped a meeting with a wild boar on our way out, but our only mammal sighting was an enormous raccoon swimming through the marshes. It looked like it could polish off a Great Dane in a few bites.

Herons, geese and other birds too numerous to count went about their business all around us as we pedaled back to the car. They seemed entirely unimpressed with the three small humans making their way home through their vast wilderness.