An old Jeep Wagoneer will emerge Friday from its garage at Ballston Beach to a changed landscape.

Update: The Jeep was removed on Feb. 24. Read the story and see photos here:

TRURO — An old Jeep Wagoneer will emerge Friday from its garage at Ballston Beach to a changed landscape.

“It’s probably going to fall apart like something out of Indiana Jones,” said Basil Musnuff. His mother owns the Jeep, which has been entombed for 40 years in a wind-blown and sand-filled garage at 135 South Pamet Road. “I'm not even sure it’s a Jeep.”

"I remember it being in the garage," said Graham Whitelaw, whose family helped develop the Ballston Beach area and whose home is near the Musnuff property. "It's like a white Wagoneer."

As the town begins this spring to allow the shifting dune near the Musnuff's property to cover beach parking spaces, the time was right to ask the family to move the Jeep too, Truro Town Manager Rae Ann Palmer said. “It should be moved for environmental concerns,” Palmer said.

Musnuff said though, that his family had wanted to get the Jeep out of the garage for years, but the town wouldn’t let them move the sand.

“Now they (the town) want it out,” he said.

Regardless, on Feb. 10 the town conservation commission issued an order of conditions for the move, scheduled for Friday, weather permitting.

- Old Jeep to emerge from sand-filled garage after 40 years

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“You can see the roof of the garage is a mess,” said Musnuff, who lives in Hudson, Ohio. The family’s house and a horse barn-turned-shed, both built before 1895 according to town historical records, sit atop a grassy dune with the garage half-encased in sand at the toe. The garage's crushed roof nearly obscures the Jeep inside.

“Obviously that’s not the condition you want it to be in,” Musnuff said.

Less-than-ideal conditions prevail at the beach and dune system overall, according to a 2016 study by the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. Allowing the dunes to naturally migrate onto the town's 75-space parking lot, rather than scraping the lot clean of sand each summer, will build up resiliency against storms and rising seas on the ocean-facing beach, according to the study.

The quarter-mile-long dune system, once the home of a turn-of-the century cottage colony and a lifesaving station, has been continually overwashed by storms since at least 1978, according to a 2001 report in “Environmental Cape Cod” by J.W. Portnoy of the Cape Cod National Seashore. Winter storm surges in the last few years have blown out the center of the dune system, and a smattering of houses have been moved back from the eroding bluffs. The Musnuff property and the town parking lot are on the southern end of the dune system.

“Part of my memory of the place is that the Jeep was there,” said Musnuff, who began to visit the house in the late 1970s. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it driven. It really was the only reason they had it, so they could drive on the beach.”

Whitelaw recalled that as a youngster he saw it driving on the beach through the mid-70s, for summer beach parties and for fishing. "Jeeps were parked by the beach fires," he said.

Musnuff’s mother Barbara, who lives in Dallas, Pennsylvania, inherited the property from her companion, John Moore Jr., who died in 2014, Basil Musnuff said. Moore was the grandson of George Thatcher, a dentist, who bought the property in 1895 from John Rich, a station keeper of the Pamet River lifesaving station who built the house but had to sell it due to a regulation that captains must live in the station, according to town records.

With the Jeep gone, the walls of the garage may remain to support the dune, Musnuff said.

— Follow Mary Ann Bragg on Twitter: @maryannbraggCCT.