Fishing Rock

Next up we're visiting Fishing Rock, an obscure little state park on the Oregon Coast a few miles south of Lincoln City, at the south end of the Lincoln Beach area. It's a small forested headland between a few miles of broad sandy beaches to the north, and dramatic vertical sea cliffs to the south.

This is one of the more obscure state parks on the Coast, I think for a couple of reasons. First, there aren't any signs for it out on US 101. So you have to already know that it exists and then have some idea of how to find it. (Hint: If you're coming from the north on 101, turn right just after the bead shop.) It wouldn't surprise me if the lack of a sign was intentional; the parking lot for the park is not very big, and it's in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood full of narrow and sometimes unpaved streets, and it would quickly become disruptive if hordes of visitors descended on the place. I am not really worried about causing that kind of mass tourism rush here; I've already posted it to the 'Gram without ruining the place, and if that didn't do it, featuring it on an obscure 20-year-old blog is definitely not going to do it.

And let's be clear, it's not like there's zero information at all about the place out here on the interwebs. It's still part of the Oregon Coast, and there's a hard limit to how obscure an obscure place can really be here, so (for example) here are two pages about the place at Oregon Coast Beach Connection and one at 101Oregon, and if you're interested in the, I hesitate to say 'hiking', but at least 'walking around' aspects of the place there's an AllTrails page for the little trail through the park, and an OregonHikers page for the stroll down the beach.

The second reason I think this place is so obscure is that it's one of the newer state parks on the coast (as in 1991) and probably isn't part of as many longtime family traditions, the common practice where you always return to the exact same place on the coast every time you go, rain or shine (but probably rain, let's be honest), and you bring the kids and the dogs and have a giant bonfire on the beach, complete with s'mores and beers and illegal fireworks and lots of shivering, and hand that tradition down to your kids for them to hand down to their kids and so forth. By the time the state finally bought the place, most people had already picked a family beach spot that wasn't here.

Actually there's a third reason, which is that getting to the beach involves a short hike through a weird dark forest, and then a steep trail down a slippery muddy slope, and lugging a cooler full of hot dogs and brewskies through all that would be kind of a chore. Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a big fan of the weird dark forest here. I mean, I like weird dark forests in general, and coastal ones tend to be weirder than most, and they aren't all weird in the same way. The specific feeling I got here was "cozy", like you're under an umbrella, maybe, or hiding inside an enormous blanket fort. And there's a small but nonzero chance that around the next corner you might encounter some cute forest creatures having a tea party, and I mean that in the twee Beatrix Potter sense, not the Tumblr fursuit not-safe-for-work variety, which is a whole other forest, if you know what I mean.

I probably ought to point out that this place does less handholding than many of the better-known parks along the coast. There are cliffs here, and there aren't always safety railings, and the standard list of universal cliff dangers applies here (i.e. small children, excitable brainless dogs, taking selfies with your back turned to something dangerous, doing stunts to impress your bros after a few drinks, etcetera.) In fact, that whispering sound you might be hearing right now is Legal telling me to tell you to absolutely not attempt anything discussed in this post, no matter how mundane it might sound, up to and including coming here in the first place. Professional driver on a closed course, bearing no resemblance to any real or fictional person, or non-person, or any animal, vegetable, or mineral, alive, dead, undead, or otherwise. Legal says you should just stay home and watch TV instead, ideally one of those courtroom shows where all the good guys are inexplicably lawyers, somehow.

So regarding the park, and how it came to be, and why it's like this, here's a circa-1990 interview with David G. Talbot, the recently-retired longtime director of the state Parks & Recreation Department, who had run the agency in its various incarnations since 1964. Fishing Rock gets a quick mention on page 4 -- apparently it had been on the state's wishlist for a long time but they had never managed to make a deal for it, and Talbot noted that buying it now might get expensive.

The point is, that kind of thing will happen increasingly on the coast. They aren't making beachfront anymore. The prices are going to go up. If we wish to save Fishing Rock and the other undeveloped coastal properties that come up intermittently, we may have to shed our conservative mentality and pay whatever it takes because we'll not have many other chances. We haven't thought in those terms for a long time.

Speaking of which, his department may have been deep in negotiations when he said this, or were about to talk, or possibly had a deal in hand already; I don't know the precise timeline, but Lincoln County property records show that the state bought the land on September 3rd 1991 from the previous owner, "Fishing Rock Enterprises Inc.", for $570,000. That comes to about $1.3M in 2026 dollars, which seems like a real bargain, at least by Oregon Coast standards. The deal came with deed restrictions that limited developing the land for anything other than a park, and gave the seller a right of first refusal to buy the land back if the state decided to dispose of it, though that expired back in 2021. The terms do allow the state to transfer the land to Lincoln County, so long as the county agrees to abide by the same deed terms.

But Talbot was right, in a way: The state wasn't able to buy the whole property, just the northern half with the rock. The southern half of the property was subdivided (by the aforementioned Fishing Rock Enterprises) into an upscale gated community, also named Fishing Rock, and the picturesque sea cliffs to the south of the park are now owned by the HOA. You can get some idea of what the area used to look like by comparing HistoricAerials photos from 1982 -- which shows undeveloped land south of the park and 1994, which shows the southern half of the property in the early stages of becoming a subdivision.

The state's 2017 South Beach & Beverly Beach Management Units Master Plan includes a short section about the park and covers some of its identified issues:

Fishing Rock is a small, day use park perched on sandstone bluffs above the ocean. There is a trail leading through shore pine forest to grassy cliffs and to the north down to the beach. The park contains some difficult to access tidepool areas and offshore rocks. The parking lot is located in a residential neighborhood and it not signed from the highway at the request of the neighbors. The majority of park users are local residents who use the trail to access the beach. The beach access trail is steep and the cliffs are unfenced, which, combined with the spectacular natural scenery, lends the park a wild, undeveloped feeling.
...
The majority of the park is in good ecological condition. Vegetation consists primarily of mixed shore pine and stunted sitka spruce forest, with some native shrubs and open grassy areas at the cliff edge. There are no known populations of invasive plant species in the park.
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Land for the majority of the park was acquired in 1991, with a small additional property purchased in 2002 for development of the existing parking lot. This area was once the location of Major Ludson’s Siletz tribal allotment.
...
ISSUES:
The beach access trail is steep and eroded in many places.
• There are several informal trails leading into the park that are used and maintained by neighbors.
• Some fencing along the cliff edge was installed in the past, but the bluffs are eroding and a large portion of the fencing has been lost. Currently, the bluffs are mostly unfenced, and there is existing signage to alert visitors to the safety hazard.
• The park is not visible or signed from the highway and is not listed in OPRD’s online informational materials. As a result it is relatively unknown to the general public.
• The park functions primarily as a community beach access.

If we're going to split hairs here -- and I'm pretty much always up for that -- strictly speaking the actual Fishing Rock is the largest of the big black basalt rocks just offshore, right off the tip of the headland here. And the deal with offshore rocks, all of them, of any size, is that the federal government kept them for itself at statehood, on the theory that they might be needed for lighthouses someday, and lighthouses are a federal responsibility, per the Lighthouses Act of 1789. And then once the feds were done building lighthouses the other rocks became a National Wildlife Refuge as well as a federally designated wilderness area, and are strictly "Keep Out" unless you have a special permit that they almost certainly won't give you. So if you were hoping maybe the state would build a rickety catwalk or rope bridge or zipline or something out over the churning ocean to the rock, you're out of luck, sorry. I dunno, mostly I mention this at all because it's one of a handful of parks on the coast where the park doesn't actually contain the place or thing in the name. The little state wayside at Twin Rocks, south of Rockaway Beach, is another one of these.

Speaking of the rock, the May 1974 issue of The Ore Bin, (a publication of the Oregon Dept. of Geology and Mineral Industries) was a special issue all about coastal geology between Lincoln City and Newport. It discusses Fishing Rock briefly as an outlying example of "Depoe Bay Basalt":

This middle Miocene basalt flow was described by Snavely and others (1965) and named by the same writers (1973). The flow is exposed along the shore at Depoe Bay and forms the wall that separates the inner and outer bays (Figure 6). Here the rock is a pillow basalt breccia consisting of more or less dense ellipsoidal masses (pillows) of basalt enclosed in a matrix of angular basaltic glass fragments formed by the sudden chilling of hot lava coming in contact with sea water (Figure 9).
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Numerous dikes and sills of this type of basalt cut the Astoria Formation just east of Depoe Bay, and it is believed that lava erupted from local fissures and flowed into the ancient sea (Snavely and Macleod, 1971).
...
The Depoe Bay Basalt extends northward from Depoe Bay but lies inland from the shore until it appears again at Boiler Bay, where small isolated masses, through their superior resistance to erosion, impart an irregularity to the inner edge of the bay. It lies along the shore north of Boiler Bay as far as Lincoln Beach. The rock knob at the mouth of Fogarty Creek (Figure 8) and the sea cliff northward to Fishing Rock (Figure 11) are of this basalt, and an isolated remnant of the flow forms a reef opposite Lincoln Beach Wayside, just north of Fishing Rock.

(The "Lincoln Beach Wayside" mentioned above is another, even more obscure, state park, but that's a topic for a whole other blog post.)

A more recent DOGAMI publication, "Landslide and Erosion Hazards of the Depoe Bay Area, Lincoln County, Oregon" (1994) includes a mention of Fishing Rock in a section about seismic risks:

Faults at a high angle to the shoreline offset the 80,000 year marine terrace deposits downward about 18 feet on the north side of Fogarty Creek and down another 15 feet on the north side of Fishing Rock. It may be that these faults are somehow related to the offshore faults. Since many of the offshore faults may be active (Goldfinger and others, 1990), these local faults may be as well. If so, they pose a dual threat of earthquake shaking and direct offset of the surface. For example, the fault that probably follows Fogarty Creek could conceivably cause offsets in the highway bridge there. The fault at Fishing Rock could affect local houses and roads, including Highway 101. Detailed mapping and age determination of these faults is recommended.

The authors go on to note that their study was about landslides, not earthquakes, and had only looked at the latter as a potential trigger of the former, but since you're already reading their paper they might as well grab you by the lapels and pitch the followup earthquake study that somebody really ought to do at some point before the Big One hits.

Seismic studies of expensive real estate have a curious way of just not happening, and I don't know whether this proposed followup study ever took place.

So I think we've got the "Rock" part covered pretty well, but what about the "Fishing" part? I didn't see anyone fishing, but the internet says yes, fishing is a thing here. For a few quick examples, here are some mentions in the Oregon Fishing Forum forums: two threads from 2017, a 2015 one, and a 2009 one. Meanwhile over on iFish.net: Two threads from August 2015, and one from 2013. Apparently the thing to catch here is something called "surfperch". The state Fish & Wildlife dept. has a page on how to fish for them, which claims they're one of the state's "most underutilized fisheries", I imagine because their habitat is not really conducive to commercial fishing. It seems that their niche in the Great Big Circle of Life involves swooping in and nomming on tidepool creatures during high tide, in the middle of the crashing surf, pretty much exactly where you don't want to be in a boat of any size. And apparently nobody invented a workable tide-powered fishwheel during the era when that would have been allowed, and that might be the only viable way of hoovering them out of the sea on an industrial scale.

Among the many fun surfperch facts I have encountered recently, I was surprised to learn that their favorite of the many items on the tidepool menu is the Pacific mole crab, better known locally as the "sand flea". I say locally because other parts of the world have unrelated creatures that also go by "sand flea", and some of them are bitey while others (including our tiny "mole crabs") aren't. Surfperch will happily eat other things, but apparently the key to success at fishing is to catch some sand fleas at low tide, then use them as live bait once the tide comes in. Which, I dunno, that sounds really tedious and maybe harder than the actual fishing part, and the more I look at them, I'm starting to think they're actually kind of cute. Like if peanut M&Ms were an inch and a half long and came in grey and had lots of tiny little legs on the bottom.

The "underutilized fishery" lament above doesn't mean this is a no-rules free-for-all zone. As of 2024, Fishing Rock is now bordered to the south by the newly-designated Fogarty Creek Marine Conservation Area. That page indicates the rules aren't finalized overall, but it does say "No take of shellfish and other invertebrates in the intertidal or subtidal zones. No take of fish from a boat." Which seems to indicate you can still fish from on shore there, but you can't use sand fleas as bait, or at least not sand fleas that you caught within the conservation area. This is not legal advice, but I suppose it might be legal if you took up raising sand fleas at home like some people do with earthworms, and managed not to become too attached to them over time, and they don't all escape into your car when you hit a pothole on the way to the coast and go randomly boinging around the interior while you're trying to drive, or something.

Anyway, the conservation area extends south to about Fogarty Creek, the next state park down the road, and south of there is the Boiler Bay Marine Research Area, a marine protected area covering the intertidal zone from the mouth of Fogarty Creek, which is about half a mile south of Fishing Rock, south to Government Point at Boiler Bay, the next park after Fogarty Creek. In the research area, you are not supposed to remove anything at all from the intertidal zone (including mole crabs, or fish, or minions of Cthulhu), but further offshore is not a protected area. And let me point out if I haven't already, this is not my area of expertise, and I don't know the rationale for protecting these areas specifically, whether it's because they're relatively intact ecosystems, or degraded and imperiled ones, or just average chunks of ocean that can be protected without impacting the local fishing industry too heavily, to juice up our marine protected area numbers.

That whispering you hear again is Legal butting in with one more disclaimer. It seems they're concerned that you, o Gentle Reader, might see this surfperch business and high-tail it out to the coast to partake of Neptune's infinite bounty, only to catch nothing that day. (Purely by luck of the draw, I should add; you're plenty good at it, as far as I know.) And Legal worries that if this happens you might catch a case of mental anguish and/or emotional distress, and sue for that plus triple gas money. So this is where I remind you that (as the old saying goes) there's a reason it's called Fishing Rock, not Catching Rock.