Lincoln Beach Wayside

Here are a few photos from the Oregon Coast's scenic Lincoln Beach State Wayside, a few miles south of Lincoln City and just north of Fishing Rock which we visited recently. You won't find a lot of info about this place online; the State Parks website doesn't mention it, nor does Wikipedia (at least not while I'm writing this), or Google Maps. In fact, the #1 Google search result right now is an Instagram post of mine that shows the park from a distance in the fourth of seven photos. One again demonstrating my weird search engine superpower, where posts here (semi-)regularly make it into the top handful of results for all sorts of topics that (almost) nobody besides me will ever search for.

Background

You might be wondering how a beach park on the central Oregon coast could be this obscure. After a bunch of research I eventually figured out what happened here, but it'll make more sense if I cover a bit of background first.

Development pressures heated up along the Oregon Coast during the 1960s, and there was a widespread perception that public access was rapidly being lost. Land was being divvied up, paved, subdivided, and gated off, and at the current rate the coast would soon become the province of a few rich people who could afford beachfront luxury estates.

Actually let's go back another half-century before that. An earlier bout of coast anxiety in the early 20th Century had led to Gov. Oswald West declaring the state's beaches to be a sort of state highway in 1913, and thus open to use by the general public. And this wasn't that fanciful of an idea at the time; present-day US 101 did not exist yet, and the coast was a place of isolated towns separated by rugged, roadless headlands, and accessible by boat, or by following a few rivers through the Coast Range from the Willamette Valley, or you could walk or ride a horse, or eventually drive a Model T down the beach to the next hamlet. Which in some places was only possible at low tide. In other places it wasn't possible at all due to sheer sea cliffs, and there you had to slowly make your way up and over the obstruction until you could get to the next beach.

The important point right now is that over time people came to see beach access as a sort of fundamental legal right. It helped that, at the time, there seemed to be more money in mass tourism than in letting a few robber barons own everything, and letting a few mustache-twirling villains win just seemed sort of undemocratic with a lower-case D, and the state's dominant Republican party was heavily influenced by the ideas of Teddy Roosevelt a few years after he'd left office. People thought it was a settled issue and found other things to worry about.

As the 1960s wore on, advances in the art and science of expensive lawyering started to identify weaknesses and potential loopholes in the current law. At one point a hotelier in Cannon Beach tried cordoning off the beach in front of his hotel for the exclusive use of his guests, violating an unwritten rule and traditional practice, and general good neighborliness, but not technically the law. Public outcry led to the famous 1967 Beach Bill: Instead of a highway, the beach is now a public park, and anything between the general high tide mark up to the vegetation line, or 16 feet in elevation above the high tide mark, can technically be private property but is legally unbuildable (at least without a special permit that exists in theory, but the state will never give you one), and the public is free to use the whole beach as if it was all one big park. Lawyers have challenged this off and on over time, but the overall arrangement still stands except for one weird unique bit of geography at Little Whale Cove, which is now an exclusive gated community built around a fairly subpar and rocky, but private, beach. Anyway, I'm telling you all of this because the legal limbo beyond the vegetation line does play a role in our story in a bit.

Origin

In a parallel effort, the state parks division (then part of the state highway department) began an effort to add official beach access points along the coast, with a goal of having them no more than three miles apart over the entire coast from the Columbia River to California. Some of these are as simple as putting up an official sign at a point where the town street grid peters out into sand. Along the north coast, closer to populated areas, there was some recognition that maybe a few parking spaces would be nice, and so a number of new small-ish state parks were acquired over the late 1960s into the 1970s, plus a few late stragglers after that heyday.

The park's origins were fairly typical for this time period. Developers had already made their mark on the area: a 1962 subdivision plat of the bluff above the beach, which initially left no room for beach access, since there were no rules requiring that at the time. You might notice the words "Lincoln Beach Park No. 2" on the land north of the subdivision, but that was just the name of the next subdivision to the north. I don't know how this particular stretch of beach came to the state's attention, exactly, but this is almost exactly three miles south of the park at Gleneden Beach, so they may have had their eyes on the general area already. I gather the place they were actually most interested in the whole time was Fishing Rock, just south of here, but it never came up for sale until around 1991, and by then they could only afford to buy half of the property, and the balance went to another gated community. In any case, back in the mid-60s the area had not yet been developed and filled with houses, so the state set about buying up a block of contiguous lots, and generally wheeling and dealing to put together a viable state park. You can see this on ODOT's right-of-way map for the park, dated October 1st 1964, and updated in the following years, showing a crazy quilt of transactions adding and removing bits of land from the wayside over time.

One example of this is in a January 26th 1966 report by the state Highway Commision on land transactions over the past year. This was right around the state's Peak Freeway point, so there were quite a few of these transactions, and the Lincoln Beach wayside makes a brief cameo in the long list of settled condemnation cases:

R-37384 - Stanley Lowther. 0.17 acre for wayside purposes. Offer of $6,000.00 approved by Mr. Jackson December 17, 1965.

(The "Mr. Jackson" here is Glenn Jackson, namesake of Portland's I-205 bridge over the Columbia, in case you were curious.)

An August 1967 Oregonian article giving an overview of the state's beach access program listed a bunch of these places, including ones already acquired, others under negotiation, plus a few proposals they were still studying.

Acquired:

• Tolovana Beach
• D River
• Gleneden Beach
• Lincoln Beach
.
• Rockwood Beach
(now called "Stonefield Beach", renamed to honor a local pioneer and probably to avoid confusion with Rockaway)
• Seven Devils

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Under negotiation:

• Manhattan Beach
• Rockaway
• Neskowin
• Agate Beach
• Yoakam Point
• Garrison Lake
(now called "Tseriadun")

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Under study:

• Clatsop Plains
(maybe part of Ft. Stevens, or Sunset Beach?)
• Tierra Del Mar
• Road's End
• Seal Rocks to Waldport
• San Marine

Unusually, the park was even mentioned by name in ORS 390.770, the state law defining the legal vegetation line. But explaining what that law means, exactly, gets esoteric pretty quickly, so I moved that stuff into a "Misc." section further down below for anyone who's really curious.

Demise

So things went along uneventfully until 1979, when the state's economy fell apart. The national economy was in a period of stagflation -- low economic growth, high inflation, and high interest rates -- exacerbated by the 1979 energy crisis Demand for new homes dried up, wood product prices plummeted, and a wave of timber job losses and mill closures swept across the state, starting a long, deep recession that the state only recovered from in the late 1980s. The rest of the state's economy soon followed, state tax revenue cratered, and state agencies were told to look for ways to cut their budgets or boost revenue.

Which brings us to the May 1980 meeting of the State Highway Commission (in the previous microfilm reel, on page 1997 of the PDF.) The heads of various agencies within the Highway Department are each reporting on how they're going to adapt to a budget shortfall. When they got around to State Parks, Superintendent Talbot stated the top priority was going to be restoring services and avoiding closing any parks, and details a few money-saving measures they're going to undertake. The top item is to close some high-cost (which I assume means money-losing) park campgrounds. I think this is around the time the park campgrounds at Lewis & Clark and Dabney State Parks went away. The second item on the list was to close some beach accesses, which seems like it would be in conflict with the principle of not closing parks, unless they counted beach ones differently. Rounding out the four money-saving ideas, they would also end some services like accepting campsite reservations (which in 1979 probably involved staffing a call center), and canceling some planned construction for new infrastructure.

The next volume of State Highway Commission meeting minutes had a brief item on page 37 of the pdf (numbered page 3919 in the original): "On September 26, 1980, approved the sale of an excess parcel of property containing 2.56 acres, located north of Fogarty Creek State Park, for the minimum consideration of $453,000.", approving the sale of the park without even noting it by name in the meeting minutes. Things moved quickly after that, at least by state government standards. A new land survey was filed with Lincoln County in November 1980, and several lots were sold at auction within the same month. A followup item on page 111 of the meeting minutes (numbered page 3994 on the original doc) has a small item about a followup sale: "On December 16, 1980, approved a second public auction sale of two lots which were part of a 2.56-acre excess park property north of Fogarty Creek State Park, approved for sale September 26, 1980.". And poof, just like that the park was gone, quickly and quietly, with no hearings about a proposed sale or anything like that. If there was any public outcry or even awareness about the sale at the time it happened, it didn't make the Portland newspapers.

You can also track what happened here by looking at Historic Aerials photos over time, which give us a rough timeline of how things played out: A 1976 photo shows the area still largely undeveloped, while a 1982 shows what looks like a small unpaved parking area and a creek flowing down to the beach, so this is probably what it looked like during the state park years, even though it wasn't anymore at this point. (And in May 1982 a survey for a private party was filed with the county as a prelude to developing the area.). A 1994 photo shows the area all built up and the creek filled in, and from that point forward there's virtually no indication of what used to be here.

Since 1980, the closest legal access points to Lincoln Beach are now the one at Fishing Rock, and another 1/4 mile north at Willow St.

Afterlife

It turns out that when they sold the park, they didn't sell the entire park. They resold the beach lots they'd bought a few years earlier, and the small creek or ravine that led from the bluffs down to the beach, and that whole stretch is just houses now, with no indication there was every anything else there. But below the vegetation line is a rectangular chunk of sand, about one acre total, that still belongs to the state (the highway department, specifically), which is what remains of the Lincoln Beach Wayside. They don't really publicize this place, since there's no direct access to the beach from inland anymore, which obviously cuts down on its usefulness as a beach access park.

I am not entirely sure why they kept it. Maybe they had a policy of never re-privatizing beach land, on the off chance that the development ban would come undone somehow someday. Or the fact that it's mentioned by name in the Beach Bill suggests they can't sell it, and if they had done so a sufficiently high-priced lawyer could potentially make the whole law come tumbling down like a sandcastle in a winter storm.

As for why it's owned by ODOT and not the State Parks Dept. today, that was probably just an oversight when they were splitting Parks off into its own separate department in 1989. Selling off a state park to save the others must have been embarrassing for everyone involved, and the whole episode was probably memory-holed so deeply that nobody remembered it when they were divying up which land was for parks and which land was for highways.

So here's the Lincoln County property record for the surviving bit of park, or ex-park, totaling 0.9 acres. As noted above, the eastern boundary is what was arranged in the original subdivision arrangement. The northern boundary is just a quarter-section survey line, while the southern boundary is actually a beach access right-of-way. But don't get too excited; those stairs to the beach are owned by the local HOA and are for use by residents only, and signs warn the peasants not to use it or else, this means you, no exceptions, period.

If you look at the area on street view, you can see the beach from the street at the top of those stairs, but you absolutely cannot use their walkway to get there. Even the official tsunami evacuation map for the area doesn't include the stairs as an approved way off of the beach. I won't hazard a guess as to whether in the event of an imminent tsunami they'll actually have some poor sacrificial security guard stationed there tasering people trying to evacuate that way. But it's an HOA on the coast, so I wouldn't put it past them.

Anyway, the west border is the high water line, everything past there is sometimes underwater and belongs to the state, specifically the "Ocean Shore State Recreation Area". Official state beach access points -- the ones with tsunami evacuation maps and the big safety yellow numbers facing the ocean -- are somehow also part of Ocean Shore, and the state is pretty careful to never provide even a rough estimate of how big it is, so just know that it surrounds us, and binds us, and was in our hearts the whole time, and it's also the friends we made along the way; it's a dessert topping and a floor wax. But it only extends to the lowest low tide point, and beyond there the seafloor belongs to the Department of State Lands instead, out to the 3 nautical mile limit. Between 3 and 12 nautical miles it's federal, as in, Reagan moved the maritime limit out that far by Presidential Proclamation #5982 in December 1988, as allowed by the Law of the Sea treaty (which the US has not actually ratified). But he explicitly didn't grant the added bits of ocean to the bordering states, keeping the 3-12 mile area as an exclusively federal zone, and succeeding presidents of both parties haven't seen fit to do that, and Congress also hasn't acted to change federal laws in all that time, and states haven't sued or unilaterally claimed that the border moved out automatically. My interest here, and the reason I mention all of this, is because adding that extra bit of water would be juuust enough to shove Wyoming aside and take their place as the 9th largest state.

But I digress.

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Misc.

A few random small items and tidbits to pass along that didn't fit anywhere else:

• two pages at Oregon Coast Beach Connection, one about another beach access point further north of here, and the other with some night photos of the beach.
• The park gets a random shout out in a 2003 iFish thread. Could be right by accident, but I'm going with benefit of the doubt here; people who fish, or some subset of them, spend a lot of time staring at maps and may have seen the name that way, or they're oldtimers and remember when it went in.
• In a link in the Fishing Rock post, some rocks offshore of here are described as the furthest northern bits of Depoe Bay Basalt, so fish that hang around in such areas would be more plentiful here than the rest of Lincoln Beach in general.
• A state erosion and flood hazard map from 1997, notes the mean cliff erosion rate for the Lincoln Beach area in general is around 0.6 feet per year. I have not seen enough coastal erosion numbers to know whether that's a lot or not, but the riprap walls along the base of the cliff seem to indicate residents are concerned
• Chronic geologic hazard map from 2018. Among other things, it labels the coastal land by geological type, and much of it here (as in, what the cliffs are made of) is labeled "alluvium", "colluvium", and most of all "marine terrace deposits", none of which sounds especially sturdy.
• recent (2021) permit application for applying riprap to the slope in front of several beach houses.

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The park is mentioned briefly in a 1978 US Forest Service report "Coding Hazardous Tree Failures for a Data Management System", General Technical Report PSW-29, from the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experimental Station, Berkeley CA. Which references a previous report, PSW-24, titled "Tree Failures and Accidents in Recreation Areas: A Guide to Data Management for Hazard Control" describes the system, complete with JCL and FORTRAN source code for some of the programs discussed.

The idea behind all this, as I understand it, was to answer the age-old question: If a tree falls in the forest, and there's nobody around to file a correctly coded "Report of Tree Failure" (Forest Service Form PSW-4600-3) with the central mainframe, did it really happen?

The system used numeric fields for the various details involved in a tree failure: the what, where, when, and why. For the "where" part, they had to issue a document listing the correct codes for everywhere that a reportable tree failure might occur, and as part of this PSW-29 assigns a code to every last Oregon state park in existence in 1979 in the name of meticulous thoroughness. (A biographical note about the first author mentions he has a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which I find... unsurprising.) So Lincoln Beach had (and maybe still has?) location number "52220 00" in this system. The generic code for "somewhere in an Oregon State Park" was "52000 00", and the code for "in a coastal Oregon State Park" was "52200 00", so even though the park is just a big rectangle of sand, and precisely zero trees if you don't count driftwood, the resulting database probably contains a few tree failure incidents for the place just due to someone fat-fingering the ID around the tail end of a long boring day of ten-keying state park IDs into an IBM 3270 terminal, or just having a sticky '2' key.

The doc notes that the demise of a tree due to logging is not considered a kind of tree failure and should not be reported as such.

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Here's a bit more on those references to the park in the famous Beach Bill, or I think this may have been a later followup to the original Beach Bill; it was in a bill about beaches at any rate. I'm talking about Oregon Revised Statutes §390.770, which is a legal description of the legal vegetation line along the entire Oregon Coast, end to end. So this has got to be one of the chonkiest and most soporific sections of any state law on the books. I have not actually measured it but I would guess it's somewhere in the top 10 at least. It starts out with:

Except for the areas described by ORS 390.760 (Exceptions from vegetation line), ORS 390.640 (Permit required for improvements on ocean shore) applies to all the land located along the Pacific Ocean between the Columbia River and the Oregon-California boundary between extreme low tide and the lines of vegetation as established and described according to the Oregon State Plane Coordinate System of 1927, as follows:

From there it's pages upon pages of survey point coordinates. A few of the points have brief descriptions, including the two that basically bracket the lost wayside:

Li-7-150 451,005 1,080,288

Description of Location of Point Number Li-7-150: A point near the north boundary of Lincoln Beach State Wayside located in section 28 of township 8 south, range 11 west of the Willamette Meridian in Lincoln County.

Li-7-151 450,586 1,080,122

Description of Location of Point Number Li-7-151: A point near the south boundary of Lincoln Beach State Wayside located in section 28 of township 8 south, range 11 west of the Willamette Meridian in Lincoln County.

The Lincoln County survey record for the area shows those points, so you can see where they actually are on a map.

The mysterious coordinates next to the survey point names are not something the average person (myself included) will have seen a lot of. If you hold opinions of the flat earth persuasion, you may want to avert your eyes for the next paragraph or so.

So everybody who has ever used GPS (or a paper map) is probably familiar with the Latitude, Longitude system, either the degrees, minutes, seconds type or with lots of decimal places. You might also be familiar with Public Land Survey System -- the "township, range, section, something within that section" stuff you see all the time in property descriptions. You'll use it constantly if you're a land surveyor or pretty regularly if you're a realtor, and everyone else may encounter it a little bit when buying or selling property, or trying to dispute your property taxes, or fighting your HOA over a property boundary, stuff like that. The land survey system has this legal fiction where it assumes it's operating on a flat plane. It makes the math easier, and at the scale it was designed to operate, the curvature of the earth is a tiny factor you can basically ignore in everyday use. But suppose you need to translate between the two -- like you need to draw a legally precise line down the whole Oregon Coast, for example -- how do you do that? This is where the State Plane Coordinate System comes in.

You may have heard people criticize the "both sides" school of professional journalism, where given a debate with two competing sides, the news coverage tries to chart a middle ground between the two rather than figure out which one is supported by the facts. I've seen this criticism phrased to the effect that the earth is either 100% round or 100% flat, there's no middle ground between them. It turns out that State Plane Coordinates are essentially that middle ground, dividing the United States up into 120 zones, mostly hinged along state boundaries and then within some of the larger states. Oregon, as the *ahem* ninth-largest state, merited a whopping two polygons, a northern one (which we're in here) and a southern one. One way to think about this is to imagine an animated spinning globe from some educational CD-ROM from 1993, and it looks primitive now because you can see the individual polygons it's made of. That's kind of what this system does too: It's not for animation purposes, but it does make the math easier.

So turning those numbers into GPS coordinates is still not trivial; the polygons aren't all the same size or tilted uniformly, and the earth is not exactly spherical either. But you at least don't have to do it by hand. NOAA's National Geodetic Survey has a neat little online calculator called "NGS Coordinate Conversion and Transformation Tool (NCAT)" that can do this translation for you. I had to tinker with it a little to figure out some of the settings to use, so let's suppose you wanted to turn another one of those survey points into GPS coordinates for whatever reason.

"Convert/Transform from:" - leave this set to "Horizontal", unless you also have a height value you want to use.
"Select the type of horizontal coordinate:" - this defaults to "Geodetic lat-long", which is for converting the opposite direction. You want to
select "SPC" (short for State Plane Coordinates). Once you change this, the fields below will redraw with the appropriate input fields.
"Northing" - the first of the two numbers goes here, commas and all. E.g. in "451,005" in point 150
"Easting" - the second of the two numbers. The "1,080,288" in point 150.
"Units" - It's kind of neat that the tool defaults to meters, like they'd do in a proper civilized country, but the numbers given in the state law are in feet, so set this to "US Survey Feet".
There's also an "International Feet" option that seems to give nearly identical results, just a few feet away if you pick it instead.
"SPC zone" - In other words, what polygon do these coordinates go to? The option you want here is "OR N-3601". Though if you're converting a point sufficiently far south you'll need to use "OR S-3602" instead.
"Input reference frame (historically called 'horizontal datum')": Set this to "NAD27", since the law specifies we're using the 1927 version of the coordinate system, a
"Output SPC zone (optional)" and "Output reference frame (historically called 'horizontal datum')" can be left alone.

So with those settings, that puts point Li-7-150 at exactly 44.8483696164,-124.0473724487, and Li-7-151 at 44.8472014030,-124.0479409700. So now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Though I'm not sure what the other half is.