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. Here's that list, mostly because I have photosets from a lot of them (which will become posts here whenever I get around to it.)

• Acquired:

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

• Under negotiation:

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

• Under study:

  • Clatsop Plains (maybe part of Fort Stevens or Sunset Beach?)
  • Tierra Del Mar (became part of Cape Kiwanda State Park)
  • Road's End
  • Seal Rocks to Waldport
  • San Marine

Unusually, the park is even mentioned by name in ORS 390.770, the state law defining the legal vegetation line, and most search engine results for variations on "Lincoln Beach Wayside" are for copies of that law, at least until this post you're reading goes live. 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 took turns reporting on how the were going to adapt to the huge, unexpected 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 detailed a few money-saving measures they were about to undertake. The top item was to close some high-cost (which I assume meant money-losing) park campgrounds. I think this was 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 any 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 mentioning 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., and the latter seems to be aimed at neighborhood beach access and includes no visitor parking.

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. Kind of like how if you have to sell blood plasma for cash while unemployed, you don't necessarily put that on a resumé afterward. The whole episode was probably memory-holed so deeply that nobody remembered it a decade later 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. And right here is where I need to insert one of those infamous Trigger Warnings: I'm not in the business of policing readers' personal opinions, but if your thoughts tend toward 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, or I guess a map tattooed onto someone's back if you're a pirate) 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 the US Public Land Survey System, which is 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. Which is untrue but works out ok because individual property lots are sub-microscopic compared to the overall curvature of the Earth, and the planet bends so little across the width and breadth of your back 40 that we can all just ignore it. 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 systems — 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. The general theory here is that the actual truth of any matter is a statistical mean, or median, or mode, or whatever, of the various contemporary opinions out there. For instance, if the world's scientists, astronauts, naval officers, airline pilots, etc., all insist the earth is 100% round, but some guy on YouTube insists it's 100% flat, the correct middle ground position is that our planet must be an equal mix of both, somehow. 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.

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.
...
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).
...
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.

Lower Bridge Creek Falls

In the previous post (that is, the one about Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range), I forgot to even mention that it has a downstream sibling. Lower Bridge Creek Falls is easier to see in that you don't have to race across busy Highway 6 to see it. The creek drops at least as far as the upper falls, I think, and it drops onto rocks next to the Wilson River -- and it probably goes straight into the river during the wet season.

But snobs and pedants and internet busybodies of all types turn up their noses at it, because the creek travels under Highway 6 in a pipe and you can see the pipe from some angles, and if your really overthink it a bunch it kinda-sorta looks a bit like it might be untreated outflow from some chemical plant going into a river full of endangered species. That isn't what it is, of course, and (as far as I know) the stream is just as pristine as anything else in the Coast Range. It is probably true that no matter how good your photos of it are, nobody will want a print of it on the wall of their outdoor gear store if it shows the creek coming out of a pipe. It's possible nobody will want a print of it on their wall, by the breakfast nook, strictly for aesthetic reasons. But, I mean, stuff like that can be covered up with a bit of Disney landscaping magic if need be, or the culvert and pipe could be replaced with a tiny little mini-bridge so it looks more natural from below, or who knows. Maybe plant some vines to deemphasize the WPA stonework under the bridge next to the falls, and swap out the ugly chainlink fence along the road, above the falls, with just about anything else that still works as a fence. I dunno, that probably wouldn't help. To misquote Upton Sinclair, there's just no pleasing people whose livelihoods depend on rage clicks.

On the other hand, the internet being internet-level mad about this one means there isn't much about it on the interwebs, and I can point you at all of it, or at least everything that Google thinks is worth indexing -- which seems to be less and less original human-created content as time goes on. Pages at Waterfalls West, My Wild Adventure, and Exploring My Life, and a cameo in an OregonHikers trip report. Also a couple of stock photos on Alamy, and a clip of stock video footage on something called Pond5, and a brief YouTube video from 2013. And that last one I only found thru DDG, even though Google and YouTube are parts of the same vast, lumbering monolith and you'd think its search tentacle would do an excellent job of indexing its video tentacle, wouldn't you? But no, or at least not anymore.

Bridge Creek Falls

Next we're paying a quick visit to Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range right off Highway 6, at the Tillamook State Forest's "Footbridge Day Use Area and Trailhead". Like most of the recreation spots along Highway 6, the turnoff is a bit awkward and you'll miss it entirely if you blink at the wrong time.

Getting to the falls from the parking lot is not difficult if you know what you're doing. The one exciting part is that the falls are on the other side of the highway, so you have to walk back up to the road, look for the trail on the other side of the highway, and sprint across when nobody's coming. Be patient and wait as long as you need to, or come back a different day when the road isn't packed with seniors in RVs and angry business dudes in BMWs who desperately want to pass the RVs. Or more precisely, they paid good money for that M5, and Highway 6 would be an ideal road for doing M5 stuff except for that one stupid RV chugging along at 20mph. Now if there was just a good place to whip around those geezers and really floor it the way its Bavarian creators intended... which in practice means you get to catch up to the next RV that much faster. And somehow there's always another RV up there chugging away. Passing one RV is easy. Passing another one every 10 minutes is annoying but doable. But somehow, passing all of them is a whole different sort of problem, and might involve some variation on Zeno's paradox.

Assuming you don't get M5'd while crossing the street, there's an old sign for the trail. It's the only sign, for the only trail, you can't miss it. The first thing you'll notice are stairs. And not just any stairs, created with dirt and boards and maybe some chicken wire. No, these are carved stone stairs, made by people who knew what they were doing, and they don't look recent. What you're looking at is a vestige of the 1930s WPA project that created Highway 6 in more or less its current form. Modernizing the old Wilson River Road became urgent after summer 1933, when the northern Coast Range was devastated by the first of the Tillamook Burn series of forest fires. At one point the new road was planned to open by December 1936, per this map, but that goal slipped due to funding and construction difficulties. Over the course of the year, the project was repeatedly funded and canceled, and authorities quarreled over things they should have worked out before starting, like who was paying for what, and whether the road could legally charge tolls.

Things continued along that way for a few more years, and eventually 1941 rolled around and the road was finally almost ready to open. So they announced a grand opening gala for August 19th, but quickly canceled that, blaming it on a typo. Then the September 19 date was rained out, and the new road finally opened without fanfare in October 1941. The state planned to treat this as a sort of soft opening and still have the planned grand opening gala in the following spring. I couldn't find any indication that this ever actually happened. I imagine that, like a lot of big plans, it just sort of fell by the wayside after Pearl Harbor.

During all that news about the roadwork, there wasn't anything in the paper about their plans for the Bridge Creek area specifically, or a list of places that were be brought up to WPA standards. The latter would be interesting in case there are other examples of their design work along the way, but forgotten out there in the forest somewhere. And maybe there are still records of a master plan on file somewhere, though I'm not sure who gets those after the responsible federal agency is abolished, like the WPA was. Maybe the National Archives would have that? In any case, Oregon newspapers did not mention Bridge Creek Falls by name until the 2020s: First a March 2020 roundup of scenic Coast Range waterfalls worth visiting, and again in October 2021 as one of the highlights of the Wilson River Trail.

Some links from around the interwebs, mostly concerning the falls, the river, the footbridge over the river, and the various trails radiating out from the far side of the bridge.

• OregonWaterfalls
• Waterfall Record
• PNW Photo Blog
• Aaron's Waterfall World
• The Outdoor Project
• The Hiking Project
• Trail Run Project
• Oregon Discovery
• The Narrative Image
• Day by Day - Rock Climbing & Life
• Wandering Yuncks
• my morning moxie
• Paul's Bizarre Website

Oh, and there's also

another Bridge Creek Falls in Oregon, in Deschutes County, upstream of famous Tumalo Falls. That waterfall was even mentioned once in the Oregonian a few years before the coastal one, in a 2017 article about things to do in the Bend area.

The Wave

I was out at the coast recently and stopped in Cannon Beach, and happened to park at a municipal lot a block or so off the main drag. The lot has a couple of public restrooms, and a small but very shiny and sparkly sculpture nearby that seems to get leaned on a lot by people waiting for someone in the restrooms. I took a couple of photos when it (the art) wasn't in use, so here they are. One thing I didn't see was a nameplate or any kind of indication who made it or what it was called, but I correctly assumed the city or local tourism office or someone was bound to have a public art page covering Cannon Beach, aand I was right again. So thanks to that, I can report that this is called The Wave, and it was made by Northwest artist Sharon Warman Agnor, and a local news site in Vancouver (WA) interviewed her back in 2017. I don't know the exact year it was made or when it arrived at the beach, but apparently Cannon Beach has a program similar to Lake Oswego where the city puts art on display for a year and then asks the public to vote on which one (if any) to buy and add to the permanent collection. The walking tour guides say The Wave won the voting after its trial year in town, but doesn't say what year that was. I really thought this detail was important I could probably just start calling or emailing people; it's a small town and it seems like everyone who actually lives there knows each other to some degree, so someone is bound to remember.

lee kelly sculpture at salishan

Ok, so here's another post that's been lurking in my Drafts folder for ages. During a summer 2014 trip to the Oregon Coast, I stayed at the groovy 60s hotel at Salishan for a few days, and (though I hadn't planned it this way) got a couple of blog posts out of it. The latter post was about a print on the wall in my hotel room, and in it I mentioned something about the hotel's developer being a big patron of the arts, both at the hotel & elsewhere. Among other things, he was responsible for the ginormous Lee Kelly sculpture along the Willamette river in the Johns Landing area, plus the 60s & 70s-era art all over the hotel grounds. Which brings us to the above photo. The sculpture pictured is in a courtyard outside the hotel's conference center, and as soon as I saw it I thought, hey, wait, I think I know who made that, and (for good or ill) I've tracked down a lot of his stuff over the lifetime of this humble blog. Unfortunately the courtyard was taped off for an event and I couldn't get any closer to it, and ended up with just the one photo.

I figured that would be fine, and I could just Google/Bing/Yahoo/Lycos it when I got home & flesh out the post from there. So I tried that, and... not so much. I found a 1981 Oregonian article about the hotel, which confirmed the thing is a Kelly, and said it went in around 1977... but it didn't mention what it's called. The usual procedure here is that I need to know a name, otherwise I don't have a blog post title, and untitled posts are stuck in Drafts limbo until that little problem gets sorted. But as far as I can tell that one little factoid doesn't exist anywhere on the interwebs. I tried again just now and all I found was someone else's photo of it, from a better angle but again without a name. I suppose I could have just called or emailed the hotel and asked them, like some sort of wild and crazy extrovert (who doesn't mind coming off as a weirdo), but I've come this far in the blog (non-)industry without resorting to, y'know, interacting with people, so why start now? Especially since there's a very good chance it's just called "Untitled" anyway. So this post has sat around in Drafts for close to four years now, which is a bit much. So I'm going to go ahead and declare a statute of limitations on unsolved minor mysteries that nobody else cares about, and post this anyway.

And hey, if you happen to know the answer, the comments are open. I actually just re-enabled anonymous comments as a goodwill gesture for the GDPR era. The new regulations don't actually require that, but I just wanted to emphasize that while Google/Blogspot and Flickr might do tracking stuff with cookies (and I have no control over that), I don't have access to that data and I personally don't track anything or anyone, and have zero interest in doing so. I also don't have or want anyone's email address, phone number, pager, fax, telex, etc., and wouldn't use them if I somehow had them (even if it would help with a blog post title). Hell, I've been known to repeatedly forget the names of coworkers I've worked with for years. I mention all this because my Blogspot dashboard was badgering me to do or say something official about GDPR compliance, so here you go.

NW 18th St. Plaza, Lincoln City

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Lincoln City, on the Oregon Coast, is a long, sprawling affair along US 101, with no particular city center to it. Today's city only formed in 1965 after a handful of adjacent beach towns consolidated, so it does have several small commercial districts here and there along the highway. The Oceanlake district is the closest the town has to a downtown, with a few blocks of one and two story midcentury retail buildings. Many of these storefronts are antique shops today, with a few restaurants and used book stores mixed in. It's not quite the trendy chi-chi area the city would prefer it to be, so in recent years they've put together an urban renewal plan for the neighborhood, to figure out how to make it a more attractive destination.

The city's glossy 2013 urban renewal guide describes the various projects they've undertaken to brighten up the area, including the subject of today's post, a little pedestrian plaza at NW 18th St. and US 101:

NW 18th Street was a “T” intersection with Highway 101 and presented access problems for drivers from the residential area. It also created problems when cars stopped in the highway waiting to make a left turn onto NW 18th.

The street was closed at the highway and a small public plaza was constructed. Paver stones were included the walking surface, benches were installed, electric power was provided and local merchants bought decorative flags to display periodically.

The location was a natural site for a public art piece and the Lincoln City Art Committee commissioned a local metal artist to create a four-panel piece set into a concrete bench, celebrating our views of Cascade Head.

The screen was created by local artist Don Wisener in 2008. I source I ran across once, but can't locate now, claimed the screen design was chosen so the art would double as a windbreak. I can't prove it because I can't find the original link anymore, but it would certainly be a sensible thing to do in this part of the world.

Above and Below

So I went out to the coast for a couple of days recently, and stayed at the hotel at Salishan, just south of Lincoln City. The hotel dates to 1965 and still has a swanky 60s feel to it, due in part to all the then-contemporary art scattered around the complex. The developer behind Salishan was John Gray, who also developed Sunriver south of Bend, Skamania Lodge in the Gorge, and parts of the Johns Landing area just south of downtown Portland. When not developing resorts, Gray was president of Omark Industries, a forest products equipment maker, and was also an avid patron of the arts, focusing exclusively on local artists. Hence the giant Lee Kelly sculpture outside the old Omark headquarters building on Macadam.

Now that you're up to speed on the background of the place: I'm sitting on the sofa in my hotel room, and I look up at the art on the wall right over me. It's a linocut print with a sort of circus theme, and I notice it's signed by Manuel Izquierdo. Izquierdo is best known as a sculptor (or at least he is to me), and I'm rather fond of his work, so I've tracked down a fair number of his creations around town. I'm not sure I'd ever seen one of his prints before, though, so I figured I ought to snap a couple of photos and, um, create a blog post around it. So this print is titled Above and Below, and is dated 1976. The Portland Art Museum has a copy as well, donated by the artist's estate in 2010, but it's not currently on view.

This post probably involved the least effort ever, on the photo end. All I had to do was roll over and get my phone and take a few photos, without ever getting off the sofa.

Salishan Beach

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Here are a few photos from a deserted Oregon beach in mid-August. That doesn't sound possible, does it? To understand what's going on here, I have to give a little background first. Oregon's famous Beach Bill reserves all beaches along the Oregon Coast as a public right-of-way; in fact beaches are legally a state highway, though obviously they don't function as one. (This legal quirk is why it fell to the state highway commission to famously dynamite a beached whale back in 1970.) The right of way only extends up to the normal high tide mark, so while the beach itself is public, access to it is a whole other story. Particularly since the coast is also full of gated communities, and casual interlopers typically aren't really their thing.

The Salishan Resort sits on Siletz Bay, a few miles south of Lincoln City. Parts of it date back to the early 1960s, just before modern environmental laws really got going. The resort includes a hotel as well as a big gated community of funky 1970s and 1980s vacation homes, and the whole complex is built around a golf course. A small shopping area and spa along US 101 were added later. The gated community fronts on several miles of public beach, including a stretch of houses that runs much of the length of sandy Salishan Spit. Those houses probably wouldn't stand up under a tsunami or a really serious storm, and you certainly wouldn't get environmental approval to build them today, but it must have seemed like a great idea back in the 1970s. Anyway, you have a situation where the long stretch of beach here is publicly owned, but the road to the beach is gated and mere mortals aren't allowed through it.

It turns out that the beach here isn't entirely inaccessible, if you know the secret. And don't worry if you don't know the secret, because I'm about to tell you. There's a short, easy trail to the beach that begins right next to the Salishan shopping center, between it and the spa complex. The trailhead is unmarked other than a "No through traffic" sign, and looks like a service road or something. I don't know if the developers were legally obligated to provide a trail, or they did it on their own to ward off a lawsuit, or precisely what terms the trail was constructed under, but they clearly weren't obligated to advertise the existence of a trail, and they don't. I only know about it because I was staying at the hotel; the front desk there will explain how to get to the beach, but you have to ask.

If you find the trail and follow it, you quickly come to a fork in the path: Golf carts straight ahead, "Nature Trail" to the right. You want to take the nature trail here, because you are not a golf cart. The trail runs along a hedge-topped levee between the golf course and Siletz Bay, which also serves as a windbreak for the golf course. Part of the way it feels like you're walking along in a tunnel inside the hedge, and you can't see anything at all off to either side. As I understand it, the main reason for this hedge tunnel is to ensure rich people don't have to look at the occasional disgusting peasant while golfing, as this upsets their delicate sensibilities and makes them take extra strokes to get the little ball in the little hole, which (in turn) results in mental anguish and/or emotional distress and/or decreased property values, and it all ends up in court somehow. Anyway, continue along the trail and you get to a forested section, and eventually you come to a clearing next to Salishan Dr., the main road through the subdivision. Just off to the left, there's an intersection with Sea Dunes Rd., and a brief bit of road that takes you to the beach access point. Take the walkway over the dunes and you're at the beach, and it's quite possible nobody else will be there. I'm sure it helped that it was 58 and foggy the day I visited, and the entire shopping center had closed for the day, but I doubt the beach ever gets very busy. From here you can walk south toward the Gleneden Beach area, or north to the tip of the spit. At that point it's a stone's throw across a narrow channel to Lincoln City. The channel is the entrance to Siletz Bay, though, so I suspect trying to swim across would be a deeply unwise choice.

Ft. George Garden, Astoria

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I was rummaging through an old iPhoto library a while back and noticed I had a few photos of of the Ft. George Garden in Astoria, an overgrown rose garden surrounded by an ornate iron fence, on Exchange St. behind the Fort George Brewery. These photos were taken several years ago, shortly before the brewery opened. Apparently they've employed a gardener to look after the place, so it may not be as overgrown as it was the last time I was there.

The garden sits next to a small city park marking the site of Fort Astoria, a fur trading post founded in 1811, which happened to be the first American settlement on the Pacific coast. After only two years in business, the fort was sorta-captured by the British during the War of 1812, and spent the next 33 years as Fort George (as in King George the 3rd), an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company. The post was later abandoned as the Hudson's Bay Company moved its main operations inland to Fort Vancouver. I don't know whether the garden itself has any particular historical significance. Based on the fencing I'm going to guess the garden (or at least the fence) dates to the late 19th or early 20th century, or later if someone was aiming for a retro look.

Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach

From the archives, a few circa-2007 photos of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, OR. Not to be confused with the other Haystack Rock further south at Pacific City. Or, according to Wikipedia, a third Haystack Rock far to the south in Coos County. Curiously, Wikipedia mentions zero Haystack Rocks outside of Oregon, so apparently we're alone in using agricultural metaphors to describe large-scale seaside geology. I have no explanation for why that might be, so feel free to grab that hypothesis and run with it for your dissertation, assuming you can prove it and you think it'll help.

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Munson Creek Falls

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Today's adventure takes us to Munson Creek Falls, a few miles south of Tillamook where the Coast Range meets dairyland. It's a surprising place to find a 319 foot waterfall, at least if you're accustomed to Columbia Gorge waterfalls.



The falls are a state park, so there's a fairly large and visible sign for the turn off US 101 (which is a left turn if you're heading south from Tillamook). But the road you'll turn onto doesn't look like a road to somewhere you'd want to go. It's paved, at first, but it's quite narrow and is in very poor condition, with ginormous potholes all over the place. There are houses on either side of the road, and as far as you can tell you're just driving around on some random rural road out in dairy country.

(Technically the place is a "state natural site" rather than a "state park". I'm not sure what that's supposed to indicate, but my gut feeling is that it means they aren't going to spend any state money improving the road anytime soon.)



Once you're past the last houses the road turns to gravel, and it looks like you've wandered onto a random Forest Service road in timber country. It's not any wider than the paved portion, and there are a few big potholes here and there, including one in the middle of a bridge (!), but for the most part the gravel part of the road is in better condition than the paved portion. It's effectively a one lane road most of the way, so you need to watch for oncoming traffic. I didn't encounter any log trucks, but it definitely looks like a road where log trucks are a serious possibility, so pay attention.



There are also a couple of intersections to keep an eye out for. The route to the falls is clearly marked (so long as nobody monkeys with the signs), at least. There's no cell service out here to distract you while you're driving (at least if you're a T-Mobile customer like me), so you'd have to work at it a bit to get lost, unless you planned on using Google Maps for directions. If you do manage to get lost somehow, I have no idea where you might end up if you take the wrong turn.



It's a short drive, at least, and pretty soon you'll end up at the parking lot for the falls. From the lot it's an easy 1/4 mile walk to the falls viewpoint. The trail itself is well maintained, in much better shape than the road, and almost as wide. You still won't be right next to the falls at the viewpoint, and there's a railing with a sign saying it's super dangerous, prohibiting you from taking a step further. In practice you can go a bit further ahead without heroic efforts, but the view of the falls is actually better back at the viewpoint. And if you're carrying a mini-tripod like I was, the "none shall pass" fence at the viewpoint is a good place to set up and start taking longer exposures of the falls (which is what you do to get the classic silky water effect people often do with waterfalls).



Speaking of photos, the main problem I ran into was that, on a sunny day, the foliage in the foreground was bright, while the falls remained in shadow in the background. I expect this happens a lot in this location, so getting exposure and colors right can present a challenge. A cloudy day might be an asset in this case, which is nice since the coast has no shortage of cloudy days.

evening fog, lincoln city

Time Capsule, Lincoln City

For reasons I've been unable to determine, back in 2001 Lincoln City planted a time capsule right in the middle of the local outlet mall, to be opened in 2051. I've also been unable to find out why it's leaning like this, or what's inside, or really any other info at all beyond what's on the plaque here.

I can't help but wonder what the surrounding outlet mall will look like in 2051. Like all strip malls, the place doesn't really have an air of permanence about it. It's far enough uphill that it should be safe from any rise in ocean levels (and I should probably avoid the whole subject, for fear of attracting creepy conservative trolls). A Blade Runner-type dystopia seems like another possibility, although Blade Runner is set in 2019, not 2051, so we have just nine years to develop all that cool futuristic technology and then let it all rust and go to seed on us. I'm not really seeing that, which leaves either a.) the Rapture, followed by Armageddon, six headed goats of Babylon, etc., which I don't believe in, or b.) the actual end of everything on January 19th, 2038 when the time_t's roll over.

In short, we're all doomed well before 2051, and we'll never learn what treasures lie within this mysterious structure. Well, unless tweakers break into it in the middle of the night, which is quite possible, being the coast and all.