It’s nine in the morning, local time, as our plane glides down onto the runway at SeaTac. We have just crossed over the Cascade Range, which rises to the east in a miasma of cloud and snow-covered peaks, towering over layers of emerald forests, lakes, and the suburbia of greater Seattle. I’m tired after an early wake-up in Boston, and just a bit bored and lonely traveling on my own while Jane holds down the fort at home, but the view from the window seat sets my sleepy heart aflutter. It’s my first stint in the Northwest since a family vacation 13 years ago, and the prospect of immersing myself in a different landscape - one of towering, old-growth forests and gleaming coastlines - has been haunting me for years. In Seattle, I find my outbound gate (standing room only) and eat an early lunch before boarding the quick hop-flight down to Portland. Again in the north-facing window seat, I watch as the glaciated summit of Rainier, the collapsed caldera of St. Helens, and the distant, lonely cones of Adams and Baker pass us by. Crossing over the broad delta of the Columbia River, with its treacherous sandbars and seagoing barges, we descend into Portland. I pick up my rental car, a baby blue-teal Chevy Spark that I promptly name Blooty (after Jordan’s nickname, “Booty”), and head out onto the highway in the early afternoon.
Why the draw to the Oregon Coast? To the Pacific Northwest? For one thing, the region is one I’ve experienced too little of. High desert, low desert, chaparral, deciduous woodland, and a smattering of tundra and taiga in the north and on island peaks, have been my landscapes of experience over the past twenty years; outside of brief trips along the Sunset Coast, Cascadia’s unique blend of glaciated valleys, tidal dunes, cedar swamps, and temperate rainforests has been sorely absent. For another, a major reason why I photograph is to describe the natural world, and the beautiful ways in which ecology interacts with the human element - the way that landscape shapes our memories and our view of our place in the world. There can hardly be a holier Grail, for a woodland photographer like myself, than the coastal old-growth of the Northwest, where some of the oldest, tallest, largest organisms in the world dwell in some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the North American continent. And lastly, perhaps for the same reasons as above, some of my favorite professional landscape photographers hail from the region - from Oregon, Washington, or beautiful British Columbia - and it has long been a dream of mine to follow in their footsteps. For all of this, I’m spending five days driving down the length of the Oregon Coast, from Cannon Beach to Brookings, and exploring some of the region’s coastal towns, beaches, and well-preserved forests.
On the highway, the Portland traffic (substantial even mid-day on a Saturday) thins out as I cross over the Marquam Bridge and skirt the city, heading westward toward the coast on Route 26. As the road climbs over the Coast Range, the landscape transforms from a rain-spattered scene of lush green farmlands to one of deep valleys, pine forests, and mist-laced mountainsides. In the car, I’ve got on an impressively moody, heavily acoustic playlist that I’ve concocted just for this solo trip. The next few days of serenity and introspection will be powered by the likes of Daughter, Noah Gundersen, Sigur Rós, Sufjan Stevens, and multiple Life is Strange soundtracks. A guitar/mandolin mix of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” comes on as I descend toward the coast; driving alone, I belt out Robert Plant’s lovely folk lyrics by heart.
The major (and only) stop of the afternoon, after roughly two hours of driving since leaving the airport, is Ecola State Park on Oregon’s North Coast. I park the car at Ecola Point, where there is a vast view stretching to the south: breakers coming in across Crescent Beach and, past the next headland, crashing upon the sea stacks beyond Chapman Beach and Cannon Beach, where I’ll be lodging for the night. After paying the day-use fee at a kiosk and popping my ticket onto the dashboard, I fish my camera gear out of my suitcase, ditch my leisure reading book in the car (Heart of the Raincoast by Alexandra Morton and Billy Proctor), and set off on the trail to Crescent Beach. The walk meanders through the forest back in the same direction of the entrance road, winding through stands of Sitka spruce, pine, and cedar. Although I’ve intentionally timed the trip for the rainy winter months (with hopes of acquiring both solitude from other humans, and some moody atmospheric photos), today is an absolutely perfect weather day on the coast; the afternoon sun is gleaming through the tall trees, and impressively blue skies are beaming down on the beaches and coves below. The track through the forest is quite easy (if muddy in places, as trails will tend to be for the entire week), but I hike at a snail’s pace, soaking in the surroundings and breathing in the fresh forest air (also, it’s always impossible to resist photographing anything and everything on the first outing of a trip). In one of the loveliest segments of the trail, the walk crosses over Waterfall Creek, above a glen of enormous spruces and below a hillside of towering pines; golden sunlight is streaming into the scene at a low angle, casting lovely shadows and interplaying areas of light and dark throughout the forest. I take plenty of shots.
The last half-mile of the trail descends steeply along multiple switchbacks to arrive just above the wrack line on Crescent Beach. I am alone on the beach; to the distance in the north, I can make out my starting point on the headland; to the south, a series of impressive sea stacks and sheltered coves. I spend a bit of time here before undertaking the steep climb back up the hillside to rejoin the trail. Golden hour is approaching now, and the forest looks all the more lovely in the hues of the oncoming sunset.
Back at Ecola Point, I towel off the sweat I’ve worked up on the return climb from the beach, and swap my layers for my windproof jacket. A few photographers have begun to set up on the headland overlooking the beaches to the south, and I join them with my tripod. The scene is a stunning one - with cliffs, sea stacks, and forested promontories in the foreground, and the mountains of the Coast Range in the background, looking austere and majestically strewn with low-lying cloud. The seaside community of Cannon Beach appears as a tiny line of houses in the midst of all of this, between beach and forest. I mostly take some simple telephoto compositions of Haystack Rock and its surrounding sea stacks, and some panoramas of the entire scene. I try some long-exposures, but find that I vastly prefer to preserve the detail of the wave action; the background clouds and mist already lend enough smoothness and cleanliness to the image. As sunset approaches, what began as an initially promising golden hour turns out to be a bit of a skunk as the sun drops into a dense marine layer building up off the coast. The light fades suddenly and aside from a bit of magenta color in the high clouds, there’s not much light or color to be seen - much to the chagrin and ill humour of the photographers present with me on the bluff. I will soon learn that the sun’s going to be doing this disappearing act a lot over the next few days; sunset photography on the Oregon Coast, in winter, it turns out, is as much about luck as it is perseverance or preparation. Still, the photos I do keep (above and below) are quite pretty in their own right. As the skies darken, I drive back down the winding road toward Cannon Beach, and check into my room for the night at nearby Ecola Creek Lodge. It’s a perfectly cromulent little room, and it comes with a free chocolate chip cookie. After a very, very long-awaited hot shower, I make myself dinner (packed from home - you guessed it - instant ramen, tuna fish, dried seaweed), enjoy my cookie with dried fruit and a cup of hot tea while watching cooking shows on TV, and pass out early into a deep sleep.
Day Two. Jetlag getting the better of me, I wake in the dark well before my alarm. The pitter-patter of rain is coming down in the lodge’s courtyard koi pond, and I peek between the window blinds to get a sense of how wet the outside world is. Very wet, is the answer. In a polar reversal from yesterday’s good weather fortunes, todaythe pitter-patter, to varying degrees, is going to be with me from dawn to dusk, from Cannon Beach, past the Three Capes, to Pacific City. After a sad-kazoo breakfast (I didn’t pack any breakfast foods, and I haven’t gotten to a grocery store yet, so it’s just nuts, jerky, and fruit), I pop on my rain layer and my backpack’s rain cover, and head out down the street and up a hill to access the dunes at Chapman Beach. It’s the blue hour, and sunrise is nowhere to be seen on account of the low-lying cloud cover and misting weather. The dunes are packed and firm in the rain, and I walk along them, taking shots of the vegetation together with flocking gulls and distant views of sea stacks to the north and south. The photos don’t do a great job of conveying quite how high I am above the beach (there’s a decent fifty-foot dropoff which appears suddenly as I approach the edge of the dunes; I decide not to risk what looks like an uncomfortable and pointless descent toward the ocean, which is roaring even at low tide. As I traipse through the grass, the light falling mist turns into full-blown horizontal pelting rain. Getting utterly soaked, I make a hasty retreat back down the street to the lodge, where I towel off my own body and my camera body before checking out. On my way out of town, I make a quick pit stop at Fresh Foods where I buy bananas, juice boxes, and several breakfast sandwiches to last me the next day or two. Then it’s onward to the south, to a pair of morning hikes at Oswald West State Park. I send Jane a quick text to let her know where I’m headed and that I’ll be in and out of cell coverage.
A few miles to the south, after a snack in the car, I head out to Short Sand Beach along the Cape Falcon Trail. The way to the beach is blanketed in a forest of spruces and hemlocks, mixed in with the occasional western redcedar, tall and imposing. Walking along beneath the canopy, I am shielded from the ongoing rainstorm, which is reduced to a fine mist that falls on the understory of salal, Western sword ferns, and salmonberry bushes. It’s a lovely environment, if quite wet and muddy - and it’s all I can do to stop myself from taking a photo every few yards along the trail. It’s here that I first run into a technical issue that becomes increasingly problematic on the trip’s wetter days: the tradeoff between using CPL filter to cut through leaf shimmer and appropriately render the forest’s deep colors, versus the moisture and condensation that builds up the filter and the camera lens. You can see this in some of the smudged highlights on the photos below. At the beach, the forest opens onto howling wind and horizontally blowing rain flying in off the stormy seas. I take a quick photo of the beach - its piles of driftwood flanked by basalt and sandstone cliffs - before retreating back into shelter beneath the trees.
Back at the car, I move a short distance down the road to the trailhead at Elk Flats - an expanse of meadow flanked by the headlands of Cape Falcon and Neah-kah-nie Mountain. From here, it’s a short (muddy) jaunt to an overlook above the Devil’s Cauldron, a roiling cove pincered between two rocky seacliffs. Heading northward back toward Short Sand Beach, I walk a short distance into the forest, photographing the magnificent Sitka spruce forest here before returning to the car. The southward drive takes me past the towns of Manzanita and Nehalem; I pull off the road briefly at the marina in Wheeler, to watch the mist rolling in off Nehalem Bay. My next walk of the morning is a few miles south, on the outskirts of Rockaway Beach. Here, an ancient cedar swamp has been preserved in pristine, old-growth condition, and is home to one of the largest western redcedars in the entire state. I spend the next hour exploring the boardwalk here, photographing some of the bog plants (salal, beard lichen, Western skunk cabbage) in macro, and visiting the gigantic Great Cedar. Standing on a boardwalk at the edge of the bog, it is all but impossible to really capture on camera the experience of standing beneath this ancient behemoth tree; I give up and simply photograph the base of its trunk, with the boardwalk encircling it for context and scale.
A longer drive now, south past Garibaldi and slightly inland through the city of Tillamook (with its famous creamery, its industrial grunge, and the re-appearance, for the first time all day, of traffic signals). I turn back out toward the coast, headed to Cape Meares. In the community of Oceanside, overlooking waves crashing upon the beach, I have an absolutely delectable basket of fish-and-chips at family-run Blue Agate Cafe before they close for the afternoon (it’s not only Sunday, but also Super Bowl Sunday). The proprietess brings me a bottle of malt vinegar to go with the fish-and-chips; a way better accompanimnent than the usual ketchup and tartar sauce.
After lunch, I continue onward to the tip of Cape Meares, where I walk down to the little lighthouse on the headland and visit the Octopus Tree, a massive Sitka spruce whose many tentacles reach skyward, possibly as a result of coppicing by Native Americans several hundred years ago. For me, the more interesting visuals at Cape Meares are seaward, toward the group of sea arches that lie offshore from the headland. In the passing clouds of mist and oceanic rain, I take telephoto of the distant rocks, which remind me of something out of the Faroes.
Finishing at Cape Meares, I retrace my route back to the south, taking the Three Capes Scenic Route which hews close the coast, running from Meares past Cape Lookout and ultimately toward Cape Kiwanda and Pacific City - my destination for the night. Before leaving Oceanside, though, I pause on the roadside to take a photo back toward the seaside houses perched below the headland, which, in the warm light of the passing afternoon, look so idyllic as to be quintessentially coastal Oregon. Gazing back at the houses and trees shrouded in mist, and the beachgoers walking below on the shore, I find myself feeling oddly nostalgic for a life I’ve never lived - warm days spent playing in the surf, lounging around the diner, heading up to the cape for sunset.
Due to a road closure along Sandlake Road, my drive to Pacific City winds up taking a long detour back to Highway 101, and I finally arrive at Cape Kiwanda around 4 PM. From the dirt parking lot at the beach, I can hear the Super Bowl underway at the bar next door; there are several families hanging out on the beach, tailgating and listening over radio. It’s been a long day for me, so I choose not to make the long walk and climb up the imposing sand dunes of Cape Kiwanda, instead opting to photograph up and down the beach.
The day’s last stop is a few minutes away at Bob Straub State Park, which encompasses a system of marshside and beachside trails along the Nestucca Sand Spit. I spend most of the sunset hour exploring along the dunes between the marsh and the open beach. The weather remains moody and changeable; in between gusts of wind and rain, there are some moments of brilliant sunset sidelight, which I take advantage of, shooting panoramas as well as low compositions in the dune grass. After a cold and rainy hour walking back and forth across the dunes, I decide to call it quits as the sun sinks into yet another thick marine layer. I check myself into a lovely room and kitchenette that night at the Surf & Sand Inn in Pacific City, where I hang my clothes up to dry and make dinner. After a long, hot shower, and a bit of scouting for the next day’s weather and routes, it’s off to bed.
