Oregon Coast Revisited

I've written about the Oregon Coast before (here, here and here), but I can't get enough. The scenery is stunning, the food is delicious and the nature-viewing is spectacular.

Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach. Thousands of sea birds (including puffins and murres) nest on the rock while some of the best tidepooling on the Northern Oregon Coast is at the base.

The last time we went we only had half a day to explore before we had to be back in Portland but it was better than nothing. We chose to go to Cannon Beach as it was the quickest trip from Portland (about 1.5 hours) and had guaranteed wildlife viewing. We had no idea what the tide schedule was when we went, but as luck would have it the tide was out, making the tidepooling great.

The Friends of Haystack Rock have a wonderful intrepretive program in the area and the guides are eager to help identify the marine life in the tidepools. They also have viewing scopes set up so that the public can see the birds nesting on the Rock.

Sea anemones and sea weed in a tidepool. The reflections on the water make photography a bit tricky. This was my best shot of the day.

A harlequin duck watches the surf.

Watercolor of ochre sea star

With the constant wind and moisture from the surf, it is challenging to sketch on the beach. Given our short time there, I decided to draw what we saw later. I planned on just a quick watercolor sketch of this lovely sea star but as is typical of me, I ended up spending nearly 2 hours on this piece. Ochre stars are very common along the coast and the only type of sea star I've ever seen there. This great website shows all of the other sea stars found in Oregon. Since I hope to be able to go back to the Oregon Coast again and again, maybe I'll get to see some of these other species someday.

Oregon Oddities

Hope all my US readers had a great Thanksgiving! We're now in the November blahs here in the Northern Rockies; it's dark, it's cold, and so Oregon in the summer is not far from my thoughts.

While Paul and I, and our friends Denise & Jim were traipsing about the lovely coast of Oregon, we did spot the occasional odd thing here and there. I've already shared the Head at Hug Point with you. A few days earlier we had traveled south to Newport, OR and Yaquina Bay Lighthouse State Park. We tried to get there when tide was at its lowest because the park has some great tidepooling and we got an hour or so in, and then we explored some of the other parts of the park once the water got too high to safely tidepool. There's a sheltered cove that seal lions and harbor seals often hang out in so we walked down to that area and noticed that the railing and posts of the fence along the sidewalk had become a caterpillar highway! They seemed to be traveling with great intent, but in all different directions.

This is just a small group of the hundreds of caterpillars we saw

Denise identified them as being in the Tussock moth family, but we've yet to figure out exactly what kind they were.

We then continued on down to the cove and watched two seals on a rock watching a great blue heron on another rock watching the fish. Unfortunately we discovered that although we had left the main batch of caterpillars behind, there were still some roaming the railings in this area and we accidentally squished a few as well as picked up a few hitchhikers on our clothes. It was tricky trying to remove them from us without touching those hairs that looked like they'd be very itchy.

For a minute, the seal found us an interesting diversion. Then he/she went back to watching the heron.

On another day we headed into the temperate rainforests that make up the Northwest Pacific Coast in search of the ubiquitous banana slug. There was plenty of fog, plenty of vegetation, but no slugs. We eventually found one on the Washington coast, but it wasn't like the olive green giants that I remember seeing in Olympic National Park. However, it was the first slug we'd seen the whole week, so it became much celebrated and photographed.

Later, Denise told me that after we headed home, they saw some real field guide quality banana slugs on a hike they took near where we had been staying. They also finally heard a varied thrush on that hike; a bird we'd been trying to get all week.

And when you are hungry after all the hiking and beachcombing and gingerly picking caterpillars off of you, where do you go to eat? Why at the Inflatable Crab, of course!

Hey Kids, We're Going on a Road Trip!

There are still many photos from our trip to Oregon in July that I haven't had a chance to go through and edit. One bunch of photos I knew I wanted to do a post about as I was taking the pictures. I think my friend Denise and I even used the word "blogworthy" at the time. Since things are pretty un-blogworthy around here right now, I figured it was time to dust them off and share them.


One day during our trip in July we all piled into the car and headed up the coast of Oregon and across the Columbia River into Washington. We were birding and hitting the Lewis & Clark historic sites along the way, but there was one stop we had to make just for the sheer silliness of it. In Long Beach, WA one can find Marsh's Free Museum, home of Jake the Alligator Man. How could we travel all that way and not pay Jake a visit?

Jake gets plenty of press time.

The, er, man himself. Watch out kid, don't get too close.

Packed in amongst the shelves of keychains, mugs, tee-shirts, magnets, toothpick holders, shot glasses and bumperstickers all sporting Jake's image, Marsh's also had other curiosities including a two-headed calf...


A shrunken head...

...a number of old music boxes and player pianos, a variety of taxidermied exotic animals from around the world, and a human skeleton on display in a coffin. The place kind of reminded me of a Coney Island-meets-Wall Drug-type tourist attraction. In one form or another Marsh's has been serving the discerning public since 1937. You gotta hand it to the family for being so enterprising.

Daily Sketch - False Lily of the Valley

Maianthemum species - false lily of the valley

I don't often get to enjoy the luxury of having time to sit and sketch a plant in depth. Even on our vacation to Oregon in July, there was so much to see and do that we were always on the go. One afternoon, however, I did have some free time and so I wandered around outside the house we were sharing on the coast with Denise and Jim. I found all sorts of wonderful plants growing right around the house, including this one. It is a native, but was being used in the landscaping - a smart choice for low maintenance gardening. Why fight the climate you are in, after all. Grow a plant that's genetically adapted to the area! This one made a lovely shade groundcover. The leaves are thick and deep green, it has delicate white flowers in spring and then these mottled berries in summer. What's not to like?

Oregon Tidepooling

I've been so busy since we returned from our Oregon vacation in July that all of my photos have remained on my photo card, languishing without my attention. It seems so long ago now that we were on the coast. I miss it, and I miss laughing my a** off with Paul, Denise and Jim, and poking around in the tidepools with them. Here are a few of the interesting things we saw...

A giant green anemone at low tide remains open in the little bit of water that is left in its pool. In the lower right hand corner of the photo you can see a shiny dark green thing - that's the edge of another giant green anemone that has retracted in on itself for low tide.

A bit of kelp makes a beautiful pattern against the beach pebbles.

Gooseneck barnacles and mussels on an exposed rock at low tide.

This crab had shuffled off this mortal coil (did I mention I'm a Monty Python fan?) by the time we saw it. A gull was trying to get the last bits of tasty meat out of the nooks and crannies of its shell when we happened upon it. The coloring and patterns on its shell were just fantastic.

These pink sea anemones, called aggregating anemones were much smaller than the more common giant green ones we saw. These were clustered in a sandy-bottomed tidepool at Hug Point.

There's a really cool website with great pictures all about the critters you can find in the Oregon tidepools at http://www.oregontidepooling.com/
Their focus is on southern Oregon tidepools but many of the things we saw in the north are included on their website.

Hope you enjoyed the trip down Memory Lane with me.

Oregon - The Head at Hug Point

The Oregon coast is rugged and beautiful, with scenic treasures around every turn. All along Highway 101 are scattered lots of view points, state parks, and other opportunities to get out and explore. One little gem we discovered just south of Cannon Beach was a little park called "Hug Point", with beach access. The four of us had had our fill of seafood that evening and needed to stretch our legs, so we popped off the road for a quick stroll along the beach. It was low tide, exposing large stretches of the sand and also access to two other coves that would have been cut off at high tide. The cliffs were riddled with caves as well. We were like a bunch of kids discovering a new land. We excitedly went exploring, checking out the caves and looking for shells, or tidepools or whatever we might come across. What we discovered in the cliffs was not what we expected!


Denise spotted it first and called the rest of us over. If you look at the upper left of this photo, you'll see what we saw peering down at us from the cliff. Kinda cool, kinda creepy. I decided to zoom in on the face with my camera, since often the viewing distance is what causes the illusion. However, it seemed like this illusion held up pretty well even in close view. It was as if someone had placed a doll's head up in that niche and it had become weathered and coated with sand. And that eye - creepy!

We have since been scouring the internet, trying to see if anyone else had noticed the head or if there was a legend about it or anything, but we haven't found any references to it yet. Could it be that we are the only ones who have ever seen The Head at Hug Point...