We were hoping for reasonable weather; global warming delivered a perfect day. Caroline sprung from the yurt with glee. The sky was a perfect blue, and it was cold enough to warrant a couple of cups of hot coffee from our favorite little coffee shop in the whole world – Dutch Bros! A bit of fog adds mystery to the landscape, and it turns out that extraordinary high and low tide events are happening while we are traversing the coast. The drives between campsites are short so we have more time for sightseeing and sipping coffee. Our first hike on this trip was a part of the Oregon Coast Trail – the OCT in local parlance.

So here’s the tragedy of the photos that follow here on this day and the next four: Originally, I had posted the above text on this day (the 22nd), and there was one paragraph that accompanied a single photo on the 23rd. After that, there was nothing. I hadn’t even posted photos. As a matter of fact, the photos you are seeing are what necessitated this explanation, as back in 2007, when these posts were originally created, we were still dealing with poor bandwidth, and I could only include 1 photo per post, and even those were low resolution so it wouldn’t take 5 minutes for my homepage to download. Now what? I can’t muster anything meaningful to say about the individual images, as whatever thoughts were had back then are now lost to time.

While the images stay with us and will hopefully always be a part of how we see the world, whatever thoughts we were having back on these fall days cannot come back.

As we walked along the ocean here at Harris Beach on this day, there was a part of us changing as this marked not only our 8th visit to Oregon, though some of those had been very brief, it was also so far our lengthiest and most immersive stay on the coast.

These vistas, fog, the sound of crashing surf, silvery ocean, spectacular sunsets, and the nature of our accommodations in yurts all worked to ensure we’d be back time and again. How many times we couldn’t even imagine back then?

This was the original photo that accompanied this blog entry, as it was posted back in 2007. At that time, my blog was a “Photo Of The Day” affair, known then as POTD. It seemed perfectly adequate to post a single photo of a travel day with a small blurb to mark the occasion. Prior to this, people allowed their old photos to languish in drawers hidden away with all relevant data that pertained to whatever specifics they once knew about the people and locations long gone with fading memories. That Caroline and I would have some small snippet from the day, and a photo tied to it would allow us to return to the computer and dig out the old images so we could once again walk in the paths that we had traveled so many years before.

Back then I could never imagine that I’d take more than a quarter of a million images and delete nearly 25% of those as the quality was so poor. With so many photos saved as bits on a hard drive, there’s really no easy means to scan digital memories. Even so, many of the ones I’ve saved are far from worthy of looking at again. The saving grace is that I can still scan them and pull out a handful that still represents the best of the day.

Take this photo of misty trees near Cape Ferrelo, just 4 miles north of the photos from the beach pictured above. With 340 photos that track the majority of the day, we can glean points along our route that are obvious, and then with some Google Streetview sleuthing by Caroline, we can learn that we’d spent about 2 hours exploring Harris Beach in the morning, before making our way up here.

There are photos that, at first blush, are not all that appealing, but apply some lighting adjustments, and maybe I can breathe life into an otherwise lackluster image. Somewhat tragically I was shooting jpeg instead of RAW in 2007 when memory cards were still expensive and our lust to travel demanded we cut as many corners as possible. We loved staying in yurts; they were our cheapest options short of camping, but some of these mornings would dip into the upper 30s, and we didn’t feel prepared for that level of discomfort.

All these years later, I could have easily assumed that somehow we’d been transported to the Carl Washburne State Park much further up the road, as that’s where my memories are strongest for seeing a wide variety of mushrooms. These photos were, in fact, taken on the Oregon Coast Trail (OCT) near the House Rock View Point.

Not that it matters one little bit that we saw a banana slug on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007, on the OCT, but we did.

Pistol River State Scenic Viewpoint on a lovely day. What more can I say?

My lovely wife Caroline walking barefoot next to the sea on a perfect day.

That’s Humbug Mountain in the distance, as seen from the Battle Rock Wayside Park here in Port Orford.

Only minutes later, we were standing on the dock in Port Orford. It hadn’t magically become night in an instant; this is just the nice effect of a small aperture on a camera that is adjusting to the blinding reflection of the sea, or maybe I pointed the camera at the sun before locking the aperture to get this effect. In either case, it’s not the truth of the image that’s important but the feeling these locations inspired as we stood there for our minute or two we were so fortunate to be present.

It’s nearly impossible to make out the red light coursing over the trees, but it’s there. On a quiet night under the waxing gibbous moon, we stood in awe of the Umpqua Lighthouse, watching the silent light turn and dreaming of those at sea so many years ago who used this beacon to stay alive on a treacherous ocean. Our yurt is only down the road, our second time staying out here.