Fort Stevens to Nehalem, Oregon

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

Disclaimer: This post is one of those that ended up being written years after the experience was had. While there was a paragraph or two posted way back then with a single photo, there were no other notes taken, so most of what is shared here must be extracted from the images and what memories they may have lent us.

Sunrise at Fort Stevens State Park on the coast of Oregon is exactly what one would be expected to take advantage of after waking in a yurt that is within walking distance of the shore.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

We were on a short walk before meeting up with the friends we had dinner with last night.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

The wreck of the Peter Iredale that’s been out here rusting away for the past 102 years.

Kirk Millhollin and John Wise at Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

Here’s Captain Kirk hamming it up for the camera. thought he’d be cute, but unfortunately for me, I snapped the photo a moment too soon. Just as he approached to give the appearance he was going to lay one on me, I turned my head and gave him a full-on-mouth kiss – with tongue. Yeah, who’s laughing now, Mr. Millhollin?

Update in April 2021: Sadly, Kirk and I had a total fallout back in the middle of 2017 due to circumstances that were complicated due to my wishful thinking and (in large part) my inability to simply deal with funding issues with the company I was running at the time and that Kirk moved to Arizona to be a part of. I don’t believe there can ever be a resolution beyond where we are today, which is totally 100% non-contact. After knowing the guy for 22 years, I often wonder how he’s doing regardless of the circumstances around our parting.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

Kirk had wanted to take us out to a small area spit of land on the Jetty Trail near Point Adams, where at other times of the year, he’d found an abundance of mushrooms, the special kind of magic ones that authorities frown upon harvesting.

This amanita muscaria or fly agaric is not one of the ones I was referring to although some claim that they too have mystical properties.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

Kirk, Rachel, and the kids needed to head back early to Portland, so Caroline and I returned to our yurt to get a bite to eat and pack up our stuff. Though we weren’t going far.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

We are still at Fort Stevens, except instead of the Pacific Ocean side, we are over on the Columbia River. The ruin is part of an old series of military batteries built over one hundred years ago to defend the Columbia River’s mouth.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

The rusty and crumbling fortified hulks are just the aesthetic I’m in love with.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

It turns out that there’s a guided tour that takes visitors into the underground structures; sadly, we didn’t get to participate in that as we weren’t aware of those tours at the time we were visiting.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

Some people go for jewelry and nice clothes; I go for textures and patterns found out and about.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

Near Swash Lake and Jetty Lagoon, just wandering around.

Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton, Oregon

While I believe we are somewhere out on the Clatsop Spit and that we are looking at the Columbia River, I could easily be wrong, but we are in the general vicinity of that area.

Astoria, Oregon

A late lunch in Astoria across from the Pilot House Luxury Suite that we’ll never want to afford, though secretly we’d love to.

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Cannon Beach, Oregon

What happened to the time between lunch and this late afternoon is lost in memories that cannot be found, but that’s of no real matter because here we are, smiling and happy at Cannon Beach, Oregon.

[I have some faint memories that our friends didn’t actually leave but hung out with us a bit more. We definitely ended up buying a big bag of saltwater taffy in Seaside – Caroline]

Sunset at Cannon Beach, Oregon

Add to the other thousands of memories we have of sunsets along the coast, or is it millions by now?

John Wise at Cannon Beach, Oregon

Yep, it’s so cold out here at the end of the day that even I needed a beanie to keep my ears warm. Did I tell you that Caroline spun and knit this work of love for me?

Sunset at Cannon Beach, Oregon

The iconic Haystack of Cannon Beach at sunset, what could be better than a walk here, even on a chilly late fall day?

We’ll be sleeping in a yurt again this evening down south of Manzanita, Oregon, at Nehalem Bay State Park.

Day in Portland

JWise Moments, Travels

Up early and on the road south to Portland to meet up with Kirk and Rachel. I’m not really here. It is as though I am still in slow-wave sleep, one of the deepest stages of sleep. Or maybe I am in sleep inertia, the state just after being woken from a deep sleep when mental performance is yet impaired. In any case, I feel as though I’m drifting out of Washington and into Portland without plan, reason, or cause, and from the looks of the multitude of homeless people in downtown Portland, they, too, are hereby mysterious circumstances.

How about lunch? Sure, you guys name it; I don’t know this part of town. Hell, I don’t know any part of this town, nor do I know why I agreed to come here. I want to be at the ocean. I have gone on vacation to get away from it all, and now I’m in the middle of it all. How about this place? Yeah, give me a fork. I might at other times feel that my distance could be interpreted as rude detachment, but I’m working at convincing myself that I am moving into the abyss of old age and hope that those around me can accept and understand why so little of me is presently here and thus allow me to feel better about my funk.

Kirk and I were in competition for who could visit the buffet more times than the other. It was a draw, not that this meal would weigh too heavily upon us, as most of the dishes were vegetarian. Finished with our feast and being in the Pacific Northwest there is an unspoken demand that you stop every 20 minutes for coffee, else why the crazy proliferation of coffee shops? Rachel recommended a shop around the corner for the four of us to imbibe some hot black liquid energy. Wicked strong and well suited to take the pallor off an otherwise gray day.

Our mobile larder needed stocking, so shopping at something akin to Whole Foods was on order; we were delivered to New Seasons in the Seven Corners area of Portland. With plans to do some serious vegetarian cooking over an open fire, I piled the veggies into our shopping cart. Fortuitous this stop proved to be as we had bought a block of Beecher’s Flagship cheese that we fell in love with and would be surprised later in the trip upon visiting Pike’s Place in Seattle to stumble into their factory.

Our tour of Portland took us to Washington Park, which sits next to the much larger Forest Park. My spirits perk up; I am near nature. Vacation must be close at hand; the imagination is awakening. Not long after our encounter with the natural world, plans are made to return for some hiking in these parks with Kirk and Rachel. In minutes, we are delivered back to our dash animations and soon find ourselves gliding silently out of Portland on our way to the Pacific Ocean. We agreed to meet Kirk and Rachel for dinner in Astoria before our day’s journey ends in Ft. Stevens State Park, where a yurt awaits us.

A little Italian place is chosen where we have the chance to meet Rachel’s children, Cassidy and Ian. Ian made a great impression by first being listless, lethargic, and generally grumpy due to a cold or allergies until after dinner when, with great aplomb, he hurled what little dinner he had eaten upon the sidewalk. Kirk, not having a dog-pooh picker-upper bag with him, had to abandon the cheesy pile for the next dog to walk by – you just know a dog wouldn’t be able to help itself to that little midnight snack.

I felt for Rachel this evening; not only did she have to comfort her barfing boy, but earlier in the day, she voiced concern for her daughter Cassidy, who, as she described it, “is getting a little too hormonal.” It must be tough on a mother to think her kid is about to go succubus. Caroline and I failed to pick up this side of her daughter’s precocious nature as we were preoccupied with wolfing down dinner so we could make our way to the coziness of our yurt. We actually thought both children were pleasantly well-behaved. Kirk, Rachel, and the kids took off for their nearby hotel; we retired to our yurt, falling asleep to the sound of the ocean in the distance.

Note: I, too, wonder why there were no photos from this day, not even bad ones.

Leaving via the Redwoods

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

It’s 7:00 as we start to pull away from our yurt here at Harris Beach State Park in the far south of Oregon. We have 400 miles to drive today in order for us to reach Sacramento, California, for our flight home. Fortunately, we are booked on the 7:40 p.m. departure with an arrival in Phoenix at 10:30 p.m.

With no less than 7 hours required to reach the airport, we don’t have a lot of time today to goof off.

I don’t know if we missed this on the way up or if we were in too much of a hurry to reach our yurt, but a headless Babe here at Trees of Mystery certainly demanded a photo. What I wouldn’t give for some red and white paint along with a ladder so I could get up there and paint a bloody stump over the canvas….maybe I’m remembering Mark Pauline at SRL (Survival Research Laboratories) and channeling his shenanigans?

We’d made good time on the road, and with a few hours to spare, we needed to spend time amongst the Redwoods. The lighting was just right, so here we go.

I can no longer tell you which part of the park we were visiting as just as I shared in the previous posts, this entry is being penned 13 years after the visit. Read the day before this if you want more details of what happened.

This year of 2007 saw us traveling a lot. In January, we spent New Year’s at Bosque del Apache over in New Mexico, watching snow geese launch at dawn. A week later, we were in San Francisco for five days, and before the month was over, we made it to the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles. Of course, my mother-in-law Jutta was with us, and we definitely had to entertain her, but we didn’t stop there. February took us to Death Valley for a few days, but then we took a break until the end of March before heading over to Santa Barbara to visit family. In April, we visited the Trinity Site in New Mexico, home of the first atomic blast. In Early May, we flew into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a 15-day East Coast trip that had us in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusets, Rhode Island, Connecticut, back to New York and Pennsylvania, before dipping into Maryland, spending a minute in North Carolina, zipping through Virginia and then driving back to Pennsylvania to catch a Chihuly glass art installation at the Phipps Conservatory. Restless, we returned to Santa Barbara in June and then spent the 4th of July in Yellowstone for five days. Nothing happened after that until August, when New Mexico drew us back. September saw us heading into Kansas so Caroline could learn to make yarn by learning to use a spinning wheel; actually, that took quite a while. And now here we are in California checking out raindrops on ferns and I can honestly say that they are just as fascinating as any geyser, great lake, lighthouse, canyon, or ponies out on Assateague Island.

It’s long been our belief to find the magic in every place we visit and to be fully in the moment instead of comparing our present situation to something else we could be doing. The fern growing out of the trunk of this tree should be as inspiring as seeing Old Faithful erupt or even just waiting nearby as Old Faithful gurgles and belches between performances. Try to imagine yourself as an explorer who just stepped off the boat from Europe in a nearby bay some hundreds of years ago, and you are seeing a tree of size and height unimaginable from where you are from; this is where we are every time we fall into a place, whether we’ve been there before or not.

A brilliant metaphor is in this photo: our path is blocked by this ginormous fallen tree. Did we have to turn around? Did we crawl under in that tiny space? Out of view, there was a detour we were able to navigate; isn’t this a good approach to the blockages we encounter in life? Why wasn’t I taught that before I became a teen and found myself lost in puberty?

I’m always taken by the paths that are carved through these environments. Making these places more accessible so we people leave the least amount of impact is brilliant. Not only are more of us afforded the opportunity to fall in love with our natural environment, but we also gain valuable memories that spur our dreams to consider where our next steps might take us.

By the way, when preparing these photos for posting, I find the quality often to be horrible with their 8-megapixel resolution but even with the relatively poor quality, I’m happy to have these reminders. How different it is to look at someone else’s images of a place compared to looking at our own. While seeing these again is almost like seeing a stranger’s photos, in the back of my mind, I know that I saw this with my own two eyes, which somehow allows them to be fully familiar.

Did I get carried away in sharing?

But it’s all soooo beautiful and dripping with pretty.

Moss on trees? Yeah, I’m all about that.

Climbing into the universe of the mushroom? You already know I love it there.

Contrast and change? Right up my curiosity.

It’s the vertical fern leaf in the dark shadow that made this photo for me.

But we can’t stay here physically forever; we have a plane to catch.

So we’ll have to get out here and call this short 2-hour visit to the Redwoods enough. While I’m sure I’ve shared it here countless times, I know that when we landed back in Phoenix and drove away from the airport at 10:30, we were pinching ourselves that the day began waking up in a yurt next to the ocean, followed by a long walk through the Redwoods before returning to the desert. Life is magical, all of it.

Beautiful Day on the Oregon Coast

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Breakfast was down south, so off to Newport we drove. By the way, as stated in the previous posts, these days are either enhanced with extra photos and blathering like the first few days or, like this one you are reading, have come together 13 years after the trip because, for one reason or another, I never got around to posting anything back in the day. While the photos sit comfortably in their cozy digital beds on my hard drive that’s always warm, they are more accessible to Caroline and me when we are out on the road and looking for something connected to a memory. and hope we’ll find some relevant information on my blog. This doesn’t often happen as WordPress doesn’t have a great search engine, but someday, when it does, or my personal A.I. has already cataloged my 1,226,675 words written, the knowledge we seek will be readily available. As for my word count, that was accurate as of 12:55 p.m. here on December 7, 2020.

This is Agate Beach, south of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse in Newport, and yes, that’s frost on the beach. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, it was 36 degrees out here, but with the wind, we can distinctly remember it felt a lot colder.

Just a bit of sun is enough to start warming us; well, that and another view of these bridges (Yaquina Bay Bridge in this case) that never fail to impress us.

I’d like to think that the person who designed these was aware of the “road temple” nature of his creations.

Every time we visit the coast during the late fall, we see these scurrying little fellows as they dart in and out of the surf, but we didn’t see them in our most recent visit here at the end of 2020. The Western Snowy Plover is endangered and has been for a long time; I can’t imagine a day when they are never to be seen again. We saw this flock at Seal Rock Beach.

And here are two of the Southwestern Desert Plovers (the “P” is silent). One of them seems more abundant than the other, though you shouldn’t trust me as I’m no ornithologist.

Somebody must have planted this sign personally christening Cristler Lake as such, as there’s nothing on the internet about this place. There is one other photo of it taken by someone a year after we shot this, but that’s it. Welcome to the place that no longer exists.

Yachats might be the first place we wanted to move to here in Oregon, though Bandon would have been a close second. We stopped in town to do our laundry on one of these trips; there’s something about visiting a local laundromat that either endears you or frightens you away – we found it charming. That laundromat is now gone. At The Drift Inn, we first watched and listened to Coin of the Realm Orchestra, playing European folk music. We bought their CD as the music felt like it was the perfect accompaniment to the coast.

I’m not sharing the frightening views that are closer to the edge, but that’s only because I would have had to stop to take those photos, and when close to the edge and losing sphincter control, the last thing I want to do is stop and take a better gander at the precarious spot I’m standing in. So when I get behind the trees with plenty of land between me and the precipice of death, I can attempt to take my shot as long as there’s adequate light to get a fast shutter speed to counter the effect of my shaky knees. View south from Cape Perpetua Lookout Point.

We had passed Sealines Nautical Shop south of Yachats when it was still open and thought we’d visit again on some upcoming visit. That day never came as they closed. Even before this day, when I snapped this photo of the fading boat and pirate, the owner had moved the shop to nearby Seal Rock, but we didn’t know that back then, nor would the place have had the charm of this seaside location. Every time we pass it, we remember fondly this former roadside treasure.

Never met a lighthouse we didn’t like. The other day, when we were visiting Carl Washburne State Park and hiking the China Creek Trail through the rain forest, we didn’t have enough time left in the day to hoof it out here to the Heceta Head Lighthouse, and the next day, the weather was poor. Here on Sunday, the day before we fly home to Phoenix, we are making time to properly visit.

Yep, we even took the tour and were able to pop our heads up for a view through the ancient Fresnel lens.

I have to appreciate how the park service keeps the trees cleared for this view of the lighthouse.

And finally, the Lightkeeper’s Home. Should you ever have an extra $1600 a night lying around to rent the entire house during winter, it can be yours on your next vacation. Otherwise, it’ll be about $1900 a night in prime tourism season.

Here I am, 15 photos into this blog post with nine more images ahead of me, and I’m wondering how I thought it was a good idea to select so many. There were more than 390 photos shot on this day, so as a percentage, I was pretty discriminating. Okay, no, I wasn’t, as there are a lot of crap images in that directory that needed trimming. I can’t be certain without checking all of my other Oregon blog posts over the years, but it seems like this view looking south towards Florence is a recurrent theme.

Our visit today to Bullards Beach State Park piqued our interest in staying in a yurt here, though obviously, we can’t do that on this trip as we already had reservations long ago.

The Coquille River Lighthouse at Bullards is usually open for visits, but sadly, its Fresnel lens is long gone.

Magical Bandon. This year, 2007, was when real estate was booming here, with locals talking of Californians buying up everything. There was serious resentment going on as while some locals benefited from high prices others were noticing that people who called this home year-round were going to be priced out of the market. After the real estate bust the following year, things pulled back, but with vacation rentals and Airbnb being viable investment opportunities, the trend continues with inflated prices. But you can easily see why.

The view from the beaches of Bandon are equally beautiful.

The same goes for what’s on the beach 🙂

Our destination for the evening would be back south in Brookings for another night at Harris Beach State Park and our last night in a yurt during this trip. I don’t believe we ever repeated this feat of staying in a yurt every night of an Oregon road trip, as the occasional shower from the comfort of a motel room seemed like a nice break from the communal showers at the state parks. Anyway, Brookings is still 83 more miles south of here, and instead of wasting precious sunset time, we just hung out in Bandon and enjoyed the view.

If you can’t already tell, the rock closest to the setting sun is Face Rock.

Sure, we still have a couple of hours driving before us, but we’re not leaving until we can no longer see a glimmer of the sun.

It was just a few more minutes after this when we could turn on the heater and start to warm up after a chilly late afternoon at the ocean. We’d do it all over again if we could have added just one more day to our vacation.

Gray Day on the Oregon Coast

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

As stated in the previous posts, which I have to recognize you may not have read since readers likely find this entry by searching, there were a few rudimentary notes accompanying a single daily photograph from back in 2007 when we made this trip up the Oregon Coast. For some reason or other, I didn’t bother to even do that for the last few days of our journey. While I expanded those posts with extra photos and a bunch of new text, I do not have the benefit of even a paragraph to help flesh out this day and the two that follow. I’m not going to try and interpret where I was with my thinking 13 years ago when we stood here looking out at Heceta Head Lighthouse or any of the other locations along the path we followed this day.

I will, though, try to add location data, such as this shot that comes from the Cape Perpetua Scenic Area.

Then there’s this image of a crashing wave that must be about 30-40 feet high. I shot this at Devils Churn, also part of Cape Perpetua. For some reason, I don’t have many images of the churn itself. This would have been our first-ever visit, and while the explosive water out at the shoreline was spectacular, it would be on a subsequent visit that I’d learn why this location earned its name. Of the few photos I did take, the water rushes into the gap on our right and sloshes around. Coming back on a different visit to Oregon, when conditions were right, we witnessed the water pounding itself into a frothy creamy-like consistency, which splashes and ripples into sculpted, transitional works of art that ride on the pulsing current. I hope that at the time we were here, I already clearly understood the dynamics of how weather, time of day, and time of year impact a place and influence its appearance. Maybe I did get it back in 2007, but I feel that I understand this a lot better at this stage in my life.

Hey, I’ve got a great idea. How about you step out of the car with some of our bread and see if the seagulls will take it from your hand? It turned out that this is a great way to recreate scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film The Birds.

Our original itinerary had us traveling from Waldport east on the 34 through Tidewater and Alsea before reaching Philomath out near Corvallis before turning west on Highway 20 through Blodgett and Eddyville, finally going south on Elk City Road and following a small road to Toledo and then Newport back out on the coast. With the gray weather, we must have decided that the photography of the countryside would be less than great, so we skipped the 125-mile loop detour and went straight to Newport.

While we didn’t go to the aquarium specifically to see this Baron Vladimir Harkonnen fish stuck to the tank window, it was certainly a highlight.

Caroline struggled to identify this bird, as finding photos of it wasn’t all that easy. Sure, it kind of looks like a puffin, but they have seriously distinctive colorings, while this bird is gray. Well, it turns out that the winter plumage of the Tufted Puffin looks just like this.

As for this bird, it remains a mystery shorebird that escaped her best efforts to identify it.

On our left is one of the iconic sights found on the coast of Oregon, but since we have arrived at low tide my photo was less than stellar, so I present you with Otter Crest Beach North of Devils Punchbowl Natural Area.

From The Lookout here at Cape Foulweather, you can have one of the most unique views on the entire Oregon coast.

This is the view south. You should make a visit yourself to see the view out to sea or up north; it’s well worth your effort.

In our memories, we’d passed the Lincoln City Glass Center a hundred times before we finally committed to stopping in and giving it a go. As a former union member of the Glass Bottle Blowers Association of Los Angeles back when I worked for Owens-Illinois as an apprentice bottle maker, I’d had enough of playing with glass, so I operated the camera while Caroline worked to make her dream come true.

Her objective was to make a “Wave Float” using the colors of the area that would remind us of the Oregon coast for years to come should we not be able to return. Little could we have guessed back then that over the next 13 years, we’d return 11 more times. The float still sits on our counter, and should the day come when we move back to Europe; it is one of the things that will come back with us.

The night was spent in a yurt at Beverly Beach, which turned out to be our least favorite State Park with too much road noise from Highway 101, not that we didn’t try it again.

Green Snow

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Yet another gorgeous day! With only 45 miles to drive between campsites today, we arrived at Carl Washburne State Park quite early. Plans were that we would hike to the Heceta Head Lighthouse the next morning, but as we were here so early and who knew what tomorrow would bring, we opted to take the hike today. Immense was the beauty we walked into. The greens were electrified, misty light rays poked through towering trees, and mushrooms dotted the landscape. Walking along the trail, there were parts of the forest where one could imagine green snow had fallen overnight, carpeting the forest in emerald hues. It seemed rare to see two of the same types of mushrooms; everywhere we looked, a new, bigger, redder, whiter mushroom would poke through the moss. Our walk became a crawl; hours passed, literally, before we made it to the fork that would take us either to the lighthouse or to the beach. With early sunsets at this time of year, we opted for the beach route. Low tide greeted Caroline and me on a broad, flat, sandy beach reflecting the golden sun and, further north, exposed tide pools with anemones, starfish, barnacles, and mussels. Another perfect day.

That’s how this blog post sat here for over a dozen years until here in late 2020. While mulling over our previous trips to the Oregon Coast after our return from our Pandemic Dictated Remote Self-Isolation Vacation, I noticed a serious void of photos on the blog while a number of worthwhile images existed that could have been posted. The bandwidth options back then severely limited what we could share, so a paragraph of text and a relatively low-res image per day was all I could deliver. But now I can do a little updating and some digital housekeeping by bringing in more details to the visual narrative of the trip wherever possible.

The original post let go of the morning spent walking out near the Umpqua Lighthouse area and jumped to Carl Washburne due in part to what I said in the paragraph above but also due to the fact that I wasn’t all that comfortable with writing yet. It probably took me as long to write 100 words back then as it now takes me to write 500 but that’s just a wild-ass guess.

We’re in the sand dunes of Reedsport, heading north. I should point out that the fleece Caroline is wearing she picked up at Monterey Bay Aquarium down in California, one of our absolute happy places on Earth. The shirt was from Yarn School in Harveyville, Kansas, where she had learned to spin yarn. Also, note the GPS in her right hand; the world had just been introduced to the first smartphones at that time, but it would still be half a dozen years before we’d get our first one. All the waypoints we took back then have sat around worthless in some directory I’m too lazy to find and delete.

The China Creek Trail at Carl Washburne State Park. We had passed by on a couple of prior occasions, but someone had assured us that it was one of the greatest trails on the entire coast. After this, I don’t believe we ever missed an opportunity to walk it again and again.

The silly writings of enchanted forests may not be so silly after all, as this would qualify as just that to me.

From this first visit to all subsequent visits, I’ve never tired of seeing the variety and often bizarre beauty found in these fungi.

Surprises pop up all the time. I have to admit that I didn’t make my best effort to effectively photograph our time in the rainforest, probably because I was so overwhelmed by it all.

The Hobbit Trail brought us to the beach.

Caroline walking barefoot on the beach at Carl Washburne State Park.

Happy as clams.

Normally, we find these guys gutted and often upside down after a seagull cleans it out. I can no longer remember if this guy was stunned, alive, dead, partially consumed, and abandoned on our approach, but I do know that we didn’t make a meal of it.

Nor do we eat sand dollars.

We were in no hurry to go anywhere this afternoon as our lodging was right here across the street at Carl Washburne in one of two yurts in the park.