We're now trying to get to the coast once a week while the good weather lasts. Ann wanted to visit Seal Rock, which is a few miles south of Newport. I was game. While she has been as far south as Otter Rock, I had never even been south of where highways 18 and 101 meet, always going to the north.
We left McMinnville 7:45 or so and in about an hour, we found ourselves on highway 101 making our way through Lincoln City to see points further south. Lincoln City sure looks like a popular tourist destination, but when I think of the Oregon Coast, I think of less populated areas.
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Devil's Punch Bowl and Yaquina Head from Otter Crest Viewpoint
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South of Depoe Bay, we took advantage of the Otter Crest State Scenic Viewpoint just to the south of Cape Foulweather to stretch our legs and have a look south down the coast from about 500 feet above the ocean. With the sun just up over the Coast Range, we had a great look at Devil's Punch Bowl, a natural bowl carved in the rocks, and on the far horizon, Yaquina Head and its lighthouse.
We would visit the lighthouse in the afternoon. On the way back, we tried to stop at Devil's Punch Bowl, but we miss the badly posted turnoff. Now that we know where we are going, we'll visit on another day when we have more time to appreciate it.
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| Art Deco Yaquina Bay Bridge, Newport OR |
We kept heading south through Newport and across the 1936 Yaquina Bay Bridge. I couldn't see a whole lot of the bridge itself while I was driving across it, but we got great views of it later at lunch bayside in Newport. Annie snapped this photo en route, but the photo doesn't do the bridge justice. It's a pretty clever piece of functional art built from arched box girders.
Leaving the bridge in our rear view, we arrived ten minutes later at Seal Rock State Park in Seal Rock, named apparently because the rocks fronting the beach were formerly a large haul-out for harbor seals. We saw no seals at Seal Rock!
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Windy Much?
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On a beautiful sunny summer day, it is hard to imagine the ferocity of the storms rolling in off the Pacific in the winter. Remember the name Cape Foulweather? Each winter sees massive waves pound the coast (storm watching is a thing out here in the winter) accompanied by stiff winds. The slanted trees growing along route 101 bear witness to these storms.
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Seal Rock Sentinel
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As we got out of the truck in the parking lot, a local crow gave us a bit of lip before flying off to some nearby trees. Although crows are very common birds, we see a lot more ravens than crows in our area. I always see more crows on the coast.
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Tide Pool at Seal Rock
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The park is interesting in that after a walk of a few short yards through the trees, you end up fairly high above the water and beach, looking straight across tide pools at lots of birds roosting and nesting on the rocks. We saw plenty of cormorants and gulls, with nothing less common.
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Western Gulls, Seal Rock State Park
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The tops and sides of these rocks are whitewashed in guano from the birds, mostly Pelagic cormorants lower and Western gulls higher. Young gulls seemed to form largish groups on the beach, their brownish plumage blending into the sand and water from a distance.
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| Elephant Rock |
The most recognizable feature at Seal Rock is the big columnar basalt formation called Elephant Rock. Standing at the base of it, I would guess that it would run to about five stories high.
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Looking South at the Seal Rocks Formations
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Mini Cairn on the Beach at Seal Rocks
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We walked south down the beach as far as the rocks that you see on the far horizon. Though the tide was headed out, it wasn't nearly far enough out to expose any interesting tide pools and I was kind of bummed about the whole experience. It was a long way to drive, almost two hours, for somewhat mediocre (by Oregon Coast standards) scenery.
We decided to backtrack a bit north up the beach to try to find a coffee shop that we had read about in Seal Rock. No luck there so we kept heading north back to Newport. Across the bridge, we decided to stop and take a gander at the Yaquina Bay lighthouse. This lighthouse is one of the least inspired ones that I have ever seen, just a small tower above the roof of a white frame foursquare house. It was made obsolete when the large tower just north on Yaquina Head was built.
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Blackberry Blooms, Yaquina Bay Lighthouse
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The place was crawling with people and motor homes and so clearly wasn't our scene, that we got back in the truck to google for places to have a beer. The only choice that was open and nearby was the Rogue Bayfront Public House, not two minutes away. We wound down the hill to Bay Blvd, the main drag along the waterfront, which we found jammed with cars and throngs of people.
I wasn't hopeful, given all the people crawling all over the place that we would be able to get a table, let alone one that was safe enough to take a risk on. However, when we walked the three blocks from our parking spot, we found the pub empty as you can see below in the photo. Our poor server had only us for a table. Having worked in the business forever, I feel for her.
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Rogue's Dead Guy Logo
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Annie, Trying to Look Bad Ass
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Just days later now, I don't remember either the food or the beer, with one exception, so that tells you something. Our server brought us a glass of chocolate stout from the nitro tap. I think they were doing server training about how to pour from that tap, but she said it was a mispour. Whatever, free beer is free beer and this stout was awesome, light and refreshing with a not obnoxious hint of chocolate.
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Fishing Boats, Newport Bayfront
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After lunch, we walked across the street and onto one of the docks next to a big fish processing plant where a couple of guys were crabbing. One had caught a really nice keeper Dungeness. Annie got to learn that chicken is the bait of choice for crabs. I grew up using chicken necks to catch crabs, albeit on the Chesapeake Bay and not in Yaquina Bay!
Over lunch, we decided to visit the Yaquina Head Lighthouse, north of Newport and just minutes after leaving downtown and negotiating traffic, we turned into the BLM-managed Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area and pulled up to the entrance booth. Normally entrance fees are $7, but they are not collecting fees now, either because of construction on the lighthouse or diminished services as a result of COVID.
In any case, at the gate we were told that the parking area was full and that we would need to walk from Quarry Cove to the lighthouse, 3/4 of a mile. We pulled in short ways to find the road blocked. An employee directed us into the Quarry Cove parking lot, down a long hill from the main road. After parking, we walked back up the hill to the entrance road on our way to the lighthouse to find that just after we parked, they removed the roadblock and were letting traffic through down to the interpretive center.
I walked back down the hill to get the truck and this gave me a few minutes to take some photos while walking. At the top of the hill, I picked Ann up and drove down to the BLM interpretive center, closed to the public during the epidemic. The road was blockaded at this point, so we parked in the lot in front of the center. The signage to the lighthouse was spot on. They've instituted two way traffic, with walkers to the lighthouse following a paved walkway on the ocean side and return walkers coming back down the road, which is closed to vehicular traffic.
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| Bird's-foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) |
The hillsides in August bloom largely yellow, or so it seems. I passed large stands of
Brassicas,
Hypericums, Tansy Ragwort (
Jacobaea vulgaris), and along the roadside, swaths of
Bird's-foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and Red-sepal Evening Primrose (
Oenothera glazioviana) blooming lemon chiffon.
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First View of the Lighthouse
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Fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium), Yaquina Head Lighthouse
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Walking along the side of the head looking southwest out onto the ocean, I saw several heads splashing in and out of the water, looking a lot like seals playing. On three of the flatter rock outcropping, dozens of harbor seals were hauled out of the water, basking in the sun.
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Harbor Seals Basking
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Unfortunately, the stairs down to the beaches and tide pools were closed, perhaps another reason for BLM not charging entrance fees. It was full low tide and I would have loved to have gone down to look for starfish and sea urchins, but that wasn't happening on this visit. We'll just have to go back.
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Turkey Vulture from Above
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A turkey vulture didn't seem to mind the vicious wind and kept making passes through the gorge, giving me the rare opportunity to shoot it from above to eye level. I'm always amazed by the grace that these creatures display on the wing and was floored by its ability to swoop down to mere feet off the water and then rise back up to the top of the cliffs without a single wingbeat.
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How Many Cormorants Can You See?
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These nearly sheer rock faces are where the cormorants were landing. It seems clear to me that they are still nesting this late in the season. I imagine that most people who view this vista don't see the cormorants because they blend into the rocks. Without doing an exhaustive examination of the photo, I count at least twenty cormorants in this frame. I believe that these are Pelagic Cormorants.
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Annie Climbing Salal Hill
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Just inland of the lighthouse is a tall, seemingly conical hill covered in low scrub. A sign post beside a trail leading up informs us that this is Salal Hill, well named for the scrub covering the hill is largely salal.
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Ripe Salal (Gaultheria shallon) Berries
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Along this trail, we could have picked bushels and bushels of ripe salal berries, a significant component of pemmican for the local native peoples. Last week, we didn't try any of the berries at Sitka Sedge because I wasn't sure if they were edible. This week having learned that they are edible and for some people desirable fruit, I tried several. They taste sweet and dark, if dark is a flavor, with noticeable grit from the interior seeds like huckleberries, and an overlying foxy flavor not dissimilar to
Vitis lambrusca,
V. vulpina, and other wild grapes. They're OK to me, but being in the wine business for so long, my palate is trained not to appreciate the wild grape flavor in preference to wine grape flavor.
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| Fireweed and Thimbleberries (Rubus parviflorus) |
While the bulk of the hillside was given over to dense and low thickets of salal draped here and there at the lower elevations by Oregon manroot (
Marah oreganus) vines, we passed several spots with different flora.
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| White-crowned Sparrow on Common Horsetail (Equisetum arvense) |
Whereas I was underwhelmed by our visit to Seal Rock, our visit to Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area was phenomenal, for the ease of access, scenery, and quiet. It is well worth any entrance fee that they may or may not be charging. I really am looking forward to a return visit when the beaches are open for access.
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