Southwest Oregon: Gold Beach and the Southern Oregon Coast

This is the final installment of our trip to Southwest Oregon in which we finish our whitewater rafting trip on the Rogue River and head to the coast at the mouth of the Rogue for a planned two days of sightseeing there.

At the take-out at Foster Bar, we loaded up in the Momentum van and headed back to Galice where we left our car. We had the option of having our car ferried from Galice to Foster Bar so that we could make the short drive to the the mouth of the Rogue at Gold Beach without having to backtrack upriver. We could have driven from Foster Bar to Gold Beach in about an hour. Instead, it took two hours to get back to Galice and another three hours to get to Gold Beach via California.

Highway 101 Bridge over Rogue at Gold Beach

Part of our experience in this part of Oregon that we had never visited before, however, would be to get to know this part of the world. Had we had the car ferried to the take-out, we would have missed the excellent drive along the Bear Camp Coastal Route, the amazingly twisty Smith River Scenic Byway, and the massive redwoods in extreme northwest California.

From Foster Bar back to Galice, we drove the incredible Bear Camp Coastal Route through the Klamath Mountains, a trip of nearly two hours. When I say incredible, I mean that it is really hard to believe that anyone would have thought to or even could construct a road through this stunningly mountainous terrain. The road is narrow, twisty, unpaved in sections, and grim to imagine in the winter. But the views were stunning and so were the wildflowers along the verges. I am really glad to have had the chance to see this part of the world, even if it was slow going, even if it added four hours to our travel.

From Galice, we backtracked east towards Grants Pass before we cut south near Merlin to ultimately join US 199, known as the Redwood Highway and the Smith River Scenic Byway. We had thought to stop in Brookings OR for a wood-fired pizza for dinner, but we were tired and knew we would be hungry long before Brookings. Accordingly, we stopped at the Grocery Outlet in Cave Junction near the California border for some charcuterie for dinner.

Afterwards, we continued on into California through the Collier Tunnel. After the tunnel, the road became as twisty a road as I have ever driven, a lot of fun, complete with amazing canyons and scenery along the Smith River.

Just shy of Crescent City, CA, we would cut northwest over to highway 101 along the coast. Our route took us past many massive Coast Redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, along the lower Smith River in Jedediah Smith State Park. I never get tired of seeing these giants.

Soon enough, we crossed back into Oregon and were quickly in Brookings, our dinner already consumed while driving. North of Brookings, we scouted, as we passed, places that we wanted to visit tomorrow, Sunday.

We had a pretty good plan for the next two days. Sunday, our plan was to backtrack from Gold Beach to Brookings seeing the sights, have lunch in Brookings, see more sights on the way back to Gold Beach, and to make a nice pasta dinner to enjoy on the deck of our Airbnb overlooking the mouth of the Rogue River. Monday would see us make our way leisurely along the coast to Florence, stopping as we saw fit, and heading back to Bend via Eugene, perhaps making at stop at Gratitude Brewing along the way.

Fairly quickly we arrived in Gold Beach and navigated our way through town to our room on the north bank of the Rogue, sitting up high above the mouth of the river, technically in Wedderburn OR rather than Gold Beach.

We crossed the river on the Isaac Lee Patterson Memorial Bridge, which is similar in style to the other 101 bridges in Oregon. Each is unique with its Gothic, Deco, and Art Moderne flourishes, but they are clearly the work of a single designer. That designer is Conde B. McCullough, the state bridge engineer from 1919 to 1935, whose legacy still impresses today.

At our room, near dusk, I wandered out on the deck overlooking the mouth of the river to photograph the bridge in the warm glow of sunset. As I set up my shots, the warm air rising off the hillside behind me brought a familiar smell to my nose, that of fennel. Looking closer, the hillside beside the house was full of wild fennel, a non-native escaped version of regular garden fennel. This is not unusual; fennel seems to be common all along the coast, at least north of San Francisco Bay.

Wild Fennel, Foeniculum vulgare

At dusk, we settled down for the evening and I took my phone out of airplane mode for the first time in days to start to map out a course of things to see on Sunday along the coast. Quickly, we turned out the lights and passed out.

The following morning, I had a bit of a sore throat, nothing bad, that I attributed to sleeping under an open window that let cold air pour in on us all night, nothing that a cup of coffee would not set straight. Ann was much more sluggish in getting up and by the time we got coffee just across the bridge in Gold Beach, I could tell she was feeling poorly.

Coffee in hand, I thought we would continue south for our sightseeing and to have lunch in Brookings before returning. However, Ann wasn't feeling well and the coastal fog was thick, eliminating any early morning sightseeing. We headed back to the room for a while to let the fog burn off a bit before setting off down 101 towards California.

South of Gold Beach, we made a couple stops along the beach while headed south. Ann dragged herself along on the first couple of stops. But by the time that we arrived at Arch Rock State Park, one of the places that I had noted yesterday, I knew things were bad when she elected to stay in the car while I made a short loop around the headland, camera in hand. Meanwhile, my sore throat was not getting better. It was actually getting worse and I was starting to have some congestion issues. Not good.

Non-Native Tansy Ragwort, Jacobaea vulgaris, Has Taken Over the Coast

A Coastal Favorite of Mine, Sitka Spruce, Picea sitchensis

Another Favorite, Sand Verbena, Abronia latifolia

Trails in the Sand

Sweet Peas Along the Beach, Lathyrus latifolius

Arch Rock State Park

Common Heal-All, Prunella vulgaris

Arch Rock

Knowing that Ann was sitting in the car in the parking lot, I made a very quick walk along the headland, stopping just long enough to shoot a few photos of the beautiful scenery, made quite haunting by the fog. When I returned to the car, I could tell Ann was nearly in tears and this, along with my worsening condition, had me say, "We're going back to Bend."

We stopped back by the B&B, grabbed our things and headed north up 101, intending to start our trip east along the Umpqua River in Reedsport, the most expedient way home. Not having any breakfast, we decided to stop for lunch in Bandon, which we reached at noon. We went into Bandon Brewing for a quick bite. I had a terrible beer and possibly the worst burger of my life there, while Ann had a wrap of some kind, mostly lettuce in a tortilla. We were feeling so bad that we cared little.

Bandon Brewing

We have seen most of the picturesque lighthouses on the Oregon coast and so when we saw a sign for another just shy of Reedsport, we took a short detour to see the underwhelming Umpqua River Lighthouse. It's not that the light isn't handsome; it is more that the setting is underwhelming and non-scenic. When you think of lighthouses on the Oregon Coast, you think of Heceta Head or Yaquina Head, not Umpqua.

Umpqua River Lighthouse

We quickly headed inland up the Umpqua River valley to intersect I-5 that would take us to 58 across the Cascades back home. Not far up the river, we saw a sign for the Dean Creak Elk Viewing Area. Not really believing that we would see elk at this low elevation in mid-afternoon, I kind of scoffed to myself. But then we saw lots of cars and lots of elk, so I pulled over and shot a few frames, the last that I would take on this trip.

The remainder of the trip was a brutal slog. Ann felt terrible and I was feeling worse by the minute. It was all I could do to sit behind the wheel and keep the car between the lines. I would wake up in the morning feeling even worse. Ann would lose her sense of taste. We would do nothing for a week except try to get better each day. Though we did not get tested, we feel like we both got a good case of COVID, a bummer of a way to finish off a fantastic experience to Southwest Oregon.