Summer 2011

This has to be the worst weather day of the entire trip. We got up this morning to gray skies and a little mist so we figured that maybe it will be better if we headed south to see if we can see some of the things we missed yesterday. As we left Cannon Beach and headed south, the mist became heavier... heavy enough to be called rain. The route south of Cannon Beach passes over some high headlands and as soon as we started climbing, we were in the clouds. The "real" rain held off for a while and we were able to get to two of the spots we had hoped to see.

Our first stop was the Cape Meares Light House, west of Tillamook. The light house has the two unique, if somewhat contradictory, distinctions... it is the shortest light house in Oregon and the highest at the same time. While it is, in fact short, it sits on a headland, 200 feet above sea level and that makes it the highest light house. The area around the lighthouse is thickly wooded with tall Sitka Spruce. One of the trees, called the Octopus Tree, has no central trunk and the branches seem to come out of the ground. The tree is estimated to be about 200 years old and it is unknown whether it grew in this strange way as an act of nature or man (the local Native Americans).

When we left Cape Meares the weather started to close in even more and we decided to give up trying to go further south and we headed back to Cannon Beach. We did make another stop, just south of Garibaldi, to photograph some rocks with trees growing on them that reminded us of Bonsai trees.

As I finished my photography and headed back to the truck, the rain really started coming down heavily. This affirmed our decision to go back to the RV Park and give up on the North Oregon Coast. We are not giving up on it permanently. If we are in this area again, and that is quite possible, we would stop here again and hope to walk the beach and view the sight in bright sunshine. I don't believe that it always rains on this coast. Some local say this is normal and others say it does rain a lot, but this is quite unusual. One person told me that she could be a weather forecaster in this area and be as good as any professional weather person. All she had to do was to forecast rain daily and she would be right 85% of the time. I really hope she was exaggerating.

Cape Meares Light House