The afternoon was sunny and dry with temps in the mid-80s when we left Portland. We drove west toward the coast through cranberry bogs, honey clover fields, and forestry land, passing lush rivers and streams. Of course, we made several stops to take pictures, and I gave Hayden his first lesson in using a manual camera. He only resisted a little.

Our first stop on the coast was Cannon Beach. The beach was long, wide, flat, and sandy—perfect for a long, invigorating walk. It reminded me of many east coast beaches with one big difference—Haystack Rock, one of the world’s largest monoliths. As you might guess, Haystack Rock is a rock shaped like a haystack. But it’s about 100-feet tall and 200 feet across, stands at the edge of the tide, and is home to many seabirds, including murres, cormorants, and, in spring and summer, tufted puffins. Many smaller monoliths rise out of the sand and water around Haystack Rock. (What do you call many monoliths? Multiliths?) I was to discover, as we made our way down the coast, that monoliths furnish much of the Oregon coast’s unique landscape.

The town of Cannon Beach has been developed for a range of tastes. It has a variety of souvenir and t-shirt shops, a handful of restaurants, and several upscale boutiques and galleries, where you can purchase designer sportswear and local artwork. The town is small enough to see in its entirety in half a day or less. (It depends on how much you like to shop.) We decided to have dinner at Dooger’s, which we were told would have fresh crab and the best clam chowder on the Oregon coast. We ended up ordering pasta with lots of garlic, so I can’t vouch for the crab, but the chowder was as good as any I’d had in New England.

On our second day, we made a bee-line north to Astoria, the Northwestern-most tip of Oregon, where the Columbia River meets the Pacific. Legend has it that over 2000 ships have been lost at the mouth of the river. We didn’t see any go down, though, while we were there.

Astoria is a quaint seaside town built on a hillside at the mouth of the river. The main attractions in town (besides looking out at the raging sea—my personal favorite) are a maritime museum, a couple of old forts, and a number of Victorian homes which are now museums. Since we didn’t have much interest in these places, Hayden decided to drive across the bridge to Washington state just so I could say I'd been there. I was glad we did; the view from the bridge was incredible. Looking east, we could clearly see the top half of snow-covered Mount St. Helens pressing up over 8000 feet (1300 feet shorter than it was before the eruption in 1980). It was an amazing sight from the coast where it was sunny, dry, and about 80 degrees for the second day in a row.

We came back across the bridge and continued south along the coast through Seaside, Tillamook (where the cheese comes from), Depoe Bay, and Newport. We made many stops along the way to hike, take pictures (lesson two on manual settings), and walk on beaches.

Although each part of the north coast was beautiful in its own way, the views that nourished my soul were on the central coast. From Newport to Waldport is an 15-mile stretch of white sandy beach with Seal Rock Head as the only obstacle. A few miles south of Waldport is the town of Yachats, and that was where I truly fell in love with the coast.

Yachats covers about a ten-mile stretch along the rocky coast northwest of Eugene. Highway 101 (the coast road) winds along the edge of a rocky cliff, high above the Pacific for about five miles south of the town and then dips down closer to the sea for a few miles. With a population of 635, Yachats has only a few roads off Highway 101, and most people live or stay in town.

We stayed at a B&B called Ziggurat, about 6 miles south of town, for the next two nights. Ziggurat means "terraced pyramid". This pyramid-shaped building rises up four stories from a 20-foot bluff, just steps from the ocean. The only signs of life (other than sea life) are two other B&Bs about half a mile away.

Ziggurat was built about ten years ago. The idea was to build a beach house, but the owner got carried away and built about a 20-room home that is architecturally unique. Although the basic shape of the house is a pyramid, the extensions along each corner of the house and the many decks on all four levels, provide privacy for every room, alcove, and deck. There are no square rooms, and windows of various shapes cover much of the outside walls.

The inside of the house contains original art in many media. In most cases, the owners know or have met the artists. Even the furniture is art, although it's comfortable and utilitarian. There's a lot of wood and glass in the house and, although it's quite contemporary and has the distinctive feel of a beach house, it's not the least bit rustic.

The outside of the house is covered with weathered cedar shakes. It was plunked down on the bluff, and everything around it was left intact. So it's surrounded by tall dune grass and beach shrubs. A narrow path lined with blackberry bushes leads to a rocky beach littered with myrtle driftwood, a beautiful grainy wood indigenous to the Oregon coast. The beach is generally empty except for an occasion dog taking an owner for a run.

We spent a lot of our time in Yachats taking photographs at Devil's Churn, a couple of miles north of Ziggurat. At high tide, the waves rush into this 100-foot chasm in the hillside, crash into massive rocks, and splash 30-40 feet in the air. This is known as a "spouting horn".

At low tide, the water settles down to reveal some of the best tide pools I've ever seen. We met a couple of other photographers there who we kept running into all over the south coast for the next few days. We exchanged film and photography tips and enjoyed each other's company. After a couple of days, sad to leave Yachats (and especially Ziggurat), we continued south along the coast. This was our fourth warm, sunny day in a row.

About 15 miles south of Yachats, we hiked up to the Haceta Head lighthouse, which houses Oregon’s most powerful beacon. I got lots of pictures, and Hayden got a bee in his shirt sleeve. It wasn’t until we were back in the car that Hayden was stung. Fortunately, I was driving. Very calmly, he told me he’d had allergic reactions in the past and his grandfather had nearly died from a bee sting. As soon as he said this, I noticed a small grocery store and pulled over. We made a quick (and vocal, I might add) search for Benedril. We were not the least bit calm anymore. Once Hayden took the Benedril and his sting was under control, we decided to locate a hospital (just in case) and stay close to it for a while.

It was lunchtime, Hayden was still breathing, and we were in Florence, one of the largest fishing villages on the coast. A few blocks from the hospital, in Florence’s Old Town, we discovered the International C-Food Market and Restaurant on the wharf at the mouth of the Siuslaw River. Boats brought in the fresh fish, and trucks came and took it to market. Sitting out on a sunny deck, watching the loading and unloading of fish, we ate the freshest crab and squid I've ever had. After lunch, we decided we could use a fix at B.J.’s Ice Cream Parlor across the street.

Our appetites fully sated and Hayden's sting feeling better, we rolled ourselves into the Jeep and continued south to the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. It was as if someone had moved the Death Valley dunes out to the ocean. If you've ever been to Death Valley, you know I'm talking about enormous dunes. The Oregon Dunes cover about a 40-mile stretch of the coast and are anywhere from 50 feet to 3 miles wide, reaching as high as 300 feet in some areas.

After a couple of stops at smaller dune areas, we hiked out a couple of miles to the middle of the deepest dunes, just south of Reedsport, and spent the next three-plus hours taking photographs and playing in the sand. The dunes in that area are bare of fauna, and the continuous sea breezes kept erasing the few footprints we made. We were high above the sea with miles of dunes to the north and south, and we were the only life form in sight. Pretty spectacular...

From the dunes, we continued south to Bandon, with a brief tour around Coos Bay to see the houses Hayden lived in when he was 6-8 years old. Arriving in Bandon well after dark, exhausted from the long drive and dune trekking, we ordered pizza downtown and took it back to our room at the top of the Lighthouse B&B. The B&B is so named because of its view of the once-active lighthouse across the mouth of the Coquille River. From our private hot tub, while eating our pizza and drinking our Oregon chardonney (which took some getting used to, being California wine snobs), we looked out a huge glass window at the lights over the ocean. We eventually fell asleep to the soft sounds of the fog horns and sea lions below.

The next morning, we spent an hour or so unsuccessfully searching for a lighthouse Hayden remembered from his childhood. In the process, though, we discovered that Bandon has more and bigger monoliths than we’d seen further north. They are quite remarkable, and many seem to have faces or animal shapes carved by the waves.

Eventually, we headed east along the beautiful Umpqua River to our next destination—Crater Lake National Park. As we made our way through thick forest toward the rim of the volcano, the snow got deeper by the sides of the road. Just as we thought we’d finally enter the park, we saw the sign informing us that the north entrance was closed; the road had not been plowed. (Yes, this was still mid-May.) Fortunately, I had my cell phone with me and, amazingly enough, got service up there at around 6,000 feet. We called the park rangers, and they instructed us to drive around to the south entrance, which added an extra hour to the trip. We finally made it up to the lodge, which is perched on the rim of the crater at 7500 feet.

Mount Mazama was a 12,000-foot volcanic mountain that erupted 7,700 years ago forming the caldera which is now Crater Lake. Springs, snow, and rain eventually filled the crater resulting in the deepest lake in the United States. Wizard Island, the result of a subsequent eruption, is a symmetrical, cylinder cone that sprouts out of the lake and rises 760 feet above the lake's surface.

The next day, after an excellent salmon dinner in the lodge's main dining room and a much needed rest, we discovered that the rim road was closed to cars—even the 4-wheel drive we'd rented specifically to drive in the snow. Parts of the road still had quite a bit of snow cover, and there were 20-foot snow drifts in many areas.

So, we drove as far as we could on the rim road and then hiked about a mile further up the road. It was slow-going at that altitude, not to mention the fifteen pounds of photography equipment I’d been lugging around all week. We both felt like our lungs would collapse if we attempted anything faster than a stroll.

We ventured out on a couple of snow packs off the road that looked and felt like glaciers and took some pictures of the lake 1000 feet below. It was overcast and gray the whole day, so the color of the lake was not the cobalt blue I'd seen in the brochures. But, after the warm, sunny weather we'd had all week at the coast, we were due for some clouds.

The second morning at Crater Lake, we awoke to big snow flakes falling from the sky. The new white snow against the deep green forest that graced much of the rim was an impressive sight. Unlike the cloudy day before, even though it was snowing, there were some breaks in the clouds through which the sun shone on the lake. By 7:00 AM, I was leaning out the window of our room to take pictures and wondering why Hayden wasn’t joining me. It was truly a spectacular sight.

	Later that morning, we headed down the mountain with the snow turning to rain in the lower elevations. We headed for Portland and our return flight home. The trip took longer than we thought, and as we rushed through Portland's version of traffic, I silently hoped we'd miss our flight so we could have one more day at the coast. No such luck...
Photographs and text by Cheryl Jasper Copyright © 1997-2006 Cheryl Jasper All rights reserved