Day 2: Southern Oregon Coast

Bridget walking through the dunes in Oregon Dunes State Park

Sunday morning started early: I woke up around 5:50am after a reasonably sound night of sleep (having your own tent is a glorious thing), packed up the tent, and shared a sad goodbye with groggy Alice. The Mendocino coast road was foggy at 6:20am...

I drove for a few hours, until lack of coffee and gasoline led me to find the cheapest gas in the Eureka/Arcata area. Upon putting my visa card in the pump the machine returned a "Card Not Recognized" error, and I realized it was a gas station for truck drivers and other special people, myself not included. No wonder it was $0.20 cheaper. I reluctantly returned to a Chevron station and refilled on cheap coffee and expensive gas.

Since I'd spent a good amount of time in Humboldt/Crescent City/Smith River on past roadtrips, I booked it through the rest of northern CA with only a short stop at the Crescent City jetty/pier. The "Welcome to Oregon" sign came and went, and I took a short break to hike down to Whalehead Beach.

Whalehead Beach, Oregon

I was a bit ahead of schedule, so I spent some time driving through Bandon and checking out the harbor.

Coquille River Harbor/mouth. Google turns my pictures into cool panoramas...

Breezing through Coos Bay, I met Bridget and her friend Stephanie in Winchester Bay at 3pm. Our meeting point was the Windy Bay Sourdough Bakery, where Bridget and I split a sourdough bagel and tasted all the mustard samples. mmmm. We looked at a map of Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area and selected the nearest trailhead: the Tahkenitch Dunes Trail. The complete loop, along the Threemile Lake Trail, the Tahkenich Dunes, and back along the Dunes trail is 6-miles.


The first leg of the trail meanders through the woods past some small lakes, with glimpses of the coastal dunes. In some locations a river of sand had come pouring down the hill, covering the trail (see pictures below).

The second leg of the hike was along the dunes, which made for much more difficult hiking. Since the dunes are constantly changing, the trail is less obvious. We found our way by connecting some tall wooden stakes placed strategically in some of the higher dunes. These dunes are interesting because they are fronted by a narrow forest - normally the sand dunes are directly along the ocean.

Just when we thought we couldn't take any more sand steps, the trail took a turn into the strip of trees along the beach, and we scurried down to the beach.

After ~45 minutes of recovering and snacking on the beach, we traced our footsteps to the trail intersection to return along the other side of the loop. A couple miles later we realized we'd taken the wrong fork in the trail, requiring an extra mile of "hiking" along HWY 101 to get back to the cars. The highway took us along Tahkenitch Lake, so while our joints were aching we managed to enjoy the extra leg of the hike. We maintained spirits by blasting country music from cell phones and doing ridiculous dances to extract honks from passing cars. Stephanie found a dead bird on the side of the road.

Upon our late return to the cars we commenced a massive spontaneous picnic of the usual pitas/veggies/hummus/fruit.  On the drive home we made a spontaneous decision (conducted through the car windows at a stoplight) to chase the sunset. We arrived at the coast seconds before the sunset: