(This post covers Sept. 11-13)

Let’s start today with Oregon Coast Geology 101. In the photos of the Oregon coastline you undoubtedly notice the many odd-looking rock islands (many of them stained white with bird shit) that rise up out of the ocean not far from the shore. Many of them look like haystacks.

What causes that?

Remember the tectonic plates? The heavier Pacific (Juan de Fuca) Plate is pushing under and uplifting the North American Plate. The friction from this slow-motion collision creates magma which has resulted in volcanoes which have created the Cascade Mountains 150 miles inland.

Subduction in action?

Here at the coast, where this plate “subduction” begins, magma formed some 15 million years ago when sea levels were much higher. The magma seeped through cracks in the ocean floor around this subduction zone, creating mounds of basalt. As the sea receded the forces of the ocean ground away at the softer sedimentary rock, but was less able to wear down the harder basalt “seeps” that we now see along the coast today as offshore mounds and rocky headlands.

These islands provide outstanding places for shore birds to nest and for seals and sea lions to haul out, molt, and make babies. They also provide something interesting for us to look at when gazing at the Pacific Ocean from the shores of Oregon and Washington.

Drive-by photo.

During the 100-mile move from Where-The-Sun-Never-Shines (Sunset) Bay State Park to our new temporary home at Where-The-Sun-Shines-Even-Less (Beverly) Beach State Park we “stopped” at two more lighthouses (with the trailer in tow “stopping” is not always that easy, so we did a drive-by of the Umpqua River Light and snapped the photo below).

We did actually stop and tour the Heceta Head Light which is probably the best-preserved and most pristine of the Oregon lighthouses. It just re-opened after extensive renovations and actually works the old-fashioned way with a bulb inside a rotating Fresnel lens.

Because of its topography and relative isolation Oregon has not been an easy place to build roads and one of the key factors in connecting those roads have been bridges (Oregon has a lot of rivers, thus needs a lot of bridges).

In a fortunate confluence many of those roads (and, seemingly, all of the bridges) were built in the 1930s when a fellow by the name of Conde McCullough was the chief bridge engineer for the Oregon DOT. McCullough believed that bridges should not only be functional and structurally sound but also aesthetically pleasing works of public art.

It’s probably not overstating the case to say that McCullough is one of the most influential people in Oregon history.

The bridge in the first photo below was taken from the Heceta Head Light and is the highest of the many bridges on the 101. The bridge in the second photo is the 101 span over Spencer Creek and this photo is taken from our campsite at Where-The-Sun-Shines-Even-Less (Beverly) Beach State Park.

On Thursday we drove north on the 101to Tillamook, stopping at a place we’d been on a previous trip in 2007 and had ever since talked of returning.

Although it was just six years ago that trip seems like another lifetime when we had deadlines and places we had to be. On the 2007 trip we flew to Portland, rented a car and drove down the coast to San Francisco. On the first day it was cold and rainy and we stopped for breakfast at a place called The Grateful Bread; a warm, cozy little place in a laid-back little town that seemed not to have change much since The Grateful Dead stopped touring. I told Betsy then that I wanted to come back to this place and spend a winter writing a book. Why? Because, well, it just seemed like a great place to write a book without a lot of distractions in a place that encouraged indoor activity and had a great place to eat breakfast.

The idea gained enough traction that it still comes up in conversation every now and then.

However, there were at least two problems with this plan. One, what to write about in the book? Two, remembering the name of the town?

I thought it was Pacifica, but when we tried to find it on the map a few months ago we discovered there is no city by that name in Oregon. There is however a Pacific City and that turned out to be the place we remembered and it was, fortunately, almost exactly like we remembered.

We bought pastries, a fresh loaf of bread and a Grateful Bread t-shirt and ate breakfast on the beach as I contemplated potential book topics and those funny-looking rock mounds sticking out of the ocean.

From there it was on to Tillamook and its famous cheese factory.

Now, you may be asking yourself; how did Tillamook get itself so closely associated with cheese that the town’s motto is “cheese, trees and ocean breeze”?

As Det. Adrian Monk would say; here’s what happened.

Tillamook is just over the coastal mountains from the Willamette Valley and it did not take long for some of those early settlers to come over and start cutting down trees and planting crops, expecting the coastal plain to be as fertile as the Willamette Valley. However, because it seldom gets very warm and is cloudy most of the time along this section of coast the crops fared poorly. Grass, on the other hand, loved the cool, wet weather and the dairy cows that the farmers had brought along with them to provide milk for the family thrived. Soon, they had more dairy products than they needed for themselves and started selling the excess. However, because milk and butter are difficult to store and transport from such a remote location the farmers started turning the excess milk into cheese that they could transport to Portland and other places for sale.

Making cheese is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process so the farmers formed small co-ops to process their milk into cheese. Those same business dynamics led to further consolidation but the company is still owned today by the local dairy farms.

Fortunately, neither of us suffer from triskaidekaphobia so on Friday (the 13th) we drove back up the 101 for a fantastic breakfast at the famous Otis Café and then worked our way back down the coast stopping at viewpoints and lighthouses before ending up on the bay front in Newport where we picked up some fresh and delicious, but pricy, salmon fillets for supper.

We took a long walk on the beach at sunset, except that there was (again) no sun visible to watch set. A more accurate description would be to say that it got gradually darker as we walked along the beach.

The family that surfs together gets eaten by sharks together.

One of our viewpoint stops as we drove down the coast was Cape Foulweather, so named by Capt. James Cook on a voyage in 1778. Cook, it seems, was a lot more forthright with his naming conventions than the Oregon Parks Department.

One of the more fascinating things that we saw on our travels was a tsunami warning display made out of a section of concrete dock that had broken loose when the tsunami hit Japan a few years ago and – 15 months later – washed up on the beach here in Newport.

Speaking of weird things, does anyone remember Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington D.C. that got busted for smoking crack and then got in trouble for the same thing that Bill Clinton got in trouble for except that instead of getting what Bill got in the White House Marion got his in the visiting room at the prison where he was serving time for the aforementioned crack smoking; and then, a few years later, after he got of prison, he was re-elected to the D.C. city council and then as mayor?

The reason I ask is that Oregon State University has created a new and improved strain of blackberry that for some unknown reason they have chosen to call a marionberry. Thus, everywhere you go in Oregon they are selling marionberry pies. Apparently they are quite tasty but, so far, I have not been able to bring myself to try a slice of marionberry pie.