Cannon Beach

We came down from Portland on a grey morning and the fog was so thick on Highway 101 that Lia said she wasn’t sure the ocean existed at all. Then we parked, walked between two weathered cottages onto the sand, and Haystack Rock loomed out of the mist — 235 feet of basalt with gulls wheeling around its crown — and Lia actually stopped walking. It is one thing to see a photograph of a famous sea stack. It is another to have it materialize in front of you, enormous and streaming with fog, while cold water slides up the sand toward your shoes.

The Rock and Its Tide Pools

Haystack Rock is not just scenery — it is a protected marine garden, and at low tide the base of it becomes one of the most alive places I have ever crouched over. We timed our walk to the ebb and found the tide pools brimming: green anemones that closed around our fingers, purple and orange sea stars stuck to the rock like careless graffiti, and hermit crabs going about their small urgent business. Overhead, tufted puffins nest on the rock in spring and summer, and a volunteer with a spotting scope let Lia look at one — a fat black bird with a comic orange beak — while explaining that touching the rock is forbidden. We touched nothing. We just knelt in the wet and watched a whole civilization go about its day.

The Town Behind the Beach

Cannon Beach the town is a single long spine of cedar-shingled shops, galleries and bakeries, and it has resisted the urge to become tacky in a way that much of the coast has not. We ducked into a bookshop when a squall blew through, then found a bakery where I ate a warm marionberry scone that stained my fingers purple. There are more art galleries here than seems reasonable for the population, and we drifted through several, dripping, until a gallery owner made us tea and talked about the light — how coastal painters come here precisely because the fog softens everything and the sun, when it breaks through, does so in dramatic shafts. Lia bought a small watercolor of the rock. It hangs in our kitchen now.

Ecola and the Long View

Just north of town, Ecola State Park climbs onto the headland where the forest meets the cliff edge, and the view from there rearranged my sense of the whole coast. From the bluff we looked back down the length of Cannon Beach with Haystack Rock small in the distance, and out to sea where the old Tillamook Rock Lighthouse sits abandoned on its own islet, battered by waves. Sitka spruce leaned over the trail, wind-bent and dripping, and a bald eagle rode the updraft below us — below us, which is a strange thing to see. We ate sandwiches on a log while the fog rolled in and out, revealing and hiding the sea stacks in turn, and I thought that I could watch this particular slow theater for a very long time.

Getting There

Cannon Beach sits on Highway 101 about 90 minutes west of Portland, and the drive out through the Coast Range — over a low forested pass and down toward Seaside — is a pleasant hour and a half. There is no airport and no train; a car is essential, and parking in town fills fast on summer weekends, so arrive early or come midweek as we did. The town itself is small and entirely walkable once you are there, which is the point. Bring a warm layer regardless of the season. The Pacific here is cold, the wind is honest, and the fog keeps its own schedule.