Long Beach Peninsula
The Drive to Long Beach Peninsula was a long day. Driving from The Highway 18 exit off I-90 all the way to Olympia was extremely ongested. Particuralrly I-5 portion which took easily a couple of hours from Federal Way to Olympia. While Google Maps shows going through the Columbia Gorge to be a longer route, it would probably be a better choice due to the extreme congestion.
Long Beach Peninsula
7/12 ~ Oysterville. We stayed at the Thousand Trails Long Beach. RV Park info HERE.
We walked the trail from the RV park to the beach this morning. The beach access trail crosses the Discovery Trail that we want to ride to Cape Disappointment while we are here. The beach was ok, but vehicles are allowed to drive on the beach, which we see a lot in Washington. Uniques to this beach were all the crabs, mostly remains, but we did come across a few that were trapped in the puddles that were left as the tide had gone out. It was interesting the way they would bury themselves in the sand.
We headed North from the rv park, going through the town of Long Beach, then headed to Oysterville to checkk it out. Oysterville is a village really, with the entire community on the National Register of Historic Places. We parked at the old schoolhouse and then walked around the village using the Walking Tour Guide. and stopped at Oysterville Sea Farms for a cup of chowder.
After visiting Oysterville we drove to Ledbetter State Park and walked a bit of the trails. We weren’t really dressed or head proper shoes for hiking, and the trails were mostly sand, so we aborted the exploration for the day. Ledbetter Park is pretty to drive into, but the hikes we saw led out of the dense forest and into thinly treed and sandy areas, one of them being a beach walk. I am not sure we need to revisit this park.
7/13 ~ Long Beach
Today we headed out to Long Beach and checking out some paddling options for later in the week.
Long Beach looked interesting when we drove through yesterday so we decided to check it out further. We were a bit disappointed with what we found. The little stores and shope didn’t really have much to offer.We tried a coffee shop and were disappointed. Liz did find a tee shirt she liked and we found a great little pie shop.
There is a boardwalk that runs between two beach access roads. We walked the boardwalk and back through town to the truck before moving on.
After Long Beach we drove to Loomis Lake and then Island Lake. Island Lake looks like a great paddling choice.
We then drove up Hwy 101 to one of the Willapa wildlife refuges where we did a small walkabout called Art Walk. It was a nice little boardwalk therough the wetlands where there were som sculpture type art pieces.After that we mad a trip to Raymond thinking we woud talk to a paddling store about options for paddling Willapa Bay. As it turned out the place was no longer in business, so that was a ftustratingh waste of a major art of the day.
After driving back to the trailer, we went for a walk on the beach. All in all it was a pretty uneventful day.
7/14 ~ Astoria
We drove to Astoria today. On the way we stopped by Fort Columbia. We have visited Astoria before and driven by Fort Columbia on the way to Cape Disappointment but did not stop Astoria bridge is pretty amazing. Instead of being high in teh middle, the bridge deck height on the Astoria end of the bridge is very high to allow the large ships to get into the Columbia River. The shipping lanes run on the Oregon side of the river because that is the deepest channel in the river. It is actually quite a difficult river to navigate where the river meet the ocean and it is required to have an experienced River Bar Pilots board the ships to get them through safely. The Columbia River Bar, where the river meets the Pacific Ocean near Astoria, Oregon, is very dangerous and is know as the “Graveyard of the Pacific. It’s characterized by strong currents, shifting sandbars, and frequent storms, making it a challenging area for navigation.
We parked and walked around town. There are some fun little shops to visit. We then visited toe Flavel House and learned some of the history of Astoria. George Flavel was the first captain to pilot the boats down the Columbia and made his fortune by creating a monopoly piloting boats.
We learned more about bar and river pilots at the Columbia River Maritime Museum. We had seen Pilot Boats along the waterfront when we were salking around town and didnt know what they were or what they did. The bar pilots go out in these boats and board the ships to navigate them through the channel. There are Bar Pilots and River Pilots. The boats also take the river pilotw out and pick up the bar pilots once they are past the hazards of the mouth of the Columbia River. It was very interesting to learn about how it all works. The museum also had a lot of ing=formation on the Coast Guard and the rescues they do. It is all very intense.
We finished the day with a good pizza at the Fort George Brewery.
In retrospect it was pretty interesting that we happened to see the pilot boats, see the Flavel House and learn of it’s history, then tie it all together with what we learned at the Maritime Museum.
7/15 ~ Cape Disappointment
We took the e-bikes on the Discovery Trail to Ilwaco and Cape Disappointment, then up to Long Beach. We had a total of 26 miles and saw a lot of fun and beautiful things. Cape Disappointment has an interesting history including the fact that it was named by John Meares when he was unable to locate the mouth of the Columbia River. He mistook the mouth of the river for a bay, which his ship could not enter due to shallow sand bars. Interestingly, that all ties in with the Bar Pilots that are used today.
Ilwaco has a huge marina and a waterfront business row that is accessible by foot traffic on the marina side of the buildings.
Cape Disappointment State Park was a fun place to experience. There are two lighthouses, the only place in the country that has two lighthouses so close together. We saw both and had a great time touring around on the e-bikes.
After Cape Disappointment we rode back to where tthe RV Park ocean access trail crosses the Discovry Trail, then kept goint to the end just north of Long Beach. We rode back on secondary roads to the rv park.
It was another fun day. It iw always so great to tour around and explore with the e-bikes.
7/16 ~ Kayaking
When planning our trip we had thought about kayaking on Willapa Bay, but as we researched ore we learned that tide levels really limit the kayaking in any tidal waters in this area as the most of the bay and all the sloughs become mud flats when tides are out. After researching more I found a blog about Island Lake. We checked out this little lake earlier in the week and it looked great so we headed out this morning for a paddle.
The paddle around the lake was great. We were curious why the water is so dark, you can’t see anything at all when you look down into the water, just black. The lake is very shallow and our paddles hit the bottom frequently. there was no water fowl at all which we thought was a bit odd, but we did see herons, eagles, and osprey. Lots of songbirds.The weather was great, very little wind (the lake is protected from wind) and lots of sun.
The put-in is primitive and at the end of a gravel road but parking is adequate. We had the lake to ourselves and only saw two people, at different times, in the parking area. It was a nice peaceful paddle.
After kayaking we headed back to the trailer and had lunch before walking the trail to the beach. Today at the beach there were hundreds of brown pelicans. We have never seen pelicans in all the ocean trips we have done. Researching this I came across a document that was written in 2015 that explains the migration of these pelicans up and down the Pacific Coast. the article mentins that the birds’ peak numbers were less than 100 in the 1979-1986 years and had increased to over 16,000 by 2009. Peak season in this area is July. It was fascinating to watch these pelicans as they moved up and down the beach, congregating in these large groups that we saw today.
It has been interesting going to the beach here, it seems we experience something different each time. Today, along with the pelicans there was a lot of seaweed that had washed up on the beach. We had not seen seaweed at all on the previous days.
7/17 ~ No Agenda
7/18 ~ Long Beach
We started the day with another beach walk, and again it was a different experience. the beach was clear of anything, just open sand as the tide receded. Yesterday we walked the beach and there were jelly fish everywhere.
We walked to the south end of the beach where there was some rock outcroppings and a point that cut the beach off at the beginning of Cape Disappointment State Park. We talked with a guy that had just caught a crab while fishing. He was pretty excited, he told is he had another in his catch bag. It was fun to see his excitement. As we walked back we found some fishing weight and hook set ups, Liz put one of those at the truck belonging to the fishing duo that we talked with.
After our walk we decided to take the e-bikes up to Long Beach to check out the farmers market. That was an interewsting excursion. As we were getting the bikes ready, it was warm with som sun breaks. By the time we got underway it had turned to a misy rain, so we returned to the trailer for warmer clothing. We had several little incidents during the ride, forgetting to fasten bags, not having keys for the locks, Liz lost the foam cover for her radio mic, I had a very low tire (still unknown if it will need a tube.)
The market was rather uninspiring, of course the misty weather contributed to that somewhat. After the market, we headed to the pie house we visited the other day to get some bread that they were out of the other day.
7/19 ~ Long Beach
When we were kayaking earlier in the week, we drove by cranberry bogs. Cranberry farming was new information to us for this area, so we decided to check out the Cranberry Museum in Long Beach. Here we learned all about hoe cranberries are farmed and harvested, it was pretty interesting.
We then decided to check out the World Kite Museum, which was not so interesting.
After that underwhelming experience we haded to the beach access where we had walked the boardwalk earlier. Sandsations was going on this weekend and there were lots of vendor booths and a sand sculpture competition. We saw some pretty cool sand sculptures both completed and in process.
This pretty much wrapped up our visit to the Long Beach Peninsula, we finished out the day a the trailer beginning to pack up for our travel day tomorrow.
All in all we had a good time expolring this part of Washington that we had barely touched on previously. We probably could have shortened this visit by a couple of days and been OK, but it was nice and relaxing, which is a little different pace than we generally experience when traveling.
Tomorrow we head to Cascade Locks to explore the Columbia Gorge.