Beverly Beach and Cascade Head Trail

It’s Justin’s overdue turn to write a blog post, but since he’s dragging his feet…I will write it

Last weekend Justin, Reger, and I went on a camping trip to Beverly Beach on the coast.

–SIDE NOTE: People on the West Coast don’t say, “I’m going to the beach this weekend.”  Instead they say, “I’m going to the coast this weekend.”  Isn’t that quirky?! It might be because it rarely feels like you are going to a beach.  The “beaches” here are often extremely overcast with a constant mist in the air, gray skies and very cold.  To show you what I mean about the fog; below is a picture of what it looked like at the “view point” on Cascade Trail…by 4pm or so it cleared up to what the second picture looks like– beautiful–but we were lucky it cleared at all. –

Anyway…the campsite was nice and close to the beach.  The trail we went on was great!  It wasn’t too awful steep and had an amazing view point at the turn-around point.  There were some neat little cave-like areas with beautiful waterfalls that we could see.  It was also really nice to camp with a friend.  Justin and I always have a lot of fun when we’re camping by ourselves, but it adds a new dimension to camping when you’ve got friends along.

On trail we saw some huge Banana Slugs again.  Man those things are weird!  I had always wondered what they looked like underneath SO…Reger helped me find out.  –Watch below:

Yuck

…Finished the hike as champions.

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Last Weekend Kayaking

I know, I know…we’re late on this post   I couldn’t help but post it anyway though because we had a lot of fun.

Last weekend Justin and I went Kayaking in the Salmon River Estuary, which is North of Lincoln City.  I always thought an estuary was the swampy area that fluctuated with the tide (those were the only ones I had ever seen) but the estuary that we went to was really nice and not swampy at all.  It was as wide as a good sized river but had the calmness of a lake.  It was somewhat surreal when looking down into the water from the Kayaks and seeing jellyfish.

We kayaked to a beach that bordered private land and could only be reached by boat or the owners of the land.  –In OR the state owns all beaches so there is no such thing as a private beaches.  Anybody can go on any beach!–  It was a fairly short kayak paddle to the beach.  Before we saw the shore-line we thought we might venture out into the ocean a little, but after seeing the 5-6 rows of continuous white-caps crashing in all different directions, we thought otherwise.  The coast is very rough here!

The gear filled kayaks were dragged, mostly by Justin, up the beach to a quiet little nook in the dunes we chose to camp in.  We weren’t bothered by any humans while camping…we were one of two groups on the beach (the fishermen camping nearby were so far away it was as if they weren’t there).  I wish the same could be said for the pesky seagulls there.  Boy were those fellas bold!  As soon as they smelled food they surrounded us.  Justin kept having to chase them off!

Over night it rained some but luckily we had a nice little dry spot under our canopy for the morning.  We awoke to loud “Mmmmahhhh” calls from the seagulls that were directly outside our tent.  They were trying to eat the orange, carrot-like stakes that were holding our tent up.  –Silly loud birds!

We had a lovely fire by the beach that morning.  –Lots of sea dried wood on the beach.  The afternoon was spent relaxing and reading by the fire while our tents dried off.  Beautiful area!!  We are planning on going back and doing the ever so popular Cascade Head hike near by.  I think we’ll do the paired kayaking/camping with it next time also.  It was such a secluded beach!

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