by Scott

Our trip up the pacific coast started as fundamental need to breath fresh air. By this point in time wildfires had been raging in California, Oregon and Nevada for over a month. Much of that time we couldn’t even see across the street. Biking and hiking would degenerate into fits of coughing so after a month we decided enough was enough and headed out for the coast. Our fist stop along the way was Salt Point State Park just north of Jenner, California. Normally we do more boondock camping away from developed campsites, but because of the fires, pretty much all the forest land in the entire state was temporarily closed to the public, leaving campgrounds our only option.
Salt Point has miles of coastal hiking trails and some of the most amazing tafoni rock, coastal sandstone that has been scoured by the wind into delicate shapes. We spent a few days there and even took our SUPs up the Russian River. Several more times during this trip we went for a paddle up various coastal rivers and there is one universal that I learned from this. It almost ALWAYS gets windy in the afternoon. There is nothing worse than finding yourself a few miles upriver as the tide starts to come in so you have to battle both wind and current to get back to where you started. My wife and I are both strong and experienced paddlers and I made sure our flip time would be near slack tide at the worse, so we didn’t have to fight the current too much, but even so, just fighting the wind was exhausting. I found that if we could be off the water by 10 or 11am we would beat the wind most days.
After Salt Point we headed up the coast to Jug Handle State Nature Reserve. Or original plan was to camp in the redwoods, but they closed the park down due to the fire and cancelled our reservations at the last minute. We had to scramble and found a funky farm that had about 8 sites to rent out with full hookups. We don’t really need full hookups, but there wasn’t much choice. The Jug Handle Farm was quirky, but it had a hiking trail straight from the campground to the nature reserve on the coast. The first morning we got up and hiked out and I spent a ton of time working some slow shutter speed compositions of the waves crashing against the cliffs. By the time I worked my way around to the other side of the trail to see the beautiful beams of light coming through a lone tree on the cliff the sun was already a bit above the tree and, while it still made a nice picture, I could visualize what it would look like a half-hour earlier with the sun directly behind the tree and the beams of light seeming to come from the tree itself. I set my alarm a bit earlier the next day and hiked out to the tree only to find the entire coast covered in thick pea-soup fog, which would remain with us for the next 5 days.
We spent a few nights at Patrick’s Point State Park farther north. From there we went to the small community of Trinidad for sunset and sunrise photos the second day. This is a cool community with an aptly named dirt road called “scenic drive” heading out of town along the coast. It was here in the evening when the smoke caught up to us. It made for a nice blood-red sky at sunset (on an otherwise clear day) but by the morning was choking everything in site, so we fled to Oregon.
In Oregon we enjoyed the Cape Meares National Wildlife Refuge. It is a high cloud forest on the cliffs above the ocean, part of the three capes. The fog was still with us, but we found wandering through the lush forests in the fog to be a wonderful photographic experience.
Our last stop of the trip was in the area of Cannon Beach, Oregon. We had been here about 10 years prior and found the town to be quaint and full of cool, artsy shops. That was a bygone time. The town seemed to have removed all the quirky shops and replaced them with strip malls offering your standard tourist fare. The beach was still pretty cool, but crowded beyond all recognition. We ended up spending most of our time here hanging out at the local surf beach, Short Sands Beach. It’s a bit of a walk to get to, but has a beautiful mix of lush forest, rivers, a waterfall onto the beach, and cool morning light. Any of these images and tens of thousands more can be licensed through my searchable online archive at TahoeLight.com. If you are interested in the way things were the last time we came this way, plus the best brewery in Cannon Beach, check out my previous post on a similar trip. And finally, a variation on this trip focused on hunting for obscure waterfalls (including many that were burned in the Eagle Creek fire a few years back) check out this post on hunting for Oregon waterfalls.