Month: September 2016

Touristing on the Oregon coast in the fall is a mixed bag: the weather will be sunny and then rainy, and then foggy and cold, often in one day! So timing is important, and impossible to predict. Take last Tuesday, for example. I left my campsite on a sunny and warm day around noon and when I arrived at the road to the Cape Blanco lighthouse 30 miles south, I found nothing but fog. I couldn’t even see the road to the lighthouse, let alone the actual beacon of light supposedly able to save ships from the rocky coastline! So today, when…

The attempt to see Cape Blanco was an abject failure, the heavy fog rolling in just as I drove up to the gates. Some days, the artist must just keep looking for opportunities. I drove back up the coast road, and then decided to drive the beach loop just south of Bandon. I missed two turnoffs for state parks, and made the third, a small parking lot for the Face Rock wayside. Stepped out of the car and almost got blown across the parking lot. Decided to go with just the camera and zoom lens, and leave the daypack with…

I am definitely not a geologist, but my dad’s career involved understanding plate tectonics and I grew up in LA, so I’ve always been aware that the earth moves as the planet keeps changing itself over time. And nowhere is this more clear than on the Oregon coast, where the San Juan de Fuca plate meets the North American plate. Look at this photo. Note how the rock layers are pushed up from east to west (from right to left in the photo). In the next photo, the rock layers are pushing up in the other direction (west to east, or left…

Some days, the beach walk is about exercising creativity, what Julia Cameron calls an “artist’s date” where you take yourself out somewhere and play. So today I went back to photos I had taken earlier in the week and played around with them in Lightroom, trying to capture different moods. The expanse of South Beach feels endless, the southern end not quite visible due to the low fog, so I wanted to emphasize that and the emptiness of the beach contrasted with the neverending surf. An enclave of huge beach houses that would otherwise annoy me for privatizing the beach and…