Cannon Beach Treasures

My family and I like to go to Cannon Beach. We have been going there for generations. Here is a photograph taken in July 1928 of my dad, Freddie, and his cousin Winnie on that beach. My dad is hoping nothing terrible happens from having to hold hands with his girl cousin. His expression seems to say, Mother, are you sure she doesn’t have cooties?

We take the Sunset Highway out of Portland and head west, turning south at the T intersection on the Coast Highway, heading down around Tillamook Head, which divides Seaside on the north from Cannon Beach on the south. Usually we stay in the southern part of the town of Cannon Beach, in one of the older motels built in the 1930s and 1940s. But one time we stayed on the north end in a lodge on Ecola Creek. My dad says his mother and aunt used to stay in that area every year for a week. They would wade across Ecola Creek on the sand, walking the two miles down to Haystack Rock every day.

My husband tells me that when he used to come with his brother and sister-in-law, her parents owned a cabin on the north end of Cannon Beach that had been built in the 1920s. It’s gone now, and a large, trendy modern-style Thing on Stilts sits in its place. The south end doesn’t have such pretentious looking places and I think retains a lovely old character.

The town is full of tourist shops, which every year become trendier and more expensive. The old town is disappearing, sadly. There are more art galleries and designer things; not bad in themselves, but they bring people who look down their noses at people like us.

What I like is to walk on the sand in the very early mornings. The sand high up on the beach feels cool on the feet and moves softly underfoot as we trudge toward the water. Then we cross the high water mark and the sand is firmer, easier to walk on. We continue to the damp sand, firmer still, and finally to where the waves still reach as the tide continues to go out until an hour or so after sunrise. The sand is hard and the water cold, but it’s summer and we haven’t seen the ocean for a year or two and we don’t care how cold our feet are. They get used to it.

Often the beach is really foggy in the morning, and the rising sun slowly burns the fog away.

We head for the tide pools surrounding Haystack Rock, the monolith rising 235 feet from the sand, partly in the water. Four other rocks rise around it, called the Needles. When we were there one autumn, the tides never allowed us to reach the Rock, but in the summer, the tides recede to its far side and let us explore all the places that are full of treasures.
We look for sea stars, purple and orange; anemones of green and pink and white; limpets with their conical-shaped shells; mussels of deep blue; hermit crabs in their shells and sometimes scuttling to find a new one; jellyfish that we were careful not to step on; sea urchins, purple and spiky; snails of all kinds; barnacles; sand dollars, always empty of their old inhabitants; little fish darting this way and that, finding themselves trapped in shrinking pools; crabs that the seagulls were intent upon finding; sometimes a squid; sometimes a little octopus! And everywhere the sea flora: kelp and seaweed, slimy and slippery to walk on, so you don’t.

You stay on the sand where possible, and on the bare rocks otherwise. Stepping on the shells of the living organisms is not only hazardous to their health, it’s painful! You can easily end up with a cut foot that stings like mad.

We poke around and vie with the sea gulls who are looking for their next meals. Lots of people feed the gulls, and they have become intrepid beggars, which is too bad. People food shortens their lives and they are a nuisance when they lose their fear of humans. But they are fun to watch when they are properly wild. Sometimes they come in huge flocks of several hundred, wheeling and darting over the waves and settling on the rocks out at sea.

Out at sea you can catch glimpses of sea lions and seals once in awhile. Up off the cliffs of Ecola State Park on the north end of Cannon Beach, you often see these wonderful animals sleeping or basking in the sun on the rocks, or diving into the waves.

A mile off shore Tillamook Rock rises out of the ocean with its now-defunct lighthouse built over the top. It was built in the 1880s and suffered through many violent northern Pacific Coast storms that damaged it over and over, sometimes very seriously, which is how it got its nickname of Terrible Tilly. In the late 1950s the light was turned off for good and the Rock sold to private investors; for some time the old lighthouse was used as a repository for funerary urns, but that license was revoked in the 1990s and now even the Rock’s owners are not allowed to land their helicopter there during the nesting season for certain kinds of shore birds.

When you are finished walking up and down the beach, you can find all sorts of foods at the Cannon Beach restaurants. My favorite lunch spot has been a deli tucked behind the shops in the center of the town. But always we have to visit Mo’s on the south end (actually in the unincorporated town of Tolovana Park), because the clam chowder demands that we make it a meal at least once or twice during our stay in Cannon Beach. To be perfectly honest, I found a better clam chowder in one little tiny place on the Pacific Coast in the California community of Morro Bay. I want my chowder to be clam-filled, and I don’t want any added garnish to overwhelm the taste of the clams. Mo’s sometimes has too much bacon. But it’s the best along the Oregon coast.

High tide is a fun time to get back out on the beach. I like racing with the waves and feeling their power as they surge up the sand. The wind usually has picked up in the afternoon, and you sit among the dunes with your book, holding the pages flat and reading to the sound of pounding surf and crying gulls. Then at sunset, it is lovely to be out on the beach as the tide again is going out, and the sand and the sea is turned red and gold.