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Forest and sea bring people together.

illamook Head drops more than 1,000 feet from the summit of Clark’s Mountain to the Pacific Ocean below.

Our Coast T

Slopes of hemlock and spruce give way to basalt cliffs and then to piles of driftwood. Lewis and Clark were here 200 years ago. Now, people hike in their footsteps, making memories with friends and family.

The Columbia-Pacific region, which continues from the river’s mouth for some distance inland and along the coast, is home to many natural wonders. In its old-growth forests are ferns and fungi. On the shore, shellfish and sea stars cling to rocks. In Astoria, the oldest European settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, there is history around every corner. Yet this place owes its character most to the people who live here.

This edition of Our Coast looks at relationships with the land. These stories are about naturalists, foragers, loggers, historians, crabbers, artists, writers and community builders of this region, who are preserving the past and creating a future for the people and places they care about.

Photographer Lukas Prinos begins with hikers on the Oregon Coast Trail, who start a journey over 363 miles of the state's coastline at the Columbia River South Jetty. At sites along the first 60 miles, Prinos covers varied terrain, as well as hikers’ accommodations, water access and elevation, including the trail’s highest point.

“We Are Still Here,” a collection of photographs by Amiran White, bookends the issue with a powerful message. White began documenting the Chinook Indian Nation, whose members’ ancestors have called these lands home for thousands of years, nearly a decade ago after learning of their ongoing struggle for federal recognition. In these images, she shows ceremonial gatherings, traditional foods and partnerships for the benefit of the land.

Elsewhere, ecologist and author Robert Michael Pyle pens a survey of butterflies who make their home in the ColumbiaPacific over the course of a year.

Some stories focus on camaraderie in the field. Katie Frankowicz of KMUN writes about the community support that emerged after a fire damaged several thousand crab pots in Ilwaco. Meanwhile, Riley Yuan, a Murrow News Fellow with the Chinook Observer, offers narrative insight into modern-day logging.

Astorian reporter Olivia Palmer turns to accessibility, documenting progress toward a coast all can enjoy through projects like Seaside’s wheelchair-accessible beach mats, while also listening for where barriers and gaps remain.

Other stories are about memories. As the Liberty Theatre in Astoria marks its 100th year, people reflect on its role as a center for community life.

Lissa Brewer Editor Our Coast Magazine

The bilingual booklet “Raíces Clatsop” captures stories of heritage.

For my contribution, other than the great fun of painting butterflies, I hiked the Bayocean Peninsula several times and visited with people who remember growing up there before the elements reclaimed what was once imagined as a grand resort.

This

edition of Our Coast looks at relationships with the land, stories about those in this region who are preserving the past and creating a future for the people and places they care about.

I looked through photographs of their reunions, of children who roamed the beach together and continued to foster friendships even after the place they shared was gone.

As I drove there and back, I watched a century-old tree disappear from a sea stack, hit by a windstorm outside Garibaldi.

I called my mother. She remembered the tree, too. We talked until I pulled into Manzanita.

NUMBER 14 • 2025

PUBLISHER

Kari Borgen

EDITOR

Lissa Brewer

PHOTOGRAPHER

Lukas Prinos

DESIGN DIRECTOR/LAYOUT

John D. Bruijn

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Lissa Brewer

Jaime Britton

David Campiche

William Dean

Mike Francis

Katie Frankowicz

Ryan Hume

Peter Korchnak

Rebecca Lexa

Marianne Monson

Olivia Palmer

Robert Michael Pyle

Amiran White

Riley Yuan

ADVERTISING SALES MANAGER

Sarah Silver

ADVERTISING SALES

Heather Jenson

Hattie Sheldon

Inside Our Coast Magazine

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Our Coast is published annually by The Astorian and Chinook Observer. DailyAstorian.com • ChinookObserver.com

MEET the CONTRIBUTORS

Lissa Brewer

Lissa Brewer is the editor of Our Coast Magazine and associate editor of The Astorian. She grew up hiking and beachcombing on the shores of Puget Sound and now lives in Astoria, where she writes about, photographs and illustrates life along the Columbia River and Pacific Coast.

Lukas Prinos

Lukas Prinos is the photographer of Our Coast and multimedia journalist at The Astorian. He first learned about cameras while exploring the Cascade Mountains in his childhood. After graduating from the University of Montana, he moved to Astoria, where he has enjoyed photographing the outdoors.

Amiran White

Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Amiran White began her photojournalism career stringing for The Associated Press in Portland. She spent 10 years as a staff photographer at newspapers in Oregon, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, and has received several awards for her documentary work, including the Golden Light Award and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.

John Bruijn

John Bruijn is the production director at The Astorian and has been with the Media Group for 25 years. He is the design director of Our Coast Magazine and does layout and design work of several visitor guides and publications.

Olivia Palmer

Olivia Palmer is a reporter covering local government and the environment for The Astorian. A graduate of Western Washington University, she now calls Astoria home. Olivia enjoys trail running, mountain biking and exploring the coast’s many beaches.

David Campiche

David Campiche is a potter, artist, poet, retired owner of the Shelburne Hotel in Seaview and author of the recent novel “Black Wing.” He is a lifelong resident of the Long Beach Peninsula who has contributed to The Astorian and the Chinook Observer over a couple of decades.

Ryan Hume

Ryan Hume is a freelance writer and editor who has been contributing to Coast Weekend and Our Coast for a number of years. He lives in Astoria and takes full advantage of the vibrant literary, arts and culinary happenings the North Coast offers.

Riley Yuan

Riley Yuan is a Chinese American writer and photographer and a Murrow News Fellow with the Chinook Observer. Prior to becoming a journalist, he fought wildfires with the Stanislaus and Baker River Hotshots, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Timor, Indonesia, and taught high school English in Hawaii and Vermont.

Marianne

Monson

Marianne Monson is the founder and president of The Writer’s Guild in Astoria and has authored several books about women’s history. Her titles include “Frontier Grit,” “Women of the Blue and Gray” and “The Opera Sisters.”

Katie Frankowicz

Katie Frankowicz is the news director at KMUN in Astoria. She has worked as a journalist on Oregon's North Coast and in southwest Washington for more than a decade, covering commercial fisheries, the environment, city government and whatever else comes up.

Robert Michael Pyle

Dr. Robert Michael “Bob” Pyle is a biologist, essayist, novelist and poet who has dwelled in deepest Wahkiakum County for 46 years. His books “Wintergreen,” “Sky Time in Gray's River” and “Where Bigfoot Walks” are Northwest classics. For his worldwide work in butterfly study and conservation, he was made a Life Fellow of the Royal and American Entomological Societies.

Jamie Britton

Jaime Britton is the acting director of the Lower Columbia Preservation Society in Astoria, where she specializes in education and resources about historic homes and buildings in the region. She loves finding connections between people and places to share their untold stories.

more CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Korchnak

Peter Korchnak is a regular contributor to Coast Weekend and The Astorian. He is from Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists. When he’s not writing, he explores the memory of another in the podcast “Remembering Yugoslavia.”

Mike Francis

Mike Francis is a longtime Oregon journalist who has extensively covered military and veterans issues. He serves on the Astoria Planning Commission and resides on the South Slope.

William Dean

William Dean is a retired investigative journalist who left newspaper work to take on the new challenge of writing novels. Since moving to Astoria, he’s published three suspenseful tales set in the Pacific Northwest and also writes about the local craft brewing scene.

Rebecca Lexa

A naturalist, educator, writer and tour guide living in the Pacific Northwest, Rebecca Lexa connects people with the natural world. Her forthcoming book, “The Everyday Naturalist: How to Identify Animals, Plants, and Fungi Wherever You Go,” will be published by Ten Speed Press in June 2025.

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Do & See

Columbia-Pacific butterflies

Accessible recreation

‘The Goonies’ turns 40

Our Picks Do & See

Wings Over Willapa

By Lissa Brewer

One by one, hikers stepped off the metal barge, peeled away their life jackets and set out, supplied with backpacks and walking sticks, on a 6-mile round trip up the center of Long Island, a lush and wild corner of the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge accessible only by boat.

Their destination was the Don Bonker Cedar Grove, a towering stand of 1,000-year-old western red cedar trees, and one of the last remaining patches of old-growth forest in this part of Washington state. Most people get there by kayak. For those staying the night, the island is dotted with 20 tent campsites in five locations.

But this trip was for an afternoon. It’s a signature event of Wings Over Willapa, a weekend of birding and nature immersion organized by the Friends of Willapa National Wildlife Refuge, and one of only a few such opportunities to visit the island.

The three-day festival is timed each year to align with the peak of the fall migration season along the Pacific Flyway, typically in late September, when millions of birds travel south between Alaska and Patagonia, stopping by the pristine waters of Willapa Bay.

In 2024, Wings Over Willapa offered nearly two dozen events. Kyle Smith, a forest manager with The Nature Conservancy in Washington, led hikers through the 7,600-acre Ellsworth Creek Preserve near Teal Slough, where the conservancy and refuge have formed a partnership to restore habitat for salmon, black bear, cougar and elk.

Nearby, the Port Townsend, Washington, based Discovery Bay Wild Bird Rescue brought live owls, hawks and falcons to greet visitors. Naturalists also took to parks and sloughs for early-morning bird hikes, authors prepared talks and kids enjoyed wildlife-themed crafts.

On Long Island, sunlight filters through the forest canopy onto soft beds of moss and fern. Coral mushrooms sprout below the trees. And between the push and pull of the tides, you may just find yourself alone with a song sparrow, humming a tune from a wooden post.

Hoffman Center for the Arts

By Marianne Monson

When Myrtle and Lloyd Hoffman, a musician and a painter, left their home, property and modest savings to the coastal community of Manzanita after their deaths in 2004, it was a first step in establishing a local center for arts and culture.

More than 20 years later, the Hoffman Center for the Arts offers a gallery and performance space, clay studio and sculpture garden. The place is envisioned as a home for artists, writers and horticulture enthusiasts, where people of all ages and backgrounds are invited to connect through creativity.

The center is run by a nonprofit board of 12, numerous volunteers and by executive director India Downes-Le Guin, who brings a background in creative writing and arts programming.

Classes offered range from life drawing to basket weaving, with scholarships available. In the gallery is a rotating cast of work by artists with ties to the North Coast. Exhibits are typically displayed for a month and may include paintings, photographs, collages, ceramics and textiles.

For writers, the center awards the annual Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize. The North Coast Squid, its literary journal, is published in odd years. Even years see the Word & Image project, pairing visual artists with writers to respond to each other’s work. The resulting creations are displayed on gallery walls and printed in a keepsake book.

A clay studio features five electric wheels, two slab rollers, a glaze room and two electric kilns. Courses are offered for beginning to advanced potters, with kiln services also available. Outside in the Wonder Garden, volunteer horticulturalists work with native plants. The garden is also a meditative space for people to sketch or write, and poetry is regularly sought for display.

Whether you consider yourself a writer, a visual artist, an art enthusiast, or a beginner on your creative journey, this is a place to build upon an interest or explore something entirely new.

Long Beach Peninsula

Manzanita

Artistry. Outdoors. Adventures.

Banks-Vernonia State Trail

By Rebecca Lexa

Over 21 miles between two quiet towns in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, hikers, cyclists and equestrians share a trail where a railroad bed once opened up stands of Douglas fir and cedar to lumber-hauling trains.

Banks-Vernonia Trail, which was recently designated a National Recreation Trail, was Oregon’s first “rails-to-trails” park, part of a growing movement that promotes turning abandoned or otherwise unused railroad beds into multi-use recreation areas.

The railroad line was in use through the early 20th century until it was abandoned in 1973. Oregon State Parks later took over the right of way and, with encouragement from local trail enthusiasts, began converting the former railroad bed in the early 1990s. Last year, it was designated a National Recreation Trail.

Most of the route is graded, though there are some slopes along the way, and it gains about 1,000 feet of elevation in the 7 miles between Manning and Tophill. The main trail is 8 feet wide and paved, but there are also gravel sections that are easier for horses, such as the alternate route at Buxton Trestle. Well-maintained trailheads include accessible entry points, and most have restrooms. Leashed dogs are also welcome.

The trail wanders through forests of varying ages, from fresh clearcuts to mixed conifer and maple. Now and then, the route may be punctuated by fall fungi or an old apple tree, linking the area to an agricultural history. As it parallels Highway 47, traffic noise is a constant, but this doesn’t prevent ample birding opportunities, including where the route follows or crosses the Nehalem River.

Banks-Vernonia is the northernmost section of the Tualatin Valley Scenic Bikeway, a 50-mile route that starts at Rood Bridge Park in Hillsboro and ends at Vernonia Lake City Park. For an extended ride, cyclists can commute a few miles up the highway to Pittsburg onto the Crown-Zellerbach Trail, another railroadturned-National Rail Trail that stretches to Scappoose.

Trail use is largely limited to daylight hours, so plan accordingly, and keep in mind that both trails have bike repair stations along the way.

FisherPoets Gathering

By David Campiche

As spectacular as an ocean storm itself, the annual FisherPoets Gathering blows into Astoria on the last weekend in February, gathering people of the commercial fishing industry for a weekend of poetry, music and salty storytelling.

Big water and back-breaking work are part and parcel of these dangerous professions, whether fishing for Dungeness crab, Chinook salmon or winching up a 200-pound halibut from the bottom of the sea.

Those who read share their love of the big water, fishing and the dangers of the Pacific Ocean with skill, humor and delight. And if sometimes there is an element of pain or danger in their offerings, listen carefully as they express their souls. Their travails are the stuff of big hearts and solid fortitude.

Fishermen display their deepest feelings with self-effacing modesty. Time and tides support the legacy. Discipline has shaped these hearty men and women of the sea. Certainly, Mother Nature can swing with a hard fist, only to lay down hours later, softly as the flutter of a seabird’s wings.

Each year, crowds wrangle over who wears the poet’s crown. Everyone has a favorite. Crowd-pleasers like Dave Densmore and Geno Leech draw gasps, foot-stomping and laughter, year after year. But there are so many. This gathering fills the town, with readings at theaters, breweries and bars, plus music and art. Fighting storms on the water from Cape Disappointment to the Bering Sea, one forms alliances.

Then there are the nights on a placid sea when the sun sets like golden thunder and, at that very moment, none on the water would trade their lifestyle for riches or hard cash. These poets will tell you stories in heart-futtering detail. They will laugh and hoot, blush and cry. You will, too.

Come listen when the clouds open over Astoria and you expect nothing from the readers but the pride in their voices, or just maybe, comradeship over a good beer. This is a proud and talented bunch.

Banks-Vernonia

Astoria

Do & See

Butterflies OF THE COLUMBIA COAST

Let it be said from the outset that we privileged ones who dwell near the mouth of the Columbia River, on either side and for some distance inland, do not occupy butterfly nirvana. If you have been under the impression that the rainforests of the world are populated by scads of beauteous butterflies, then revise your view slightly: this is true of tropical rainforests — but not temperate rainforests.

Butterflies tend to do very well, in both abundance and diversity, under conditions that are hot and wet (the tropics), hot and dry (the desert) and cold and dry (the Arctic). Cool and wet, not so much. And those are the conditions that prevail here, in our beloved temperate rainforest. The persistent rain and heavy forest cover tend to discourage these sun-loving insects, whose immature stages are likely to rot in the wintertime. Our diversity is better expressed in ferns, mosses, mushrooms, conifers and other organisms that thrive under cool, shaded, moist conditions, or else migrate. So the butterflies here are subtle, compared to elsewhere.

That said, a modest array of species from across the spectrum of butterfly families has adapted well to the plants and climate of the lower Columbia, and they do very well here. Happily, many of these are both beautiful and fascinating, and may be found with moderate searching and attention to the landscape. So we are not at a loss for butterflies here, even if there are far fewer than we might find in the Cascades, Olympics, or Willamette Valley and points south to the Siskiyou and beyond.

Here I will acquaint you with a number of butterflies that you might well encounter here along Our Coast and its adjacent inland areas, and give some tips as to how you might go about spotting them. Since butterflies have different life histories and particular emergence times, it might be best to do this by running through the butterfly year along the Columbia Coast.

Butterflies tend to do very well, in both abundance and diversity, under conditions that are hot and wet (the tropics), hot and dry (the desert) and cold and dry (the Arctic). Cool and wet, not so much. And those are the conditions that prevail here, in our beloved temperate rainforest.

Words: Robert Michael Pyle • Illustrations: Lissa Brewer

As winter turns toward spring, with hazel catkins bursting and pussy willows not far behind, the very first butterflies of the year are posed to emerge — not from their chrysalis, but from a hollow tree, shed or other shelter. Eight Northwest butterflies overwinter as adults, and may be seen on the wing even in January or February, or certainly in March, when the sun is allowed to shine enough to warm the air and bring out these hibernators. Around here, the most likely ones to see are mourning cloaks, California tortoiseshells, satyr anglewings and green commas. Watch for these sizable, often rustycolored butterflies taking their hungry sustenance at sapsucker holes or pussy willows. They may look tatty after their long winter in-dwelling, but their bright offspring will appear again in the fall.

Usually the first fresh emerger to pop out of its pupa is the echo azure, related to the eastern spring azure, which Robert Frost described as “sky-flakes/down in flurry on flurry.” Members of the gossamer-winged family, the blues, coppers and hairstreaks, azures are a lovely lilac-blue on the upper side, silvery white below. Their caterpillars feed on flower buds of many kinds of shrubs, especially osier dogwood, ocean spray and ninebark around here. The adults visit early flowers such as sweet coltsfoot, and the males collect on sandy riverbanks and muddy logging roads to sip salts from the soil. So when you spy bright blue fliers on early spring days, your eyes are not playing tricks on you.

These increasingly rare warm and sunny spring days may also reveal relatives of the azures called elfins. The tiny, chestnut-and-mauve brown elfin haunts kinnikinnick and salal in seaside woods, while the (actually pine-feeding) pine elfin patrols shore pines among beach dunes at Leadbetter Point and Fort Stevens, and the bramble green elfin seeks out rosy lotus flowers higher in the Oregon Coast Range. All of these are thumbnail-sized, as is our earliest skipper — the buzzy gray two-banded checkered skipper, which lays its eggs on flowers of big-flowered geum and trailing blackberry in woodland glades and roadsides.

Eight Northwest butterflies overwinter as adults, and may be seen on the wing even in January or February, or certainly in March, when the sun is allowed to shine enough to warm the air and bring out these hibernators.

In April, the forest and rural roads begin to be spattered by lots of margined whites floating along like bits of tissue paper. These nearly pure-white butterflies with darker veins beneath favor the flowers of ladies' smocks (Dentaria or Cardamine) on which to lay their eggs, like most of the whites requiring hosts in the mustard family. They are native to our temperate rainforest and very well adapted to it, doing well in clearings among both old-growth and managed forests, if not sprayed. But when you leave the wilder places for the towns and gardens, the species of white shifts from margined to European cabbage white. This familiar butterfly, introduced into Quebec in 1861, covered the whole continent extremely successfully, feeding as larvae on cabbages, broccoli and other crucifers. It is by far the commonest species in Astoria, flying from spring through fall in successive generations. I love it, as it is often the only butterfly to be seen on a sunny day in town or farmland.

The late spring brings some real warmth, and with it the tide of swallowtails. The first to mention is another white butterfly, but bigger and floppier than the actual whites. This is the Clodius parnassian. Though classed as a swallowtail by morphology and DNA, it looks nothing like the others. It is a biggish, rounded butterfly of waxen white with sharp inky-black and cherry-red spots. Its caterpillars feed on wild bleeding heart, so you can spot it floating along many a woodside road or path all summer long. Usually by May Day or so, the more obvious true swallowtails will be out too. We are graced with three species here: the pale tiger swallowtail, first out, often in time to nectar on your lilac bushes. It is quite whitish too, banded in thick, black tiger-stripes. A week or two later come the western tigers, lemon-yellow with narrower black tiger-stripes. Both of these feed on broad-leaved trees like willows, cherries, red alder and cascara, and can be truly abundant when conditions are right, even in the city. (Many people call them monarchs, which do not occur here because of the absence of milkweed.) Our final species of the family, the anise swallowtail, has two distinct broods, in spring and late summer to fall. It sports yellow bands across black wings and it lays its eggs on seaside angelica, cow parsnip, dill, parsley and other members of the carrot family. Look for them on lilacs in the spring and butterfly bushes in August, and along headlands, breeding almost down to tidewater at Leadbetter Point.

Do & See

As spring goes on, watch for western meadow fritillaries in the forest clearings. Like all fritillaries, they feed on violets. When they fly, their brilliant orange, black-dotted wings, and their violet-and-rust undersides when at rest, leave little question of their identity. Another softer orange small one — actually Dreamsicle-colored — may be seen haunting the backbeach grasses on the Oregon side about this time. Known as the ochre ringlet, it is often seen tucked up under spiderwebs beneath Queen Anne's lace along seaside dunes. The related large wood nymph may be spotted flip-flopping through pasturelands and woodedges some distance inland from the shore. The males are dark chocolate and the females cocoa, each with conspicuous eye-spots on the wings to draw birds' attention away from their bodies. Both ringlets and wood nymphs feed on grasses as green, camouflaged caterpillars.

Summertime sees the flights of several colorful members of the brush-footed family. A common resident of towns, countryside and anywhere with willows and ocean spray, the very handsome Lorquin's admiral soars back and forth between occasional flaps. Flying out from a chosen branch, males patrol particular territories where they are most likely to encounter females. Jet-black with broad white bands and cinnamon wing tips, they are unmistakable and unforgettable. Another butterfly commonly called an admiral, the red admiral (or red admirable), is not closely related. It too is black, but its wing bands are scarlet or fire-engine orange, not white. Look closely and you will see its resemblance to the several species of ladies — painted lady, West Coast lady and American lady, each with salmon or citrus-orange wings with distinctive black, tan and white variegations. All three species fly into our area in the summer from farther south, so their numbers are highly irregular and their appearance unpredictable year to year. They especially love to nectar on zinnias and butterfly bushes.

A much-smaller brush-foot appears sparsely in spring but much more abundantly in its summer generation. This is the bright orange-and-black spackled mylitta crescent. A mother-of-pearl crescentspot at the outer edge of the underside of the hindwing gives its group the name "crescents." The brighter orange males, just an inch across, glide and flap, glide and flap, close to the ground, patrolling roadsides, edges of rutted tracks or fields and country lanes, all through late summer into fall. The slightly bigger females are a duller orange. They spend their time visiting flowers and seeking their host plants to lay eggs. They feed exclusively on thistles — native or introduced. So if you do not have a compelling reason to eliminate thistles, by all means keep them around, because they are also the caterpillar host for painted ladies and a favorite nectar source of swallowtails, fritillaries and others.

Another tiny flier of summer is the purplish copper. You will find it in damp spots or waste areas in fields where pink knotweed or smartweed grows (not the big Japanese knotweed). Females are orange- and black-spotted, while the males are tarnished-penny brown with an extraordinary purple sheen when seen in the right light. They occur through much of our area, though seldom commonly unless you come upon a good big knotweed patch.

One other, very special species of copper can be claimed by the Columbia Coast, but it is very rare and few have seen it. A newly described subspecies of the mariposa copper (more common in the Cascades), it is known as June's copper. Found at Ilwaco in 1918 and never since on the Long Beach Peninsula, it was discovered among the Gearhart Fen Complex in recent years by local naturalist Mike Patterson. Efforts to find more and to protect their fen-cranberry bog habitats are underway. The uncommon, sedge-feeding dun skipper may be spotted here as well.

Which brings us to late summer, and the most famous of our Columbia Coast butterflies, the Oregon silverspot. This silver-dollar sized, silver-spotted brush-foot was first found near Ocean Park in the nineteen-teens by early lepidopterist Agnes Veazey. After many years of its anonymity, I found it again near Lake Loomis in 1975. The butterflies' federal listing as a threatened species was one of the Portland-based Xerces Society's first campaigns, nearly 50 years ago. Since then, despite lots of monitoring and habitat conservation efforts, it has dropped out of Washington and persists only in a few Oregon coastal remnants of the old, native-fire dependent salt-spray meadows and Mount Hebo. Recently, it was introduced to Saddle Mountain, and the hope is to reintroduce it to restored Washington habitats in coming years. One colony, at Cascade Head Preserve north of Lincoln City, survived thanks to the nectar of the despised exotic weed tansy ragwort, until native nectar sources were reestablished.

Shifting now from rare to common species, there is no more widespread or successful butterfly along the Columbia Coast (and indeed throughout the region) than the woodland skipper. There are many species of grass-feeding little skippers of tawny coloration and rapid flight, but most of them fly in spring and in specialized habitats outside our purview. This one emerges in late summer, in almost every open, sunny habitat available. Many people know them in their gardens, zipping around among herbs, asters and many other flowers. They seem like familiar neighbors or garden sprites. Their orangey-gold wings marked with black dashes are short and triangular, and their bodies thick with powerful flight muscles. Try to get a peek at their confiding and, frankly, cute faces, with their big eyes, short antennae and furry palpi. They thrive on many kinds of grasses, native and nonnative, so long as they are not cut too short and never, ever sprayed. Woodland skippers, prolific everywhere but deep woodland, are on the wing from Aug. 1 to Oct 1.

As summer wanes, two members of the whites and sulphurs family may appear, one of each. First, only among the shore pines at the beach, seek out the ghostly, lovely pine white. You may see them floating about the tops of the pines or Douglas firs, whose needles their exquisitely cryptic larvae consume; or they may come down to nectar on the flowers of hawkbit, late-blooming wild strawberry or garden lobelias, among others, especially in the mornings and later afternoons. The males are milky white with crisp and narrow black veins and black-chained tips. The females are more lineny, with smudgy black veins, and very striking crimson markings below. How lucky we are to have two of the few pine-feeding butterflies right here, both very beautiful — the western pine elfins in spring, and the pine whites in late summer into early autumn. Head out the piney strip behind the sea and dunes, and try to see them both.

To find ways to help with butterfly and pollinator conservation visit www.xerces.com

To identify and get to know all of the butterflies of our Columbia Coast and surrounding regions

Pick up a copy of the Timber Press book, “Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest” by Robert Michael Pyle and Caitlin C. LaBar from one of our local booksellers.

Meanwhile, the orange sulphur (or alfalfa butterfly) shows up from the east side and the Cascades some summers — just a few, or in certain years, hundreds or thousands, laying their eggs on red clover for one final generation. They last as long as the weather permits — I saw one big female here in Gray's River on Thanksgiving one year — and then die back until next year's recruitment. Seek them in hayfields and pastures, and be prepared for shocking oranges.

Finally, the last warm days of autumn see the fresh new tortoiseshells and anglewings flitting about in search of late nectar or rotting fruit to tank up on prior to their long winter hibernations. The bright satyr anglewings will be seen especially near nettle patches. In fact, three of our loveliest common butterflies depend entirely upon stinging nettles for their caterpillars' development: the satyr anglewing, the red admiral and Milbert's tortoiseshell. Nettles are the sine qua non for these spectacular residents. The caterpillars of California tortoiseshells, however, feed on buckthorns, mountain balm and mountain lilacs in the Cascades. Adults move down into western counties in late summer, having defoliated their hosts. Sometimes they breed here on ornamental Ceanothus or maybe Cascara, and some years they build to such numbers that Patterson has seen them migrating south along the seawalls and shorelines. It is not uncommon, but always delightful, to find one overwintering in one's woodshed or cellar. But the finest sight of autumn butterflying might be to witness a bright, fresh mourning cloak basking or nectaring on mums or asters before turning in for the winter — all dark chocolate, French vanilla and blueberries, a butterfly for the ages, wherever you see it.

I hope this little excursion through the year with our local butterflies might encourage readers to seek out this rainbow resource for themselves. In order to optimize your butterfly-spotting opportunities, follow these simple rules: visit open, flowery, sunny places with your eyes wide open. Grow all the food and nectar plants you can in your garden or spare land or flowerbox for butterflies and other pollinators. Make sure the plants you buy have not been pretreated with neonicotinoid pesticides, and never, ever spray these or other butterfly-toxic products yourself. Happy butterflying!

On the Oregon Coast Trail

A photo essay by Lukas Prinos

The journey begins

Evening light hits the observation tower at the Columbia River South Jetty, where the Oregon Coast Trail unfolds into the mist. The trail follows Oregon’s 363-mile coastline south to Brookings. Hikers typically set out from the north.

According to the United States Census Bureau, around 15% of Oregonians have some type of disability, and around 7% have a mobility-related disability. Despite that, many still face barriers to accessing the trails, parks and beaches that draw swaths of visitors to the coast.

an accessible COAST

Moving the needle on recreation for all

For Tom Sayre, a typical bike route spans at least 20 miles.

On most rides, Sayre hits the pavement in his neighborhood before dropping down to Skipanon River Park to pick up the Warrenton Waterfront Trail. From there, he takes in sweeping views of the Columbia River, passing through Carruthers and Seafarers' parks and on to the trails at Fort Stevens. Often, he’ll stop by the ocean before looping past Coffenbury Lake to return home.

In this corner of the North Oregon Coast, the rides are sometimes sunny, sometimes soggy, but always keep him coming back for more.

“I mean, where else can you ride 20 miles and ride through forests, along a big river, see the ocean, stop at a lake?” Sayre said. “I don't know, that's probably one of the best routes you could ask for.”

There’s more at play than picturesque views, though.

Sayre broke his back decades ago, and has used a wheelchair ever since. It wasn’t until after college that he discovered handcycling, a sport where riders use their hands, rather than their feet, to pedal. These days, he gets out once or twice every week on a custom-made, three-wheeled handcycle.

Sayre has been advocating for increased accessibility in outdoor recreation for the past 35 years — and in some ways, that type of advocacy has paid off: a few dozen years ago, even an accessible outdoor restroom might have been hard to come by. Now, more and more ADA-compliant facilities and adaptive gear suppliers are dotting the map. But the work is far from complete.

Words: Olivia Palmer • Images: Lukas Prinos

Left: Tom Sayre speeds along the Warrenton Waterfront Trail. With a handcycle, he can access a variety of terrain for a ride, including grass and gravel.

A tug passes by along the Warrenton Waterfront Trail.

Addressing barriers

When Sayre gets out on his handcycle, it’s an escape from the ordinary.

“It’s a rare occurrence that somebody that's in a wheelchair, underneath their own speed, can go fast enough to feel the wind blow through their hair, their eyes water,” he said.

There’s a wealth of places nearby to make that escape, too — among his favorites, the Astoria Riverwalk, the Banks-Vernonia Trail, the Discovery Trail and the winding paths of Fort Stevens State Park. On slower days, when he feels like getting farther from the crowds, he might go with his family to the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge, Cedar Wetlands Preserve, Kilchis Point Reserve or Cascade Head Preserve.

Still, there are other places Sayre can’t get to. On a recent ride, he pulled up to a trail off of Perkins Road at the edge of Lewis and Clark National Historical Park. It’s one he might have kept going on, except for an obvious obstacle: a brown metal gate, stretching from one side of the entrance to the other

Sayre calls this kind of physical barrier a showstopper — and for good reason. Although hikers and dog walkers can usually slip through the space between a gate and the edge of a trail, someone using a mobility device often can’t.

He doesn’t have to look far to find similar issues nearby.

Off an overlook along the Fort to Sea Trail, a set of boulders stands as an impassible barrier. In Warrenton, gates cut off access to much of the Airport Dike Trail. Sayre said he can name plenty of other examples.

Part of the issue comes down to funding — if cities and parks have limited budgets, they can’t always prioritize addressing outdated infrastructure. They also need to consider trail maintenance. Physical barriers like gates are often used to keep all-terrain vehicles and cars out.

“I understand that, and that's a good thing that they're protecting our park like that, but you can't block out a whole population because of that issue,” Sayre said. “You’ve got to manage it a different way.”

There’s a wealth of places nearby to make an escape, too — some of Tom Sayre's favorites are the Astoria Riverwalk, the Banks-Vernonia Trail, the Discovery Trail

and

the winding paths of Fort Stevens State Park.

Sayre has served on dozens of boards and citizen advisory committees, including with the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, which released its first-ever accessibility design standards for all future projects in 2023.

Other agencies have made similar efforts. In 2020, for example, Lewis and Clark National Historical Park completed an accessibility self-evaluation and transition plan to document barriers and make recommendations for improvements. The Oregon Coast Visitors Association, on the other hand, is working with partners to increase accessibility along the coast through the Oregon Coast Travelability Group.

Laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Architectural Barriers Act provide important standards for that kind of work — but Oregon Coast Visitors Association deputy director Arica Sears said she’s learned they’re often just a starting point.

“Accessibility is a lot more than that, because there are a wide range of disabilities, cognitive and physical,” Sears said. “So I think it's an important conversation when anybody is looking to improve, especially outdoor recreation, that maybe the kayak launch is ADA accessible, it passes that law, but is the parking lot to get to it? Is the bathroom at the parking lot accessible? And if those answers are no, then really that kayak launch is not accessible to disabled people.”

To Sayre, accessibility starts with how people get to a park or recreational facility, like whether there is accessible parking, or whether there are accessible public transit stops and accessible routes to the entrance. From there, he looks at signage, taking note of whether signs include accessibility symbols and adequate information on slope, cross slope and ground treatment that might exceed expectations. Accessible trails will be wide and shallow enough for a variety of users, and have a firm, even and continuous trail surface that connects to other trails and amenities.

The list goes on — but before he even gets to a facility, Sayre wants to know what to expect, and how to prepare. Having detailed information online about trails, parking and amenities goes a long way.

“When you spend a lot of time in the outdoors, you realize that there's a whole bunch of barriers that are going to try to keep you from recreating, right?” he said. “And after experiencing it over and over and over again, you start to think, ‘How can I find out information before I go, getting all the gear put in the rig, driving out to somewhere and getting out and finding out there's a barrier, you know, right at the entrance?’”

A handcycle is a type of bicycle powered by the rider’s arms.

Tom Sayre gazes out over the Columbia River at sunset.

Do & See

Accessing the beach

From the sandy shores below Haystack Rock to the tide pools of Oswald West State Park, the Oregon Coast is incomplete without its beaches. But as Sayre knows, beaches often don't bode well for wheelchairs, especially when there’s dry sand. For him, most outings include parking on the beach, finding a spot to sit, and watching as his family plays and walks around.

For families like April Foster’s, beach access mats have opened a door to something more.

Foster has been visiting the coast for years with her daughter, Eilish, who uses a wheelchair. When Eilish was younger, she would carry her to the beach, but with time, that became less and less practical.

For at least a decade, Eilish stopped going to the beach, settling instead for views from the road or the parking lot.

“It became like scoping out where we could park and watch versus participate,” Foster said. “And especially during COVID, when I moved to Manzanita, I was like, ‘It's really sad that we live, like, four blocks from the beach and we can't get on the beach at all.’”

Then, in September 2022, April and Eilish visited Lincoln City for its first season rolling out hundreds of feet of Mobi-mats at local beach sites.

Foster remembers the spark of excitement that flickered as she watched an elderly couple make their way up the mats, one in a wheelchair. She wasn’t sure how long they’d been out on the beach, or what they’d been up to, but she could sense how palpable their joy was.

As she pushed Eilish along the blue plastic mat, the same feeling washed over them.

“I was like, ‘We get to touch sand, we get to feel that salt air. We just get to hang out, you know, and be around other people who are enjoying the beach,’” Foster said. “And that was so nice, and that's what I hope for every beach community, is for people like Eilish to be able to get down, to be with their family, be with friends, to go have a picnic, whatever it may be.”

Since Lincoln City’s roll-out, the City of Seaside has also added over 1,000 feet of Mobi-mats to two of its beach access points — one off 12th Avenue and the other off Avenue U. Now, when April and Eilish are in town, they often make a stop by the water, sometimes continuing along the promenade for a longer walk with ocean views.

The mats aren’t just for wheelchairs, though. Joshua Heineman, Seaside’s director of tourism marketing, said he often sees families with strollers and wagons, visitors with canes and other beachgoers use them, too. “It's been surprising how much it's used actually,” Heineman said. “I mean, even I am somebody who likes walking in the sand, but there's just something about when you see that road laid out in front of you. You just gravitate towards it.”

Seaside and other cities along the coast also offer free beach wheelchair and track chair rentals. Meanwhile, the Oregon Coast Visitors Association has created a Mobi-mat toolkit to help provide jurisdictions with practical resources for creating a project plan, securing funding and permits and implementing a Mobi-mat program.

Of course, for as many feet of mats extend along the beach, miles of shoreline elsewhere remain inaccessible. Many cities only keep their mats out during the summer months, and those that keep them out for longer can face challenges during events like the king tides. Sayre worries the mats could create an obstacle for vehicles on the beach.

Still, they offer one experience that otherwise might be out of reach — and for Foster, that’s no small thing.

“Obviously there's limitations, but to have an opportunity to experience it, I think, is pretty special,” she said.

Seaside and other cities along the coast offer free beach wheelchair and track chair rentals. Meanwhile, the Oregon Coast Visitors Association has created a toolkit to help provide resources for Mobi-mat programs.

Seaside has installed mats that can extend up to 1,600 feet depending on tides and ocean conditions.

Centering community voices

Efforts to increase accessibility extend beyond the coast’s beaches. At Westport County Park, an ADA-compliant boat ramp and kayak launch recently won Clatsop County a national award from the States Organization for Boating Access. At state parks like Cape Lookout and Nehalem Bay, accessibility improvements are underway thanks to the support of a general obligation bond.

But without the input of people with lived experience, those types of efforts can miss the mark.

“That advocacy is really important,” Sayre said, “and if you don't have a seat at the table, it's much harder to make the change.”

That isn’t lost on groups like the Oregon Coast Visitors Association and the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. Helena Kesch, the department’s ADA and tribal relations coordinator, said working with people from the disability community has played an essential role in informing work like the agency's accessibility design standards.

Eilish Foster, left, and her mother, April Foster, greet a dog at the beach in Seaside.

A gate stands in the way of a National Park Service path off Perkins Road. The gate has an access point on the side that cannot be navigated by a wheelchair or handcycle.

“Sometimes, if you're not working with people with lived experience, you don't know and you're making assumptions,” Kesch said. “So it's really important to engage with people with lived experience in the project design and planning phase, even at conception, because there's things that you just don't think about when you're not a person with a disability.”

The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department’s new standards aren’t all-encompassing, though. Rather, they’re a starting point to continue to add to and improve upon. The reality is, increasing accessibility is less of a box to check off and more of an ongoing process of listening, noticing and taking action.

More than anything, Sayre wants to see more people with disabilities communicating their needs to their local jurisdictions — and not just informing accessibility work, but leading it.

“I think that you have to have that population representing themselves and not somebody else representing for you, because while they might be really well-informed, they're not living the life,” Sayre said. “I'm getting older, and I'm not going to be doing this for much longer, and I had hoped that there would be, you know, 10 people that could take my place, or 20 people that could take my place.”

That kind of involvement, he added, allows for a proactive approach to problemsolving — and a more accessible coast for all.

Miles of sand

Fishermen gather at Fort Stevens State Park. The first 16 miles of the Oregon Coast Trail follow a flat, wide beach past the Peter Iredale shipwreck until an inland turn at Gearhart.

Coho salmon

Fishing grounds

Larry Smith inspects a coho salmon in his cooler

From left, longtime friends Larry Smith, B.K. Srinivasan and Al Onkka share a laugh while they wait for the fish to bite.

The Oregon Film Museum in Astoria, where cardboard cutouts of characters from “The Goonies” line the halls.

Do & See

‘It’s our time’ “The Goonies” is turning 40.

This year, the best-known Hollywood production filmed in Astoria will celebrate four decades since its June 7, 1985, release, and fans from around the world are expected to shuffle in for a weekend of special events celebrating the cult classic.

Words: Peter Korchnak • Images: Lukas Prinos

Held over four days, from June 5 to June 8, Goonies Weekend is being put on by the Clatsop County Historical Society in collaboration with the Seattlebased event planning company Gilly Wagon.

The milestone celebration is planned rain or shine. Registration is free, though some events will require a ticket. Most activities will be in Astoria, while others could extend into surrounding areas, such as Ecola State Park in Cannon Beach, where exterior scenes of the movie were filmed.

Tiered tours of the Goonies House in Astoria will be offered throughout the weekend. Regular visits on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday will be free for all.

Visitors can purchase additional tickets for a bus tour, a porch visit, the truffle shuffle stump, as well as a full tour package with all of the above. The VIP Cocktail Hour ticket will offer 40 guests access to the house, drinks and a mix-and-mingle with the attending cast and crew. This will be only the third time that access to the house has been open to the public.

June 7 continues to be celebrated as Goonies Day in Astoria, an official holiday by city proclamation.

Do & See

The house at Duane and 38th Streets recently changed hands. The new owner, Behman Zakeri, of Kansas City, is a selfprofessed Goonies superfan.

“I love the humor, the adventure and the endless pursuit to find the treasure,” he wrote in an email. “It’s a representation of my childhood in the ’80s. I've recited Goonies lines throughout my life.”

The movie also inspired him as a kid, he added. “It had so many teachings and messages throughout the movie: never say die … what true friendship is, don't judge a book by its cover, stick together, and the list goes on,” he said.

Zakeri has carried his love for the film since childhood.

“It takes a big fan that loves the movie so much to buy the Goonies House and share it with the world,” he said. “I always wanted to own the one and only Goonies House. I believed in my heart that I would be the best steward that would not only take care of the house, but also make it welcome for fellow Goonies all around the world.”

When he purchased the property in 2022 for $1.65 million, Zakeri also announced plans to renovate the house to match its appearance in the movie. While the transformation is still in its early stages, Zakeri has been working to equip the house with “gooniesbilia.”

The Rube Goldberg machine that opens the yard gate after Chunk does the truffle shuffle is about halfway built. And Zakeri has been collecting replica props to place inside the house, including film merchandise and memorabilia like action figures, toys and posters, as well as a model of Michelangelo’s David statue with Mikey’s mom’s “favorite piece” rendered as a magnetic appendage.

Organizers are asking visitors to remember the Goonies House is in a residential neighborhood and to keep disruption to a minimum by obeying parking signs and street closures and not littering. Walking or using the event shuttle is encouraged.

Zakeri is also assisting the museum in hopes of bringing members of the original cast to town for the festivities, to speak at events, sign autographs and take photos with fans.

As of February, no appearances had been confirmed. But weeks earlier, several Goonies alumni, including Josh Brolin and Corey Feldman, attended a hand-andfootprint ceremony at the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles for Ke Huy Quan, who portrayed Data in the film.

Not only do the cast members still support each other, but many have expressed a desire to reunite for a sequel, which has been rumored over the years. In February 2025, Variety reported “Goonies 2” was “officially in the works,” with a scriptwriter hired and Steven Spielberg returning among the producers.

In June, guided tours of filming locations around Astoria will immerse visitors in the making of the original. Multiple screenings are also planned across town, as is a costume contest and various movie-related challenges, including geocaching and a treasure hunt. No word on whether any of the hidden treasures include truffles.

A special sweepstakes will also offer a night for two at the Goonies Jail, sleeping in the cell featured in the movie located in the old Clatsop County Jail, which houses today’s Oregon Film Museum.

Goonies Weekend will double as a fundraiser for the museum, with proceeds from the four-day bash supporting an ambitious expansion project.

"I believe I am the best steward that to not only take care of the house, but also make it welcome for fellow Goonies all around the world.”

According to McAndrew Burns, executive director of the Clatsop County Historical Society, which operates the museum, the 800-square-foot facility welcomed 53,400 people in 2024, an average of almost 150 visitors each day.

The museum is dedicated to promoting Oregon's film legacy. But, Burns said, in the current facility, “we just can't fulfill our educational mission the way we should. There are aspects of the story of filmmaking we aren't able to tell in that space. We want to tell the story of behind the scenes.”

Behman Zakeri unfolds a ladder to the attic of the Goonies House. He purchased the home in 2022 and is planning renovations to match its appearance in the movie.

In addition to exploring the mechanics of filmmaking, plans for the expanded museum include immersive exhibits concerning the state’s animation industry and liveaction movies filmed in Oregon.

“Five hundred major motion pictures and television shows have been filmed in the state of Oregon,” Burns said, including “The Fisherman’s Bride,” which in 1909 was the first commercial feature with a plot shot in the state, and the first to be made in Astoria. “We didn't name this facility the Astoria Film Museum or the Clatsop County Film Museum. We named it the Oregon Film Museum, and there’s a rich story to be told.”

Once the expansion is complete, the original jail location will become fully dedicated to “The Goonies,” which was added in 2017 to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

The historical society has raised about 70% of the funding needed for the $10.1 million expansion project, according to Burns. The new, twostory 13,000-square-foot building at Seventh and Duane Streets, on the site of the former Morris Glass building, will resemble Astoria’s pier buildings on a footprint reminiscent of a camera aperture.

Construction is estimated to take about 20 months. While the ground is yet to be broken and the timeline set, the historical society has been doing preparatory work for the site, including a geotechnical survey required in the permitting process.

“In an ideal world, we’re opening at Goonies Day 42,” Burns said.

The campaign is still in its quiet stages, working with donors to supply the bulk of the funding. The museum was awarded a $1 million state grant last year.

As supplemental events, the historical society is also planning an ‘80s car show as well as an ’80s’ con at the Astoria Armory, replicating a popular convention event from the film’s 30th anniversary. The Clatsop County Heritage Museum will also feature a special exhibit about the old county jail, a key filming location that has become a pilgrimage site for fans worldwide. .

A treasure map and letter from Warner Bros. hang on an upstairs wall in the Goonies House.

Photo Credit: Joni Kabana

Bull kelp

An annual seaweed, bull kelp can reach heights of more than 100 feet each season, forming an underwater forest canopy. In recent years, about two-thirds of Oregon's kelp forests have disappeared.

Eat & Drink

A foraging journey

Crabbers come together

Eat & Drink

Our Picks

Fedé Trattoria

By Marianne Monson

In Italy, a trattoria is a neighborhood restaurant serving simple, regional dishes in a rustic setting. They’re often family-owned, with a focus on local ingredients. You don’t have to get on an international flight to experience one, though. On Astoria’s Pier 12, you can try Fedé.

The trattoria is a partnership between wife and husband Faith Davenport and Sean Hammond, who brought decades of restaurant experience to opening an eatery of their own. Initially drawn to the cuisine of Italy, it wasn’t until they visited the country that they fell in love with the food and ambience of small, regional dining spots and decided to bring that spirit back home.

Fedé’s ambience is decidedly cozy, with views of the Columbia River from both sides of the restaurant. A dozen tables are arranged around an open kitchen at the center, so diners can observe Hammond as he seasons a dish or places house bread into the stone oven.

The waterfront restaurant has cultivated partnerships with local farmers and fishers in order to create a cuisine with a strong nod toward seafood and other specialties of the lower Columbia. In traditional Italian style, the menu is arranged in four course offerings: antipasti, soup and salad, pasta and meat, fish and veggies — so the dining is fully customizable, ranging from small bites and drinks to multi-course meals.

Highlights include radiatori pasta with braised lamb, chanterelle fettuccine, mussels served with saffron, and a creamy burrata cheese laced with pesto sauce. For dessert, offerings include flourless chocolate cake, lemon tart or panna cotta finished with pine bud syrup.

Fedé does not accept reservations, so arrive early on weekends and summer days to get on the waitlist. Their largest table seats six, so it’s best for small gatherings.

In Italian, the word “fedé” translates as “wedding ring,” but the word also carries connotations of faith, belief and trust — a nod to the partnership that centers the restaurant, and the bravery it takes to open one in a small, coastal town. With loyal customers and strong reviews, that faith appears to have paid off.

Ilwaco Cider Co.

By William Dean

At this craft cidery in downtown Ilwaco on the Long Beach Peninsula, Vinessa Karnofski, a former chef, is forging a reputation as one of the most creative cider makers in the Pacific Northwest.

She and her husband, Jarrod Karnofski, opened Ilwaco Cider Co. last year with modest expectations. In a short time, they’ve surpassed initial goals thanks to strong regional support and a spacious, family-friendly taproom on Spruce Street. Live music is featured on Saturdays, and a long list of fun events is always in the works.

The star attraction, though, is the tantalizing array of hard ciders made with natural ingredients. The brews run the gamut from sweet to tart, in colors from straw to burgundy, but they all have something in common: complex flavors and aromatics.

One local favorite is Springrider Cran, made with locally grown cranberries, lime and wildflower honey. Another must-try is Columbia Fog, made with oolong tea, lavender, vanilla and orange blossom honey. For those wanting something zestier, there’s Ancho Libre, made with ancho and serrano chilis, pineapple, guava, papaya, fig and fennel.

“Blending is my absolute favorite,” Vinessa Karnofski said when asked what part of her new career she enjoys most.

She attended the Western Culinary Institute in Portland and worked for years as a chef, but with young children to raise, she wanted to rein in her runaway hours and turned to the hobby of home-brewing ciders.

“I needed to find something in line with my passion, which is cooking,” she said shortly before the cidery’s opening. “Something where I could be creative.”

Distribution of the ciders is already robust on the peninsula, where many restaurants and bars offer different flavors on tap. Fort George Brewery has also added it to the lineup. With no other craft cidery closer than Portland, expect the footprint to expand further onto the Oregon Coast.

Astoria

Ilwaco

Anna’s Table

By Peter Korchnak

Hailing from a local family of fishermen and restaurateurs, owner and executive chef John Nelson’s menu at this new Cannon Beach restaurant merges culinary traditions of the Oregon Coast with a nod to his Scandinavian heritage.

Regionally sourced — hunted, fished, farmed and foraged — ingredients sing in an interplay of old-world techniques, including brining, pickling, curing, grinding and smoking, to create simple, seasonal dishes prepared with thoughtful intention.

One menu mainstay, Manila clam linguine, lets the titular mollusk shine alongside fresh pasta. Another, lamb shank brined and braised with glögg, a Swedish mulled wine, and accompanied by lingonberries, harkens to the chef’s family origins.

Sturgeon from a seasonal tribal fishery on the Columbia River cassoulets with white beans and smoked pork. Crab cakes on a bed of watercress and radish salad awash in dill lemon creme fraiche highlight one of the Pacific Northwest’s most prized bounties.

The restaurant’s name is an homage to the chef’s mother and daughter, and its location — an unassuming residence-like building on Cannon Beach’s Hemlock Street — signals family comfort and coastal features. Diners at the source-to-table restaurant enjoy space to slow down and connect with the best that the wild nature of the North Coast yields in a clean, intimate interior.

A small, sommelier-curated wine list rotates Pacific Northwest and French creations, complemented by local microbrews and nonalcoholic beverages like pear cardamom shrub soda. The akvavit flight pairs well with Swedish cream to round out the experience.

Guests can also take the restaurant’s techniques and recipes, as well as Nelson’s stories, home in the chef’s cookbook “Dig a Clam, Shuck An Oyster, Shake a Crab.”

Feasts. Eateries. Libations. Recipes.

Long Beach

Cranguyma Farms

By Ryan Hume

October is well-known for its fall foliage. On the Long Beach Peninsula, there’s more to see, and much of it comes from the ground up. Shy chanterelle and porcini mushrooms peek out from their hiding spots on the forest floor. October is also when the many cranberry bogs on the peninsula are flooded.

Washington state is responsible for 3% of the United States cranberry crop, ranking it fifth in the nation. In 2023, the state pulled in over $10 million worth of the bitter berry most famously associated with Thanksgiving and Christmas. With its plentiful peat bogs, cool climate and specific latitude, the peninsula is one of the major producers in the state.

No wonder the Cranberry Museum is located in Long Beach.

Cranguyma Farms is the largest cranberry farm on the peninsula, with over 200 forested acres. The odd name is a sort of tortured portmanteau: “cran” obviously comes from cranberry, “guy” refers to the original owner, Guy C. Meyers, and the “ma” is his wife Amy’s name spelled backward so that the “y’s” overlap.

First established in 1940, Cranguyma is now under fifth-generation ownership. They have roadside stands in Seaview and Chinook that sell readypicked berries for $8 a gallon, but the fun is really to be had at the farm just north of Long Beach proper, where there is a dedicated bog for U-Pick cranberries throughout October. Pick what you want for 75 cents a pound.

If you visit the farm at other times of the year, Cranguyma also offers U-Pick blueberries throughout the summer and into the fall.

Nearby, the Cranberry Harvest Fair is a long-cherished annual event put on by the Pacific Coast Research Foundation at the Cranberry Museum. Usually on the second weekend of October, come see a wet harvest at the research center’s bogs behind the museum and stay for live music and cranberry-heavy breakfast and lunch items.

Cranberry harvesting also coincides with the peninsula’s annual wild mushroom season, when many of the area’s finest restaurants offer special menus featuring the region’s delectable forest fruits. Plan accordingly and a feast of earthy bounty awaits.

Cannon Beach

One wild weekend

Forging friendships through foraging

Imagine living in a land where the fruits of the forest and the sea can be plucked at will and transformed into a gourmet dinner, and then realize that, in fact, you do. The bounty of the Pacific Northwest is well-known, and celebrated for good reason.

Words: Ryan Hume • Images: Lukas Prinos

Plates are garnished with the lichen old man’s beard, or Spanish moss.

Fresh chanterelle mushrooms can go for $40 a pound during peak season. Willapa Bay oysters are shipped around the world. But the forest and the bay can be deceiving, offering plenty of poisonous alternatives to the good stuff, so it doesn’t hurt to have an expert on hand.

Enter Matt Nevitt, purveyor of all things wild. Formerly an engineer at Nike, Nevitt decided to exit the rat race more than a decade ago to pursue his lifelong passion of living off the land, a different sort of hand-to-mouth existence that he learned growing up in Raymond, Washington.

Nevitt has cultivated a reputation as one of the premier foragers in our region, providing restaurants throughout the Pacific Northwest with wild mushrooms and other found goodies. Chances are, if you are a fan of fine dining on the coast, you have nibbled on one of Nevitt’s treasures.

His company, Wild Foragers, also sells directly to the public through the North Coast Food Web in Astoria. Foragers, by nature, are notoriously secretive. They have to be to protect their special spots.

“I see myself as a farmer,” Nevitt said. “Or, more accurately, a caretaker of the land. All of the patches I visit tend to become more abundant each year, because I’m doing things to promote propagation and spreading seeds and spores as much as possible.”

So it was indeed a rare opportunity for Nevitt to offer a two-day guided tour of his choice patches among the waterways that slip through the trees off of the pristine Willapa shores. The spoils of this adventure would go home with the lucky participants. The apex of the experience — an allinclusive trip with a cost of $425, including tent camping on-site — was a Saturday night pop-up dinner at Wild Foragers’ Raymond headquarters, a celebration of the abundant wild foods of the area.

This event had gestated for more than three years, ever since Nevitt met Kenneth “Kenzo” Booth, chef and owner of Būsu in downtown Astoria. Būsu’s playful, Northwest-driven, Japanese-inspired menu relies heavily on local, foraged ingredients.

Nevitt was one of Booth’s first vendors, and the two soon became fast friends, dreaming up a way to combine their talents.

“(Matt) is incredibly kind,” Booth said. “And those are exactly the kinds of humans I want to be around, work with, and (I) consider him family.”

Jonathan Jones cooks up mushrooms on a Kasai Konro grill.

The planning

The October sky was shockingly blue and crisp above the Willapa River on the first morning of the event. These were good omens for the campers as they arrived to pitch their tents on the lapping waterfront of Wild Foragers headquarters, a property bought by Nevitt in 2014 on the original site of the Pacific County Marina.

“I’ve heard old stories of giant ships from Japan that once docked here to unload oyster seed and load up with our local trees to take back to Japan,” Nevitt said.

The property had also been an oyster cannery and a boat shop before Nevitt and his father helped build the house that now stands on the shore.

“Our area has long been known as one of the epicenters of the best wild mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest,” Nevitt said. “Also, Willapa Bay is considered one of the cleanest natural estuaries in the world due to many factors, including all the oysters filtering the water.”

The weather was just sheer dumb luck, but everything else was meticulously planned. Nevitt called on friends and family months ahead of time to arrange everything just so. Two long, live-edge tables on the dock that spilled out over the river had been harvested from an old-growth tree by Kaley Hanson, a friend of Nevitt’s who is a woodworker and owner of Raymond’s Pitchwood Alehouse.

The warehouse on the dock had been transformed into a semi-outdoor kitchen, though the structure itself had plenty of room for prep work, and a walk-in fridge Nevitt designed himself. Jessaid Pagán Malavé, a project manager from Seattle, was on hand with his partner, Cerena Gonzalez, to help make everything go smoothly.

Pagán Malavé had met Nevitt not even a year before, having taken one of his foraging classes. He soon took another.

Born in Puerto Rico, he spent years in New York City in the finance industry before heading west. “I used to think people who picked berries out of a bush were crazy,” he said.

Consider him a convert.

“I worry for a living,” Pagán Malavé said. “We needed a plan and needed to work backwards. He trusted me with helping to bring his vision to fruition.”

Soon all that worry would pay off as three borrowed boats were attached to a small convoy of trucks and the 20-odd foragers in muck boots were whisked away to undisclosed locations along the estuary that

Nevitt has sniffed out, cultivated and nurtured for years.

The group of hunters was diverse, hailing from all over the Northwest. Some were chefs Nevitt has supplied, others were foodies, or naturalists. They ranged in age from early 20s to early retirement. Most were novices, so Nevitt’s advice was on full display, teaching the participants how to clean mushrooms with a knife before placing them into a basket.

That first day’s haul was impressive. “We were able to find some great varieties of wild mushrooms that I was hoping to find. In particular, we found some of the most photogenic chanterelles and hedgehogs I’ve ever seen, and they were also some of the largest specimens I have ever found,” Nevitt said. “I led the group into the patches and they found them and they were so excited to find such amazing mushrooms.”

The Willapa Bay area has long been known as one of the epicenters of wild mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest.

Matsutake mushrooms grilled with salt and pepper on a bed of lichen and a splattering of chili garlic oil.

Eat & Drink

The kitchen

Back at the warehouse, jutting out above the river, prep had been ongoing throughout the day while the foragers had been hiking through the woods. Booth had enlisted his old friend, Thomas Carey, to pull off the big meal. The two had met nearly two decades ago in the now-closed kitchen of Le Bistro Montage in Portland.

Nevitt delivered all of the mushrooms to Būsu a few days earlier. Booth gauged it was about a week’s worth of prep for the main courses, though pickling started in the spring.

Nevitt estimated that over 90% of the ingredients used in the sevencourse menu arrived in the kitchen from less than a 20-mile radius.

There was a gas grill on the dock and propane burners for pots and pans, and, of course, an oven and stovetop up the hill in the house.

Booth and Carey were later joined by Jonathan Jones, the executive chef of the Astoria Golf & Country Club, who showed up with a very large piece of kitchen equipment. A Kasai Konro grill is a monster of a

box typically used in Japanese cooking, like yakitori, where small pieces of meat or vegetables are grilled inches away from a special type of smokeless charcoal called Binchōtan, which reaches impossibly high heats and can be used indoors.

“I was fortunate to get the third released in the United States,” Jones said. “I could not wait to use it so I thought it would be a great opportunity to break it in and put it out and see how it performed.”

This was only half of the grill. Jones and his wife, Stacey, hope to utilize the whole beast with a new cocktail and small-plate eatery called BAR X.O., which they plan to open in Astoria.

“I have not worked with Kenzo before,” Jones said. “But my wife and I are huge fans of his craft. To be honest, his izakaya is one of the main inspirations that made us feel like we can come out here and create a dining experience for the great community of Astoria.”

Everyone in the kitchen fell into a rhythm and spirits remained high through all the chopping, sauteing and grilling.

Chef Kenneth “Kenzo” Booth holds a bowl of black truffle miso mushroom soup with rice noodles and pork at Būsu in Astoria.

The feast

After a very long day, the whole crew was ready to sit down on the dock and eat through the dusk. The vibe was certainly camp casual — muddy boots, jackets, rain gear that never saw a drop. More people showed up, friends of Nevitt’s, including the tablemaker, Hanson, whose gorgeous work was now lined with an assortment of pickles and glass bottles of fresh Willapa Hills spring water that had been pulled straight from the source that afternoon. Nevitt produced a keg of Culture Shock kombucha, out of Seattle, frothy with a bit of bite.

Booth’s cooking philosophy is to follow the seasons and the pickles on the table reflected these transitions. Pickled fiddlehead ferns and oxeye daisy buds — bright, salty bursts done in the style of a caper — represented spring, while curried pickled chanterelles and rehydrated shiitakes seasoned with soy, ginger and apple cider vinegar spoke of autumn.

Soon, large platters of freshly shucked Willapa Bay oysters arrived — briny and pungent under a punch of mignonette — and the crowd turned ravenous. Looking down into the water surrounding the dock, you could see there were plenty more to be had.

“They are mother nature’s gift to us,” Jones said. “They are packed with so many great flavors and also they are super healthy and very abundant.”

But this was October in the Pacific Northwest, when the wild mushroom is king. Following the luxury of eating oysters on the dock, the remaining courses would be vegan and prominently feature mushrooms, each attached to its own wine pairing prepared by Jones, who was the evening’s sommelier, having won multiple awards at a winery before moving to Astoria.

“Personally, I’m a meat eater,” said Jordan Probasco, a longtime friend of Nevitt’s and a chiropractor in Astoria. “I was a little skeptical about a completely vegan meal coming at me and making my tummy tickle with excitement, but it did. Literally everything they put in front of us was epic. I tend to be a picky eater, but remained open to whatever came my way that night. And I’m glad I did. It was phenomenal.”

The first soup of the night arrived and set a high bar. Thai red curry paste and coconut milk were blended with five pounds of lobster mushrooms and a kelp dashi. The flavor was intense with just an edge of heat.

Next, thick slabs of matsutake mushrooms were grilled and served with a

crispy chili garlic oil on top of a spindle of old man’s beard, a stringy type of lichen that’s high in Vitamin C.

Perhaps the most playful dish of the evening was the wild mushroom congee with porcini mushrooms and wild sea spinach. Congee is a savory Chinese rice porridge that Booth often likes to include on his menus. Here, considering the significance porcini mushrooms play in many Italian risottos, this was kind of a cross between the two — it had the creamy base of a congee and the toothiness of a risotto. The wild sea spinach was certainly not the same leafy green one finds at the grocery store and added a nice color and a hint of salinity to the dish.

Anyone who has eaten at Būsu knows that Booth is a master of a steaming bowl of ramen, and the kare miso ramen he served on the dock as the last rays of sunlight faded was nothing short of phenomenal. The depth of flavor achieved in a broth consisting of

miso, hedgehog, chanterelle and maitake mushrooms filled the soul with earthy gulps of umami between slurps of slick noodles.

The last main course was also a mainstay of Būsu’s menu — a vegan wild mushroom okonomiyaki, which is an Osaka-style savory pancake. Stuffed with cabbage, braised chanterelles and tofu, Booth employed a doctored-up vegenaise instead of the traditional Japanese mayonnaise to keep with the theme of the night.

Dessert was provided by Nevitt: a coconut and huckleberry pudding with chia seeds — a nice, soft landing after so many wonderful, eccentric, filling courses.

No one walked away from the dock hungry, kitchen staff included, as some turned in early and others kept the momentum going at the waterfront. Around fire pits and with an acoustic guitar played by Probasco, who had also played at Nevitt’s wedding, the good vibes carried deeper into the night.

Fresh oysters are prepared with a mignonette sauce.

Goodbyes

The boat arrived at the dock the next morning and the foragers, now including the kitchen staff, piled aboard for one last hunt. The Serenity, piloted by Capt. Chuck Stepp and his dog, is an old converted houseboat that Stepp, a mechanic who lives down the waterway from Wild Foragers headquarters, has been fixing up for years.

A 20-minute boat ride would reveal one of Nevitt’s most private patches. Across the bay rang out the shotgun blasts of duck hunters.

Up a rocky incline, the land evened out into a grassy field before spilling down into the woods. Right in the middle of the field stood a fairy ring of porcini — a natural formation mushrooms sometimes take, where they grow in a near-perfect circle, almost reminiscent of Stonehenge in England. While a magical sight, the porcini were too buggy to pick.

“I haven’t said anything like this over the weekend,” Nevitt said to the group. “But foraging patches are special places. Some are passed down over generations. If any of you want to come back to these places, please let me know first. And maybe someday you can show me yours.”

There was a decent haul that morning, but not as fruitful as the day before. Back on the dock, the crew communally split up their gathered bounty and decamped back toward their real lives with a bag full of treasures and at least a few new friends.

Miraculously, the weather had held through the entire weekend, but as Pagán Malavé pointed out, it was the people that made the experience so successful. Nevitt hinted with the success of this weekend plans are already in the works for another culinary adventure next autumn and those interested can get on the wait list by reaching out to him on Instagram.

Before the group departed, one participant, Alex Brodeur, of Portland, mentioned he would really like to try another oyster plucked right out of the shadow of the dock.

Nevitt obliged. Down at the shoreline, he looked at the water level. The tide was too high. Not missing a beat, Nevitt took off his boots and waded in deep, dunking underwater, gathering bivalves, so everyone could have one last treat.

Wild Foragers

Follow Matt Nevitt at @ForagerBox on Facebook or @wild.foragers on Instagram

Wild mushrooms top off a dish at Būsu. The restaurant is donation-based, with hours and menus updated online.

Foraging patches are special places. Some are passed down over generations.

Matt Nevitt, left, of Wild Foragers, and Kenneth Booth, center, welcome guests to dinner at Nevitt’s property in Raymond, Washington, and preview the courses they’ve prepared.

Evening light at the Wild Foragers property in Raymond, where dinner was followed by coconut and huckleberry pudding for dessert.

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Hiker’s Camp

Over Tillamook Head, hikers follow the route of Lewis and Clark as they traveled to a Clatsop village in search of a beached whale in 1806. At Hiker’s Camp, within Ecola State Park (“ecola” means “whale”), cabins are offered first come, first served for Oregon Coast Trail hikers.

‘That’s a healthy community’

Crabbers come together in the wake of Ilwaco fire

Words: Katie Frankowicz • Images: Lukas Prinos

Boats line the docks at the Port of Ilwaco in February.

The way the winds were blowing that day, Butch Smith didn’t even know about the fire at first, even though it was — almost literally — right outside his front door.

The small Port of Ilwaco perches near the mouth of the Columbia River in Pacific County, Washington. Smith, the owner of Coho Charters and a commissioner for the port, lives at the east end. Ilwaco Landing, owned by Bornstein Seafoods, was to the west.

On Jan. 22, 2024, a massive fire broke out at the facility, sending up plumes of dark smoke. The smoke was so bad it triggered a warning from county emergency management officials to Ilwaco residents to shelter inside and keep doors and windows shut.

Ilwaco Landing was piled high with crab pots, standing in preparation for the opening of one of Washington state’s most significant fisheries: commercial Dungeness crab. That day, these orderly lines of gear hampered efforts to control the fire. Along with the dock and facility buildings, materials used in the pots fed the flames.

By the time the fire was under control, thousands of crab pots, representing hours of work and potentially worth more than $1 million, were lost. No injuries were reported, but the fallout for the fishermen looked potentially catastrophic.

By the time the fire was under control, thousands of crab pots, representing hours of work and potentially worth more than $1 million, were lost.

Eat & Drink

“It is basically — yeah, it’s 20 years of my life that just went up in smoke,” Peter Nornes, a lifelong fisherman who had gear stored at Ilwaco Landing, said at the time. He lost 500 pots in the fire.

“My initial thoughts were, ‘This is gonna be bad,’” Smith said, adding, “I knew how much fear was there and how much people were going to lose so close to the opening.”

Just under 10 commercial fishermen had gear stored at the site. Several boats had lost everything they would need to be on the water when the season opened. The bulk of the crab caught in the West Coast’s commercial Dungeness crab fisheries is caught quickly, often in the early weeks of a season.

There was no good time to lose so much gear, but right before a season opener was possibly the worst time.

The Ilwaco Landing fire destroyed around 4,000 pots. But, in a response that continues to astound people with decades of experience in local commercial fisheries, within four days, almost as many crab pots were back in fishermen’s hands.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dale Beasley, president of the Columbia River Crab Fisherman’s Association.

To him, he said, “It tells you something about the comradeship of the crab fleet. Even though they’re highly competitive with one another, they’re also very compassionate. That just doesn’t happen. I’ve fished in a lot of fisheries where you didn’t tell anyone anything.”

Gear donations came from all over: as far south as California, all up and down the West Coast. Local crabbers loaned out the gear they could spare. One Native fisherman showed up with a truck full of thousands of dollars worth of crab pots and gave them away. Nobody caught his name.

Commercial fisherman Jay Vaughn had never seen anything like it either. When U.S. Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez, who represents southwest Washington, visited Ilwaco after the fire, he told her it was a collective effort and one he was happy to be a part of.

“I’m kind of coming up in this, too,” Vaughn said. “I’ve had a lot of help getting here.”

People showed up to offer meals and help collect pots as the impacted fishermen scrambled to prepare — again — for the season. A new nonprofit even emerged from the fire: FishHer Columbia Pacific CommUNITY Alliance, an organization of women ready to respond to future emergencies.

Crab pots are stacked before being loaded onto boats at the start of the season.

With the gear in hand, another key component was the fact that the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife waived certain requirements for how the gear was tagged. It was an unprecedented effort to make sure fishermen impacted by the fire would be able to get out on the water when the season opened. Oregon also reissued the necessary tags for the season at no extra cost.

“The fact that Washington stepped up immediately without prompting was fabulous,” Beasley said. “Our crab manager understood the gravity of the situation.”

If they hadn’t suspended the gear marking, Beasley said those crab fishermen would not have been able to go fishing that year.

This season, a number of the fishermen impacted by the fire are back on the water, including Nornes. By early February 2025, initial Dungeness crab landings in Washington’s coastal commercial fishery were at more than 3 million pounds, for an ex-vessel value of more than $20 million — relatively low volume, but a good price.

Fishermen saw opening prices of $5.75 per pound, a record and well up from the $3.50 per pound they saw last season.

For the fishermen, the uncertainty of the current season is the sort of familiar uncertainty they encounter with nearly every season, requiring the nimbleness and capacity for risk that are part of the job.

The future of the Ilwaco Landing facility is on less settled ground.

Andrew Bornstein of Bornstein Seafoods declined to answer questions for this story. Smith, however, said there could be challenges when it comes to rebuilding at the overwater Ilwaco Landing site.

Insurance will only cover so much and likely not the cost of new pilings. There are state regulations that complicate any plans to phase the pulling of old pilings and driving of new pilings, Smith said.

If the site were on port property, there would be more resources available when it comes to low-interest loans or grants. But Ilwaco Landing is on private property. It is, in fact, the only privately held piece of property at the Port of Ilwaco. Smith has been working with Washington lawmakers, but he said the situation is in a bit of a holding pattern.

For the port, there is some urgency in getting the facility back up and running. Bornsteins primarily used Ilwaco Landing as a place to land crab. That tonnage counted to the overall tonnage crossing into the Port of Ilwaco and has helped the port qualify for crucial federal dredging on the channel that leads out to the Columbia River.

The facility also provided important cranes for the Bornstein boats that landed there. Those same boats might be able to use cranes at the nearby Safe Coast Seafoods processing plant near the Port of Ilwaco marina to load crab pots, nets and other gear. But it’s not guaranteed.

This realization has prompted the port to start looking for money for a fisherman’s dock, a working dock with a crane or two that any commercial fisherman could use regardless of who they sell to.

For now, Smith said, the port is continuing to see how it can support Bornsteins.

“All our industries are important to us,” Smith said. “A healthy port with a healthy fishing community — that’s a healthy community.”

Damaged supplies sit across from Ilwaco Landing, where a Bornstein Seafoods crab-landing facility burned in 2024.

Lion Rock

The sun sets over a sea stack at Arcadia Beach, near Arch Cape.

Live & Stay

Built from the land

Seaview shines Reader views

Live & Stay

Our Picks

Snow Peak Campfield

By Riley Yuan

The construction is wood and glass and concrete. The color scheme is black and amber, against which the signage, in a white, serif font, really pops: snow peak / Campfield / Long Beach. Beside the text, an asterisk-like logo calls to mind a minimalistic snowflake.

If you pull over out of curiosity and inquire at the front desk, you might learn that the building’s siding wasn’t painted black. Rather, it was burnt in a centuries-old Japanese process of hardening and preserving wood known as “yakisugi.” “Yaki” — charred. “Sugi” — cypress.

You might learn that Snow Peak is a decades-old Japanese outdoors brand and maker of high-end camping gear, and that the company first entered the U.S. market in Portland, where it still has a flagship store. You will certainly be invited to explore the rest of the 25-acre property, which was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Places of 2024.

After four years and $20 million of construction and wetland restoration, it has become a campground unlike any other in the country — a manifestation, like other Campfield locations in Japan and Korea, of Snow Peak’s vision for a more open and communal way of spending time outside.

The camp store combines a cafe, taproom, mini-market and outdoors store into a single space where guests and the public can gather and relax. The ofuro spa, modeled after a traditional Japanese bathhouse, is similarly available to both overnight guests and day-pass-holding visitors.

Its heated, deep-walled tub is covered but open to the elements, so that while you soak, you can still hear wind, rain and wildlife — still see rows of alders lining the creek that flows through the middle of the grounds.

The most private and luxurious way to stay is to book one of the jyubako, which translates to “living box.” These minimalistic, tiny cabins, which come outfitted with a kitchenette, queen-size bed, living area and shower, are Snow Peak’s way of bringing the comforts of home outdoors.

But the tent sites are perhaps even more emblematic of the company’s ethos, which holds that the outdoors are a place of communion — not just with nature, but with each other.

Pilot House

By Ryan Hume

Nested above the 14th Street Columbia River Pilot Station in downtown Astoria, the Pilot House offers high-end comfort and stunning views amidst the bustle of a working pier.

The historic mahogany-red building was once the ferry slip for rides across the river to Megler, Washington, before it was decommissioned in 1966 at the opening of the Astoria Bridge.

Astoria’s famous bridge is right there through the window, but it isn’t the only thing that looms large from the panoramic views provided by the Pilot House — freighters patiently waiting for the pilots downstairs to steer them up and down the majestic but dangerous Columbia are an awe-inspiring sight.

It should come as no surprise that the theme throughout is decidedly nautical. Ship wheels and other maritime mementos speak to Astoria’s 150-plusyear history as a waterfront town.

Guests arrive through a private gated entrance or by boat at the private dock. The business of loading and unloading the pilot boats that transport these skilled captains to the bobbing freighters is an all-day-and-all-night affair, so the noisesensitive should beware.

Up a small staircase and just past the nautical compass rose etched into the floor of the foyer, the 1,700-square-foot suite opens up, nearly all of it lacquered in honeyed hardwood, from the original floors to the ceilings to the wainscoting. There are three bedrooms, three baths and four gas fireplaces throughout. The master bed and bath sports both a jacuzzi tub and a private balcony that opens onto the Columbia. Views from the living room point upriver to the east.

Just outside the Pilot Station’s gate lies all that historic downtown Astoria has to offer. The trolley stops at the corner of 14th Street as it runs parallel along the 6.4-mile Astoria Riverwalk. Walkable attractions include the Columbia River Maritime Museum, the Liberty Theatre, the Astoria Nordic Heritage Park, the Garden of Surging Waves, the Heritage Museum, the Flavel House and the Oregon Film Museum.

Restaurants, boutiques and quirky shops abound. Choose any direction and explore, knowing the creature comforts waiting at the end of the day.

Long Beach

Astoria

Homes. Rentals. Hotels. Campgrounds.

Surfsand Resort

By Lissa Brewer

In the shadow of Haystack Rock, beach bonfires start to crackle as the sky turns to dusk. On the oceanfront side of the Surfsand Resort, white Adirondack chairs encircle small piles of driftwood, calling families and friends to spend an evening roasting s’mores.

Lights glow from patios as people settle into their rooms, unpacking board games, making dinner plans and listening to the ocean roll on long after night has erased lines between surf and sand.

Bill Hay, a Portland real estate developer, built the Surfsand property in the mid-1960s. In a challenge to efforts led by former Gov. Oswald West in 1913 to protect state tidelands as public highways, he also began to restrict beach access in front of the resort, above the high tide line.

This set in motion a chain of events that would lead, in 1967, to the Oregon Beach Bill, ensuring public ownership of all 363 miles of the state’s coastline.

Now, the Surfsand is offering a more inclusive vision. Last year, the 96room, pet-friendly hotel completed a $12 million renovation, including updates to its guest rooms, reception area, swimming pool, fitness center and neighboring Wayfarer Restaurant & Lounge.

The restaurant, which opened in 1977, also recently welcomed a new executive chef. Shawn Dickensheets, an alum of Food Network’s “Chopped,” hopes to add vegan and gluten-free items in addition to menu staples like filet mignon and beer-battered halibut and chips. The Wayfarer serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, with an expansive list of regional wines, craft beer and cocktails.

Other hotel amenities are plentiful, from fresh-baked cookies in the lobby to beach cruiser rentals and weekend activities. A full pet package, for $35, includes treats, a bandana, toys, a blanket and towel. A dog-washing station also leads right to the beach.

Bonfire setups are available daily between 6 and 9 p.m., with a $50 kit including firewood and s’mores. Community bonfires are also organized seasonally, weather permitting, between June and Labor Day.

Oregon Coast Modern

By Peter Korchnak

Two vacation properties in Manzanita have added a modern flair to the coastal getaway experience. Oregon Coast Modern is the brainchild of Cole and Lea Anne Gerst, who have brought their respective backgrounds in creative industries to remodeling and designing two well-appointed homes with architectural significance.

The Architect’s Retreat honors a 1980s design by the late renowned Portland architect Marvin Witt and his philosophy of design for use.

Remodeled in 2018, the three-story, three-bedroom house overlays updated, modern touches on its original midcentury design. An original triangular second bathroom has been transformed into a wet bath with a heated floor, the fireplace in the living room has been updated, and spaces bound by angles and vaulted ceilings are optimized for utility.

Furniture and accessories are stripped down to their functional essentials. In the color palette, black supplements wood and earth tones, evoking sun, sand and sea. Some accessories and artwork used in the interior design are custom-made originals or produced in limited editions.

Despite the clean and stark touches, the house still feels cozy. The tall but small footprint draws visitors upward. On the top floor, a view of the ocean through the first lends the home a forest treehouse-for-grownups feel.

The other property, Shadow Peak, is an A-frame cabin built in 1969 and renovated in 2023. Tucked into a quiet neighborhood blocks away from the beach and downtown Manzanita, it’s a three-bedroom home that echoes an iconic style of midcentury cabin.

A floating metal spiral staircase, leading up to a landing, centers the main living room. There, a Morsø wood burning stove and floor-to-ceiling windows make for a soaring space where spacious meets cozy.

Cannon Beach

Manzanita

Tall trees and grasses surround Richard and Anne De Wolf’s Bay House, built on a 12-acre land plot on the eastern shore of Willapa Bay.

Light pours onto a tile backsplash in the kitchen.

Finney, the couple’s dog, walks by a doorway.

Bathroom windows look out at the forest.

Built from the land

On Willapa Bay, an arched home inspired by a feeding barn

Words: Jaime Britton • Images: Lukas Prinos

It takes a certain tenacity to buy land, fell timber and build a house from the earth it stands on. Even more so on the Pacific Northwest coast, where winter storms can bring days or weeks of high winds and horizontal rain. But a spirit of handcraft has managed to survive in the region for centuries, and continues to thrive.

Set above the eastern shore of Willapa Bay, Washington, Anne and Richard De Wolf’s Bay House has been crafted to withstand the harsh coastal climate and remain part of the land it’s built from — a home constructed out of and in nature.

Friends and family who visit wend their way through a forested path that opens to a hidden clearing, revealing a curved roof amid the straight lines of surrounding trees.

After purchasing 12 acres of coastal forest, the couple, who are owners of the Portland-based design and build firm Arciform, walked around the property and identified the timber necessary to fulfill the home’s structural needs, hand-picking particular trees to serve specific purposes.

“The siding, the framing, all the posts and beams are all from the site,” Anne De Wolf said. “This place looked like a very muddy timber yard for a while.”

With a little help from friends and neighbors, the De Wolfs felled the trees, had them milled onsite and sorted them by their intended placement in the design.

“It was a labor of love, for sure,” Anne said.

Now getting its final touches, Bay House was an organic idea inspired by a somewhat random twist of fate. Anne had initially designed the home in a New England style, but scrapped plans the moment the couple laid eyes on a feeding barn near Long Beach. Within 24 hours, she said, she had created an entirely new drawing.

The couple pulled inspiration from two different pages of architecture. While Anne loves the clean lines and materials of warehouses, Richard is more drawn to medieval and storybook styles. And though the house adopted its overall form from the feeding barn, inside, the vaulted ceiling and heavy arches play against multipaneled windows, blending the seemingly opposite architectural forms without a break in the flow.

“It came between — a mix between church and warehouse with a little barn in there, too. I think medieval structures and warehouses really have a lot in common. So it kind of came out as a marriage of the two,” Anne said.

Salvaged items like stained glass from historic churches and old glass insulators from telephone poles bring a wash of clean color throughout the space.

Behind the home, afternoon sunlight bathes curtains of raindrops blowing in and out throughout the day. Wet tidal flats catch the light and sparkle through the water’s gentle ebb and flow.

Over more than a decade, Bay House has come together weekend by weekend as the De Wolfs worked on the construction together.

“It was a big adventure the whole way through,” Anne said.

Now, the house stands nearly hidden where the sand meets the forest. It’s a place of quiet contemplation, complemented by the clamor of wind and rain. Not a bad place to get away from it all and fall into the arms of nature.

Rain falls onto the home’s arched roof as Richard De Wolf walks up a wooden staircase.

Over more than a decade, Bay House has come together weekend by weekend as the De Wolfs worked on the construction together.

“It was a big adventure the whole way through.”

Warm wood tones meet antique stained glass in the home’s living room.

Planters sit outside at the edge of the forest.

Hug Point

Access to some sections of the Oregon Coast Trail depends on the tide and season. This point’s name comes from the close navigation of stagecoaches that used the beach as an early highway.

Seaview A VICTORIAN VILLAGE

Seaview is squeezed between Ilwaco and Long Beach, Washington, kind of like a beloved cousin. To this writer, Seaview is a pocketful of memories.

As a child, I came west, jammed into the backseat of a 1953 Studebaker. At the age of 5, I was looking for cowboys. That expectation was replaced quickly enough by loggers and fishermen, and an awful lot of Finns and Swedes.

My father and mother purchased a three-story sea house, built by one, Harry Demuth, the man who salvaged hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber off the doomed freighter Iowa, a 410-foot ship that sank in a big blow off Peacock Spit in January 1936.

All 34 sailors were lost in “60-to-75-foot seas,” a savage tale of monstrous force verified by the U.S. Coast Guard rescue ship, Onondaga, that was badly bruised and tragically unsuccessful in its valiant attempt to reach any survivors.

Words: David Campiche • Images: Lissa Brewer

The Collie Schulderman House at 37th and K streets in Seaview.

in 1896, the

Demuth went on to build a lumberyard — now an antique mall — and a half-dozen homes in his fair village. The ocean waters west of Demuth’s house lived up to their moniker, “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Children seldom swam in the ocean.

That house looked over the sandy oceanfront. In those days, the beach was accreting, and the ocean was significantly closer. The walk or drive today — much of the beach is still a driving beach — from the Sou’wester Lodge west to the ocean is nearly 1,000 steps. The lodge was built as a vacation home for the U.S. Sen. Henry Corbett in 1892.

I will always associate the Sou’wester with a lovely couple who proclaimed it as a “MYODB” and insisted that “you make your own damn breakfast.” Both were psychologists who seconded as marriage counselors, dispersing several forms of healing to many.

Len Atkins had a quick wit and an eccentric but loving disposition. His loving partner, Miriam, could calm the seas. Thandi Rosenbaum, now the owner of the Sou’wester, has carried on the business and expanded its offerings to great acclaim.

In 1896, the Shelburne Hotel, still a prominent beacon of hospitality, was built at 45th Street and Pacific Way. Jonathan Stout, Seaview’s founder, had opened an earlier summer resort, the Sea View House, in 1886. He purchased 153 acres of what would become the town, and offered lots of 50 by 100 feet for $100.

Built

Shelburne Hotel in Seaview is the longest continuously operating hotel in Washington state.

Charles Beaver, who married Stout’s daughter, Inez, was the Shelburne’s builder. The couple were given the hotel as a wedding present and ran it for a couple of decades. My wife, Laurie Anderson, and I ran the hotel for over four decades. Tiffany and Brady Turner, owners of Adrift Hotel, Inn at Discovery Coast and others, have carried on the Shelburne’s fine reputation.

Seaview had a small grocery store owned and run by Joe Sugarman, a gentleman with a big heart who was an inspiration to the neighborhood. He always had a kind word for those who frequented his store. I remember the huge block of Wisconsin cheddar that my mother transformed into a Welsh rarebit.

The favorite occupation of tourists in those days of the late ’50s and ’60s was clam digging. The limit was 24. We trudged from our sea house to the ocean and dug the bivalves with a fury associated with young bodies long before arthritis settled in. On a good morning, when my father, Dr. John Campiche, drove us to the beach, we would often be rewarded with pancakes and hot syrup at Hannah’s, a cozy restaurant across the street from today’s veterinary clinic.

Seaview was a clutch of summer homes at the turn of the 20th century. Many of the finer residences — the elegant Kilcare house, for example — burned to the ground. Fires took nearly a dozen of the wooden lodges and hotels until more recent times.

The Wilcox house still stands proudly on Willows Road — officially in Ilwaco, but don’t mention that to the residents of Seaview, who consider it part of their town. It is a handsome structure owned for years by Candy and Frank Glenn. They purchased it from a family of cranberry growers, who introduced the berry along with a handful of early pioneers nearly a century ago. The Glenns elevated the town with generosity and good taste. Candy survives her husband.

On 31st and K Street is the Williams house, now shared by members of the family. Warner, who passed away recently at the age of 98, was a man of eloquence and a storyteller bar none. He recited memories of a milk wagon that made regular visits down his dirt street — horsedrawn — selling vegetables and milk to the good Seaviewites.

And there was the Clamshell Railroad, the train that “ran by the tide” and carried Warner to the schoolhouse in Ilwaco. His uncle and conductor, Reese Williams, greeted Warner every morning and saw to it that the boy arrived home dutifully. Warner was everybody’s hero, as was his brother, Rod, both World War II veterans. The decorated soldier didn’t love war. “Any man who wasn’t scared, wasn’t human,” he said. Warner’s words still resonate on K Street.

This cottage belonging to the Corbett family later became the Grandview Lodge and is now part of the Sou’wester Lodge. Photo: Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum

A view looking north at Seaview beach. The houses on the rock are those of Capt. Straubel. Later, when the homes fell into disrepair, the rock was blown up and used for road construction. Photo: Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum

An etching of the T.J. Potter, a steamboat that carried tourists to resorts on the Long Beach Peninsula from Portland. Photo: Seaview Historical Preservation Society

Records and VHS tapes line the hallways of the Sou’wester Lodge.

A replica of the Seaview sign sits in the corner.

The Clamshell Railroad stopped at a depot at 38th Place, which more recently became the acclaimed DEPOT Restaurant. Michael Lalewicz and his gracious wife, Nancy Gorshe, turned the charming building, now owned by Jeff and Casey Harrell, into a destination.

And so it goes, from house to house, street to street. Yes, the old stable still stands — was that the Seaview Academy? — a broken and abandoned relic famous for horses that ran only in one direction. That is, back to the barn and dry bales of hay.

And Sid’s, the original grocery store that burned one night — I can still see the flames — only to be rebuilt one block north as a modern grocery store that lures tourists while remaining faithful to the locals. Sid Snyder became the majority leader of the Washington State Senate.

A powerful but generous man, he was highly emulated. His first store was salvaged. It is now Chico’s Pizza, an early hangout for teenagers in the ’60s.

The south end of Seaview on “K” is a strolling street. It starts with Crank’s Roost on 39th Place and the summer home of the indomitable local author Terence O’Donnell, a man of courage who showed both kindness and steady interest toward any local who crossed his path, making them — not him — the center of attention.

“K” ends at the old Seaview Station on old Holman Street, now 30th, owned today by Fred and Corinne Dust, an engaging and generous couple who always find a cup of coffee for nearly any drop-in. Fred Dust was the talented headmaster at the Bush School in Seattle, that other city.

Pride of place runs high in Seaview.

Our intimate museum hosts a treasure trove of well-curated artifacts that speak to Pacific County and the PNW’s rich tapestry of history. From the bountiful forests to the vast sea, our collection beautifully encapsulates the region’s diverse activities, abundant resources, and flourishing industries, both past and present. Browse our extensive PNW-focused bookstore and gift shop, and be sure to bring Fido; we are dog-friendly!

The trail continues

A wooden boardwalk leads through the forest at Oswald West State Park.

Wild mushrooms

Mushrooms poke through moss on a tree along the Cape Falcon Trail. Fall is peak season in Oregon for foraging wild fungi.

Cape Falcon

Sitka spruce and hemlock meet jagged basalt rock at the tip of Cape Falcon, the site of Oregon’s northernmost of five marine reserves.

Reader views

Poetry and art of the Columbia-Pacific

Along the River’s Edge

By Joy Diamond, Astoria

Growing up in the northwest of England, the Irish Sea was minutes from my home. At low tide, when the sea wasn’t even in sight, the beach was our playground. The air was sharp, fresh, and I took it for granted.

When I moved to Southern California at almost 13 years old, there was shock at how different the weather was. The heat enveloped us, and I longed for what I had left behind.

Twenty years ago, after my son moved to Portland, I came to Astoria to live. I love the weather here on the coast. I find it invigorating. Yes, in the winter it is cold, it rains and sometimes snows. But one can breathe here, feel truly alive.

Then spring comes. We plant flowers and vegetables. The glorious days of summer are welcomed with pleasure. The bounty of gardens, the warm sun on our bodies, the enjoyment of daylight lasting into the late evening.

Walking along the riverwalk, I glance up to the hills, where hundreds of trees dominate in all their majesty. Nature, in all its glory, shows what Astoria is. Walk along a residential street and suddenly a deer or fawn might appear, nibbling through a garden for his lunch. We stop so we don’t disturb. In those few moments of watching, we feel peaceful.

The different times gone by are evident in the lovely old houses as our imagination takes hold, wondering who lived there all those years ago. Then, within a few minutes, we are in the countryside, passing cows, horses and sheep.

We have it all, really: a small town with art galleries, restaurants, theaters, but also the river and beautiful nature. Yes, it does tend to rain a bit, but isn’t it worth it?

Beaver Creek '24

By Libby Lawrence

An Archaeology of Fragments

By Irene Martin, Skamokawa, Wash.

As a writer of history, my favorite place is the past. Join me there, in this archaeology of place and time.

I once visited a museum with a superb display of salmon canning artifacts. The viewer could even lift the lid of a barrel and smell the aroma of an old-time fish cannery. Marcel Proust wrote about how smell triggers memory in “Remembrance of Things Past.” But how does one remember over a century of canning on the Columbia without lifting that barrel lid? Look around — that legacy is everywhere.

My wanderings through the cannery buildings and communities of the past have turned up much more than company towns with no heart.

Instead, I have found people, rich and poor alike, who lost children to the diseases of their time and family members to drowning or accidents, but whose resilience, inventiveness, tenacity and courage developed industries and communities.

I have paced through graveyards, viewing an occasional stone with a gillnet boat carved on it, or a name from the past: “Ellen Harrington,” “John West.” Antique shops may contain old salmon labels, or stencils used for painting labels on boxes: “PAPCO,” “Red Bird.” Broken crockery from old cannery sites recalls Chinese crews that lived and worked there. Spring daffodils memorialize a pioneer woman who once lived in an isolated valley.

When boats were the only source of transportation, people from Cathlamet bought supplies in Clifton; fishing families from Willow Grove shopped at Mayger. Residents of other small towns traveled to Astoria on business and social occasions. Many of their descendants still reside in the area, where every cove and piling represents a memory.

For many of the 50-plus years I have lived here, I have spent my days with dead people, the people who left us what we have in the present. Look around, their legacy is everywhere.

Each tiny detail corresponds to yet another fragment of their lives, another twist of the kaleidoscope that alters our perception of who they were and what they left.

Every day as I write their history, I try to bring to life again that which seems dead, knowing that it will never be precisely the same, can never capture all the nuances of how they worked, lived and loved.

But every day reverses time’s deaths, as I await the incoming tide of memory that brings back the beloved past.

On the Beach in Gearhart

By Wendy Wolf, Gearhart

I have never experienced another beach like this one. Flat and wide, you can walk for miles.

It’s cold, even in July, the wind biting and clean. Sand dollars dot the boundary between water and land, linen white and delightfully round, spiny emblems etched on their backs. There are shells. Mussels mostly, luminous purple like a nighttime sky.

I walk with my hands in my pockets, wearing boots to splash through the tributaries the ocean has worn into the sand. If you look closely, you’ll see tree shapes extending from the edge of the pools. An entire evanescent forest in intaglio.

There is a sea lion sunning herself. She’s coffee brown, shiny, robust. Her pointed muzzle is raised, long whiskers adorably askew. I give her a wide berth, leave her in peace.

There are elk on the hills. Grazing, playing. As the light fades, they become silhouettes. The stars emerge. The brightest ones first. The view becomes endless.

Cape Disappointment

By Deborah Morgan

Watercolor 24

By Mike Francis, Astoria

Want to meet at the Rusty Cup?

I saw you yesterday, walking your dog behind the maritime museum. It was foggy, and the sea lions were in full cry at the East Mooring Basin. Or what’s left of it.

Did you see the colors on the column last night? Yellow and blue for Ukraine. Coming down Eighth Street, I almost hit a couple of deer. Did you hear the band at the Labor Temple, the booms echoing down the dark sidewalks? I saw people going in, as if they were summoned by a thrashed Pied Piper.

The apartments are open behind Safeway, construction workers are busy at Owens-Adair, the Coastal Health Center and Bethany Lutheran. Somebody bought Big Red, things are even looking up at Heritage Square. A chill is descending, but the city won’t hibernate.

Yes, I’ll meet you for coffee, but give me a few minutes. The Ship Report is coming on.

By Gregory Gorham

Poetry and art of the Columbia-Pacific more Reader views

My Sacred Place

By Jan Bono, Long Beach, Wash.

Perhaps you and I have met here before at the Holy Church of the Western Shore.

Did I hold out my hand and ask for your phone, so you’d be in your photo to share back at home?

Most tourists I greet, they join me and stare at the ocean, then ask of the fishermen there. They ask of lives lost out on Peacock Spit in a boat they assumed quite worthy and fit.

I sit and tell stories in my kiosk view pew and answer their questions — There are more than a few.

A teacher by trad for about 30 years, I love sharing history with fresh sets of ears.

North Head’s the name most often recalled where eagles soar, both majestic and bald.

The lighthouse is keeping its light on for you but also some secrets, let’s give it its due.

No place is more reverent, or holy, or blessed, so join me in prayer, giving thanks, taking rest.

Ancient Cedar Grove on Long Island

By David Campiche, Seaview, Wash.

I have found my way through rain, sockeyed by drench seeking great boughs of cedar for what little umbrella comfort they could afford from winter that takes us all down even you, great ones here, before me.

Gathering in the green, all lichen, all moss spreading blankets of needle and limb I give myself to you, I give myself to rain.

And green, kind of a fur, everywhere earth skin hummocks muscle of planet, alive as your breath, or mine. And trees, tendrils really, growing through lush salal, undergarments of bracken fern duff of needle, decay of bark, humus of hemlock, fir, alder, cedar, spruce, fertile rot life twined together by rain.

Ceaseless today in the raven’s dance of falling winter light.

Storm Watch

By Terrie Remington

By Wendy Wolf

Starry Night Mussel

Short Sand Beach

A lone surfer splashes through the waves as sunlight pours onto this popular cove along the Oregon Coast Trail.

From Short Sand Creek, hikers continue onto the Sitka Spruce Trail, then to a grassy meadow known as Elk Flats.

History & Heritage

Liberty Theatre at 100

Logging pride endures

Memories of Bayocean

History & Heritage

Our Picks

Fort Clatsop

By Ryan Hume

Beneath the oft-wet forest canopies of Lewis and Clark National Historical Park stands a reconstruction of the famous explorers’ winter digs worth checking out. Construction of the original fortification finished on Jan. 1, 1806, and Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the other members of the Corps of Discovery spent the very soggy season collecting supplies, trading with Native nations, harvesting sea salt, curing leather and prepping their maps and journals for the cross-continental journey home.

That winter wasn’t all dismal and disappointment. As Clark wrote on the morning of their departure on March 23, 1806: “We had wintered and remained from the 7th of Decr. 1805 to this day and have lived as well as we had any right to expect, and we can Say that we were never one day without 3 meals of Some kind a day either pore Elk meat or roots, not withstanding the repeeted fall of rain which has fallen almost Constantly.”

The original fort collapsed in the years following the expedition’s leave and it wouldn’t be until 1955 that a replica was built following Clark’s sketches. Sadly, just short of the Bicentennial, this Fort Clatsop burned to the ground in 2005. Thanks to several hundred volunteers working under the direction of the National Park Service, the current replica was dedicated the following year.

Besides walking through the rooms of the resurrected camp, the recently remodeled Fort Clatsop Visitor Center offers interpretive exhibits, a bookstore and a theater playing two films about the historic expedition. Learn about the local Indigenous people. All park fees can be paid at the center as well.

Fort Clatsop is also an anchor point for a more extensive day trip exploring the rest of the national park, which covers 1,421 acres on the Oregon side alone. Featuring covered picnic areas and a historic canoe and kayak launch, both open year-round, the fort is a hub for 14 miles of hiking, including the start of the Fort to Sea Trail that weaves through deep forest and bogs to let out at the Pacific Ocean on Sunset Beach.

Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, period-costumed park rangers answer questions and run interactive programming. The summer also brings guided kayak tours. Lewis and Clark wish they had it so good.

North Head Lighthouse

By Lissa Brewer

Walk to the far northwest of Cape Disappointment State Park for an upclose look at an active navigation aid to the legendary waters surrounding the Columbia River Bar.

Park with a Washington State Parks Discover Pass and take a short loop trail to reach the picturesque North Head Lighthouse. First lit on May 16, 1898, it was the second light installed on the north side of the river, as ships coming from that direction weren’t able to see Cape Disappointment Light, to the southeast, in time to safely navigate into the channel.

Construction of North Head’s 65-foot tower began in 1897. A first-order Fresnel lens was moved from its black-and-white counterpart — and is now on display at the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center. Nearby, builder George Langford completed a barn, two oil houses and keeper’s dwellings, which continue to operate as vacation rentals.

Alexander Pesonen, the lighthouse’s first head keeper, transferred from Tillamook Rock and lived at North Head for 26 years. During that time, Mabel Hatch Bretheron, the first woman lighthouse keeper in Oregon, became his assistant after heading north from Cape Blanco.

The light shined from dusk until dawn, with cleaning and polishing to be done in the daylight. Because of frequent high winds on the headland, the U.S. Weather Bureau also built a station between the lighthouse and keeper’s dwellings, which lasted from 1902 until 1955.

Then, like several of the Oregon Coast’s 11 lighthouses and others across the U.S., North Head was automated in the 1960s. More recently, it has undergone extensive restoration work after being acquired by Washington State Parks in 2012. A volunteer group, Keepers of the North Head Lighthouse, continues to assist in its upkeep.

Afternoon tours of the lighthouse are offered between May 1 and Sept. 30. Children must be 7 years old to climb the tower, and all visitors should wear closed-toe shoes. Admission is $3 for adults and free for children up to age 17. Look out from the lantern room and think of sailors on a rainy night, and the light that could guide them to shore.

Astoria

Ilwaco

Traditions. Cultures. Artifacts.

Raíces Clatsop

By Riley Yuan

A junior at Mount Holyoke College, Alejandra Lopez Nestor is over 2,500 miles away from the coastal Oregon town where she grew up. But her heart is never far from the culture and the community that made her who she is.

Since last summer, Lopez Nestor has been working on a bilingual booklet of stories and photographs sourced from more than 20 individuals in the Latina/o communities on Oregon’s North Coast. She is considering leaving copies of the booklet, titled “Raíces Clatsop” (Clatsop Roots), at local community centers and libraries, and sharing excerpts online.

Lopez Nestor hopes that the stories can restore nuance to an overlooked and often scapegoated community. But in some sense, the project is more private than public. Many of the individuals she interviewed are friends and relatives, and telling their stories is a way of honoring their sacrifices.

“I think it’s really important to recognize that my parents didn’t have the opportunity to go beyond an elementary or middle school education,” Lopez Nestor said. “So for me to be in a space where I’ve learned to vocalize my thoughts … and to use these resources and skills…for the purpose of highlighting stories in my community — I think that’s what I wanted to do.”

It wasn’t just stories of hardship that Lopez Nestor wanted to highlight either. Of special interest to her were stories of aspiration — the stories that some of her interviewees were living vicariously through their children.

“I think you have to come to terms with the fact that sometimes, your body is all that you have to make a difference in this world,” she said. “But I wanted there to be more. I wanted to hear their words and hear their stories, and also to show that they are so much more valuable than just the labor they are putting into the world.”

“Para mí eso fue una sorpresa muy muy grande (For me it was a very big surprise),” Lopez Nestor’s mother said of being included in the booklet, while choking back tears. “Me sentí conmovida para hacer eso (I felt so moved by it).”

For as any immigrant parent knows, to be acknowledged this way by your own child — to know that they know how hard you’ve worked — is to achieve the greatest dream of all.

Julia Butler Hansen House

By Mike Francis

In the quaintly charming river town of Cathlamet, Washington, a simple white house on the edge of downtown stands as a reminder that the place was once a portal to national political power.

The Julia Butler Hansen house, a modest and tidy Pioneer vernacular that was built in the 1860s for a fish seiner, was soon acquired by James Kimball, the grandfather of former U.S. Congresswoman Julia Butler Hansen, a formidable woman who rose to national prominence following an unbroken string of election wins.

She was elected in 1937 to a seat on the Cathlamet Town Council and ultimately rose to the U.S. House of Representatives, where she served in a variety of prominent roles, including the Appropriations Committee, from 1963 to 1974.

In the summer of 1957, a parade of political heavyweights — U.S. Senators Warren Magnuson, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, along with House Speaker Sam Rayburn — all visited Hansen at her house in Cathlamet, seeking to persuade her to run for Congress. She declined to run in 1958 but was elected on her first try in 1960.

Inside the house, numerous artifacts attest not only to Hansen’s political significance but to her family’s pioneering role in the region’s culture and politics. Photos of Hansen with President Lyndon Johnson share shelf space with Chinese porcelain.

Hansen was known for the range and effectiveness of her work, from advocating for the Indigenous tribes of the Northwest to securing funding for bridges at Puget Island, and most notably, across the Columbia River to Astoria.

“She was a force to be reckoned with like no other,” said David Olson, Cathlamet’s mayor, and a leader in a continuing fight to preserve and maintain the house.

Last year, supporters tried to give the house to the Washington State Parks, but the organization argued it lacked the resources to preserve and maintain it. Recently, supporters formed the Friends of Julia Butler Hansen, a nonprofit dedicated to caring for the house.

Astoria

Cathlamet

Photo: David Kimball Hansen

Opening day of the Liberty Theatre in 1925

the Liberty at 100

Astoria theater’s second heyday surpasses its first

Words: Mike Francis • Images: Lukas Prinos

Historic photos: Liberty Theatre

You may already know the Liberty Theatre in downtown Astoria is an architectural gem, an elegantly restored theater and movie palace that harks back to its original splendor as a symbol of a resilient seaport town. The arc of the 100-year-old theater’s rise, decline and revival is by now a familiar one to Astorians.

And yet, the stately kiosk, the beckoning marquee, the painted panels of Venetian canals and the ornate embellishments of the pilasters are only part of the reason locals prize the Liberty so highly. The other half involves the role the theater played — and continues to play — in the social and cultural life of Astoria and the lower Columbia region.

The theater was once a place where people went not to just be entertained, but to be seen.

To enter the Liberty was akin to taking a cruise to an exotic destination, where elegant performances and evocative architecture promised to transport audiences to someplace memorable. And for those who didn’t have tickets, it was absorbing to watch the parade.

During the late ’20s and early ’30s, it was thought to be fun to park on Commercial Street on Saturday evening and watch the strollers … The preferred parking spot was on the southwest corner of Commercial at 12th Street. From that vantage point you could also see who was going into the Liberty Theatre.

— Don A. Goodall,

Cumtux,

Spring 1982

In fact, the theater today touches more people than it ever has, from fans of big-name acts like Lyle Lovett to middle school students on field trips. Under the leadership of executive director Jennifer Crockett, the Liberty today is the leading performance and entertainment venue in the region, reaching people who would otherwise have never come through the door. The theater’s second heyday is surpassing its first.

Yet the Liberty’s programming, like the building itself, has rebounded from its dismal middle years, when paltry audiences settled in the broken seats to watch a series of forgettable movies. But let’s start at the beginning.

This photo from 1946 shows the uniforms and smiles of ushers outside the theater.

The Liberty’s auditorium, chandelier and stage.

A view of Astoria looking to the east from 11th and Commercial streets.

History & Heritage

the curtain rises

The Liberty’s origins lie in a smoking ruin.

The Dec. 8, 1922 fire that tore through Astoria’s downtown left smoldering heaps of charred timbers and tumbled bricks over a stretch of 32 prime commercial blocks. Gone were more than 200 shops, restaurants and service firms.

From this devastation, Astorians came together to rebuild the city in a remarkable show of resolve and resilience. Within a couple of years, rebuilt rows of commercial buildings had risen from the devastation to again serve the community and visitors from other places.

At the center of the rebuilt city, on the corner of Commercial and 12th streets, the Liberty became the most dramatic symbol of downtown Astoria’s rebirth. On the block that had been home to the WeinhardAstoria, the city’s premier hotel, architects John Bennes and Harry Herzog designed an Italian Renaissance entertainment palace that became the town’s signature downtown building. As it happened, the theater opened just as the vaudeville era was about to be eclipsed by talking pictures. While live performances continued at least into the World War II era, the Liberty became a showcase for the fledgling art of cinema.

In its prime years of the 1920s and 1930s, the theater was a social center of the lower Columbia region. Astoria was a lively port town, with ferries plying the Columbia River, canneries employing immigrants and local people, and Chryslers, Studebakers and Ford Model Ts angled along Commercial Street. After it opened in 1925, the Liberty was a place where the people who lived here encountered the people who were passing through.

“My mother left Astoria High School when she was 14 and got a job as an usher right here. And she also sold tickets. They were hard in those days ... She said every time the night was over, and if the money didn’t add up to what the tickets were, it came out of your wages … There were so many foreign seamen coming in here, and they didn’t speak English and didn’t understand our money system, so they would always shortchange these poor sailors just in case the tickets didn’t add up at the end.”

— Karl Marlantes, speaking in the Liberty Theatre at the 2024 Creative Writing Festival

During the 1920s and 1930s, even during the Great Depression, people found reasons beyond movies to come to the Liberty. The Clatsop County Historical Society archives are full of references to the goings-on.

“The Elks Lodge Chapter 180 entertains 1,100 children at the Liberty Theatre Christmas party. (1932)” …“Hortense Stacey wins a trip to Hollywood in Liberty Theatre beauty contest (1927), “Lennart ‘Johnny’ Ross, 17, wins new Chevrolet in Liberty Theatre drawing. (1932)”... “Jack Dempsey, the huge-shouldered killer of the ring and the most colorful world’s heavyweight fight champion in boxing history, will appear on the stage of the Liberty Theatre tonight in a special bond show that opens at 8:30 o’clock. (1944)”

Astoria city historian John Goodenberger has written evocatively of those days, noting the appealing efficiency of the usherettes, the commanding presence of a Wurlitzer organ raised from the orchestra pit, and the parade of memorable onstage attractions, from tap dancers to explorer Roald Amundsen.

But in relatively short order the organ was sold, the proscenium arch hidden behind a movie screen and the lobby and auditorium apparently repainted with little consideration for the ornate flourishes that had distinguished the theater when it opened.

Within a few decades, the Liberty had become a tarnished gem, a neglected, chilly place where moviegoers shivered in their seats while watching the projected images of Doris Day, Elvis Presley, Ernest Borgnine and others. Astorians who went to movies in that era describe the experience as “yucky and spooky,” but there was little else to do downtown. The district around the theater had become a place where drifters could buy drugs and visit strip bars. The Liberty had become little more than a shell of the building that had been Astoria’s showpiece.

The Liberty’s owner at the time, a Los Angeles lawyer named Edward Eng, “didn’t give a rip,” Goodenberger said. Eng spent no time in Astoria and seemed to care only about maintaining the tax break that came with owning a historic building.

Worse, Eng had hired contractors to carve two tiny cinemas into the balcony, flanking the main projection booth. The Liberty was able to show three films at a time, but the experience for audiences was anything but enriching. Preservationists did what they could to minimize the harm done by the remodeling and, fortunately, were able to protect the panels of Venetian scenes and for the decorative plaster walls.

With the building deteriorating and the moviegoing experience degraded, Astoria lost some of the glue that helped the town cohere. The unheated theater, with its sticky floors and broken seats, no longer was it a place where moviegoers were proud to be seen. It soon became a place to be avoided.

A view of 12th and Commercial Street from the second-floor McTavish Room, which hosts live music, culinary events and other performances.

a second act

The Liberty’s second rebirth can be traced to the late 1990s, when a team of concerned Astorians led by Steve Forrester, then-publisher of The Daily Astorian, began working to rescue the building from neglect and further damage. Forrester said he was initially motivated to create and upgrade a space available to Portland performers but began to focus on the Liberty along with like-minded citizens, including Hal Snow.

Cannery Pier Hotel developer Robert “Jake” Jacob eventually pried the building from Eng after state historic preservation officials rescinded his historic building tax exemption. Jacob turned it over to the newly formed Liberty Restoration Inc., a nonprofit group, for $1.3 million raised through a city urban renewal grant.

To hear Forrester talk about the lengthy effort today is to recall the names of people and institutions in Astoria, Portland and elsewhere who came to the Liberty’s rescue: Snow, Jacob, Goodenberger, the Oregon Community Foundation, Edith and Bill Henningsgaard, Jared Rickenbach, Michelle Dieffenbach, Michael Foster, Jim Flint, Paul Benoit, Cheri Folk, Skip Stanaway, Marge and Theodore Bloomfield, Betty Smith, Norm Yeon, Judith Ramaley, Daniel Bernstine, Willis Van Dusen and others.

Collectively, they soldiered through a broad and inspired effort that captured national attention, while focusing community energy on the Liberty.

“It was like a political campaign,” Forrester said, the way a group of advocates worked to persuade donors and investors that saving the Liberty was worthwhile. After years of effort, they achieved broad buy-in from many Astorians and others in the lower Columbia region. In that sense, the restoration effort was an echo of the burst of civic determination that rebuilt downtown in the wake of the 1922 fire.

“I was immensely proud,” Forrester said, who added a caveat: “It’s one thing to restore a theater and finish. It’s another thing to operate it.”

And that’s where Crockett has taken over. Hired as the renovated Liberty’s third executive director, she has overseen an explosive growth in programming, quadrupling the number of shows hosted by the theater and touching the community in ways that even the old Liberty never did.

“We’re using and engaging every corner of the theater,” she said on a recent day when, as it happened, the Kids Make Theatre program was one year old.

The youth theater school, funded by earmarked gifts, offers theatrical experience, from acting to prop-making, to kids of all ages. “We have 400 kids passing through every week,” Crockett said. “It’s bonkers.”

Crockett has worked to connect the Liberty with schools, noted longtime backers Dan and Sue Stein, of Astoria. They cited the intimate performances that take place in the secondfloor McTavish Ballroom, the Cinco de Mayo performances that brought new people into the

theater, the outreach to high schools and the memorable showing(s) of “Elf,” the Will Ferrell Christmas movie, when audience embers threw socks toward the screen to mimic a snowball fight.

“Her energy and joy really opened the Liberty to everybody,” Sue Stein said. “It’s a very welcoming environment.”

In introducing singer Storm Large to a soldout audience last year, Crockett talked about how the Liberty was once considered a place geared only to upper-crust audiences. But now it hosts everything from dog shows to standup comics, aiming to attract people who might otherwise have stayed away.

“We’ll try anything once,” she said.

Backers have responded. Last year’s capital campaign raised money mostly to repair a leaking roof, and supporters pushed it over the top at a gala auction and paddle raise.

In its 100th year, the Liberty is perhaps in better shape than it ever has been, but the job of maintaining and enhancing it will never be finished. Crockett speaks hopefully of potential tangible improvements, such as a fly loft that would permit performers to ascend and fly above the stage, as well as about improvements to the theater’s balance sheet. The Liberty, she said, needs a permanent endowment to help carry the theater into its second century. You’ll hear more about that soon.

OK, that’s enough talking. The show is about to start.

Jennifer Crockett, executive director of the Liberty Theatre, poses for a portrait.

Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain

At 1,680 feet, this summit is the highest point on the Oregon Coast Trail. A subject of Nehalem-Tillamook stories, people have hunted and gathered plants here for millennia.

Turn after turn

Logging pride endures in the Willapa Hills

Words & Images: Riley Yuan

At five o’clock in the morning, Tony Snodgrass is smoking a cigarette and waiting. His crummy idles in the empty lot, and the asphalt glistens wet beneath the street lamps. It’s December, so it’s chilly and gusty. But inside the cab of his truck, it’s warm and dry. And clean — cleaner than the other guys’ crummies, Snodgrass points out with a smirk.

Within minutes, two sedans pull up. Michael Neumeyer climbs out of one, and Q. out of the other. They exchange good-mornings, toss their bags in the bed of Snodgrass’s pickup and climb into the cab. Neumeyer rides shotgun while Q. sits behind him, covers his face with his hoodie and goes promptly to sleep.

He stays asleep for the duration of the hourlong drive to Doty while Neumeyer and Snodgrass banter about football and the radio, tuned to a pop station, drones softly on in the background. It’s still nearly pitch dark outside, but occasionally, oncoming headlights light up the cab just as one man turns toward the other or glances up at the rearview mirror, revealing a cheekbone, or the corner of a mouth, or an eye. These features give little away though, except, perhaps, for a certain, quiet alertness.

Part of it is the early hour. As the day goes on, bodies and tongues will warm up and become more expressive. But only to a certain point. The woods are no place for performances. Swagger will not help you down in the hole.

Chips fly out of the kerf of timber faller Allen Slusher’s back cut through an aging alder tree.

This job is always gonna be hard work, It’s getting physically easier on people … but now it’s more of a mental game. And individual loggers, regardless of age or experience, still yearn to be tested by it.

A Douglas fir tree seen mid-fall as cutter Allen Slusher looks on at its stump.

Beneath his hoodie, Q.’s features remain hidden until the very last minute, when Snodgrass is backing the truck down the muddy two-track where everybody parks their crummies before hiking a short distance up to the landing. As soon as the truck comes to a stop, the men spill out of their seats and into the surrounding darkness.

Neumeyer begins pulling things out of the bed of the pickup: a rucksack, a power saw, a gallon jug of water, jerry cans filled with gas and bar oil, and some plastic shopping bags full of bratwursts that he will later cook over the warming fire and share with the rest of the crew. He dons a pair of caulked rubber boots, a raincoat, a pair of rain pants and a dirty, hi-vis vest. Up on the landing, Snodgrass has already fired up the yarder, which is now coughing and groaning like a giant beast of burden. It’s half past six, and the rain, illuminated by the machinery’s floodlights, is a spitting one.

The firewood Neumeyer sets about chopping is already drenched. But after dousing it with a few glugs of gasoline, he gets it to go — just as Q. and the rest of the rigging crew make it to the landing. J., the rigging-slinger, and the other choker-setters have arrived separately, with Jesus Diaz, the crew’s do-itall hook tender.

“Good morning, Michael! Good morning, Tony!” J. yells over the din. And just then, the yarder’s whistle blows a few times in quick succession, signaling that Snodgrass is preparing to raise the skyline cable, along with the carriage and the attached choker cables that will ride it down into the hole and bring back up the logs. It’s a petulant, high-pitched sound — a bike horn multiplied by a million — and piercingly loud.

Once committed to memory though, whistle codes also constitute the quickest, clearest channel of communication in this steep, gnarled terrain. They are how Snodgrass and J. will signal the majority of whatever they are seeing and doing — the former by pressing a button in the yarder cab and the latter by squeezing the trigger on the Talkie Tooter transmitter dangling from his waist. By quitting time, they will have choked, yarded and processed upward of 30 turns, or batches of logs.

But that is still eight hours away. Now, the carriage is hurtling downhill for the first turn of the day, with the rigging crew on its heels.

“Let’s go!” J. yells. For a second, Q. sticks his hands into the warming fire, rubbing them vigorously together as the flames lick his fingertips. And then he pulls on his gloves and dives off the edge of the hill with the others. They’re a nice pair of heavy-duty work gloves— insulated on the inside and coated with rubber on the outside, all while remaining pliable. Later, the warmed-up tongues around him will rib him good-naturedly about shelling out for them. But can you blame Q.? He was just curled up in the back of the crummy with a hoodie over his face. Ten minutes later, he is crashing through the brush and the dark and the driving rain, mere flesh and bone in a world made of wood and steel.

In a way, he might as well still be asleep. Like building skyscrapers or sending people into space, there is something so fundamentally preposterous about what he is about to do — about pulling whole trees out of the forest. Something about doing this work that demands one suspend all sense of what is safe or reasonable or even possible. Something about logging these rain-soaked hills that compels one to move and operate as if by the logic of a dream.

Jesus Diaz poses for a portrait while hiking the hills.

History & Heritage

To shield or to embrace

It turns out somebody had beaten Snodgrass, Neumeyer and the rigging crew to the landing. His voice crackled over the citizens band radio while Snodgrass was still backing down the two-track.

“Morning, George,” Snodgrass replied. It was the boss himself — George Bridgewater, 71, the owner of Bridgewater Logging, who is typically up by half past midnight on a workday, out on the landing not long after two, and loading the first log truck of the morning some time between three and four. As almost every one of his employees will point out independently, Bridgewater is usually the first person to arrive at the side, and the last person to leave.

His movements and mannerisms are also the most measured of them all — seemingly, at times, to the point of slowness, though what appears to be slow is actually just deliberate. It certainly has nothing to do with age or ability. Rather, it has to do with experience, feel and dedication to a principle governing all forms of manual labor: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Another thing that makes Bridgewater stand out, as much as he loathes drawing attention to himself, is his leather cap. It’s caked in a layer of grease and dirt that any seasoned woodsman will immediately convert into a sense of vintage. But beyond this, nobody on the landing seems to know its backstory.

Squint real hard, and Q.'s gloves and Bridgewater’s cap might just look like competing, if not mutually exclusive, responses to logging’s most fundamental and inconvenient reality: many millions of tons of wood do not simply walk themselves off one of Earth’s most productive but unforgiving landscapes. People have to go out there and get it. The scales are mismatched, though. The exposure is extreme. Harvesting timber, like other human attempts at wrangling nature, ends up being a physics problem of deadly proportions — one that has to be survived as much as solved.

So the question is, do you shield yourself from nature, or do you embrace it? Do you try to limit your exposure to the elements, or do you let them weather you? Do you opt for the protective, rubber work gloves, or the worn, leather cap?

It isn’t binary. Methods of coping with objective danger and discomfort exist on a spectrum, and any number of variables affect where you might land on it. Age is one of them. And here, Bridgewater and Q. are perhaps representative of their respective generations.

“When I was younger, there wasn’t too much emphasis on safety,” Bridgewater recalled. “I mean you didn’t want to do stupid things, but you didn’t sit down and talk about it. You know — ‘We can’t do this, we can’t do that.’ Never did that.”

This was in the 1960s, when Bridgewater was a boy, pulling levers in the cab of a D5 Cat at the bidding of his late father and founder of Bridgewater Logging, Jack Bridgewater. The logging town where the younger Bridgewater grew up, Raymond, was already in decline, though still full of places to down a beer and a steak, or else satiate any other appetite that could be worked up in the woods. Company camps and towns still dotted the Willapa Hills, and there were still a number of gyppo outfits that hadn’t yet been swallowed up by the giants, Weyerhaeuser and Crown Zellerbach. Said simply: most everyone in southwest Washington still made a living, directly or indirectly, off of the trees towering above them.

But the mindset and risk-reward calculus that Bridgewater spoke of defines a much longer period of time, spilling over decades on either side of his own boyhood. Here in southwest Washington, it began with Scandinavian immigrants and the Deep River Logging Co., which, according to logger, historian and Naselle resident Bryan Penttila, “harvested over a billion board-feet of logs from the Naselle River watershed” in the first three decades of the 20th century.

A logging carriage with attached choker cables travels along a skyline cable.

Timber fallers Keith Kramer and Allen Slusher hike down to their job site at the start of a shift.

Timber faller Allen Slusher keeps an eye on the top of an alder tree as he saws through its base.

The physics problem that is logging was even deadlier then. And men routinely failed to solve or survive it — were felled or maimed on the job at many times the rate of injury seen in just about any other line of work. To this day, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration deems logging the most dangerous job in America.

And yet, for the better part of a century, the promise of money to be made, and the seeming inexhaustibility of the resource that made it, managed to turn the physics problem into a numbers game, played with as much relentless persistence as ingenuity. Communities could send an endless stream of men into the woods because they had the men to send. And those men took the risk of living cheek by jowl with nature for granted — navigated it with a do-or-die combination of pluck, nerve, endurance and skill. Ultimately, what the individual logger earned for bringing these qualities to bear was more than just a living. The pride he felt in doing the grittiest, toughest work out there — in measuring himself daily against the elements — was as big as the timber he felled.

A century later, there has been a subtle, but profound change in the industry. It isn’t the rapid mechanization of logging operations across the board. It isn’t the constriction of timber markets in an increasingly globalized economy, and the concurrent shuttering of so many independent outfits and mills up and down the Emerald Edge. It isn’t the newfound emphasis on safety, efficiency and regulation. It isn’t the way social and political attitudes toward logging have shifted since the timber wars of the 1990s.

It’s the draining of that once-fierce pride out of the logging community itself. The sense that there are fewer and fewer who are in it for the love of it — who have the sap running through their veins.

To those who have seen enough to pinpoint it, this change does feel like a relatively recent one. When asked what he wishes more people understood about logging, Bridgewater’s nephew and right-hand man, Matt Cron, said: “Ten years ago, I would have said the pride in it, just the value of the job, because it comes from the heart. But it’s changing so much now …

guys don’t do this stuff now because it’s what they really want to do.”

He paused before adding: “I think a lot of people look at guys who work in the woods … like, ‘Oh you work in the woods? Well, you must not be able to do anything else.’”

It’s hard to say what, exactly, is responsible for this change. As Cron pointed out, it’s still possible, in spite of all the other aforementioned changes, to earn a decent living by logging — especially in this evergreen corner of the country.

But what’s also undeniable is that the various forms of belt-tightening the timber industry has experienced in recent decades have simply resulted in fewer loggers. And for the ones that remain, the philosophy of the industry now revolves around minimizing their exposure and maximizing safety and accountability.

For every one of his employees whose boots touch the ground, Bridgewater now carries insurance at a rate of $19 per hour through the Washington Department of Labor and Industries. Jobs that used to take the manual labor of an entire crew, working together out in

The physics problem that is logging was even deadlier in the first three decades of the 20th century. And men routinely failed to solve or survive it — were felled or maimed on the job at many times the rate of injury seen in just about any other line of work.

Michael Neumeyer unhooks choker cables from yarded logs.

Log truck driver Tom Betrozoff poses for a portrait in front of his loaded truck.

Rigging-slinger J. pulls choker cables down from the logging carriage.

History & Heritage

the open, are now done with a man or two, holed up in the climate-controlled cabs of modern machines. As Trace Conklin, an operations manager at Weyerhaeuser’s Raymond sawmill put it: “If we could get to the point where no hands touch the lumber at all, we would.”

Or in other words, the rubber gloves, and not the leather cap, are now the default. Which, to Bridgewater and Cron, isn’t a bad thing. After all, the physics problem itself hasn’t gotten any easier.

“This job is always gonna be hard work,” Cron said. “(It’s) getting physically easier on people … but now it’s more of a mental game.”

And individual loggers, regardless of age or experience, still yearn to be tested by it. It’s why Q. got made fun of for his gloves that day on the landing. It’s what Snodgrass meant when he said, while pulling levers in the yarder cab, “Sometimes I miss being down in the rigging.

Just the hard work of it.” The men that Cron and Bridgewater have working for them are

still steeped in pride and camaraderie. And in an age that sometimes seems designed to rob them of both, it is equally by design that they have retained these qualities.

“Terrain changes, timber changes, markets change, everything changes, but to do a job in this day and age, it takes people,” Bridgewater said. “I don’t care what you’re doing, you need people. So by God you better treat them right. You want the most out of them. And that’s what I try to do. I try to lead by example.”

Terrain changes, timber changes, markets change, everything changes, but to do a job in this day and age, it takes people. I don’t care what you’re doing, you need people. So by God you better treat them right.

Timber faller Keith Kramer looks on as three trees fall, domino-fashion.

A feller-buncher prepares to lay down an entire hemlock tree after sawing through its base.

History & Heritage

Planning and vision

Back out on the side, Diaz is down in the hole.

As a hook tender, he doesn’t have to be here. J. has things fully under control in the brush, whereas Diaz’s primary responsibility amounts more or less to masterminding the entire yarding operation. The placement of the skyline cable, the triangulation of various smaller ropes and cables that will pull the skyline into place, the designation and rigging of multiple, faraway stumps and trees as anchor points for blocks and pulleys, the way that an entire hillside of downed timber can be covered in the fewest and most efficient yarding corridors — all of these things are a direct result of Diaz’s planning and vision.

But he’s here anyway, helping to choke logs, piling onto Q. with the jokes, and occasionally relaying messages up to Snodgrass. Part of it is the presence of a reporter, whose safety can be better ensured with an extra pair of experienced eyes. But another part of it is what Bridgewater was talking about: leading by example. Plus, Diaz likes it down here. He started in the brush 20 years ago, with Bridgewater Logging, doing exactly what Q. and the other choker-setters are doing. And he still prefers to spend his days hiking all over the place, breathing the fresh air and keeping an eye on things.

He also shares Bridgewater’s philosophy, with regards to facing the elements. Beneath his raincoat, Diaz is wearing nothing but a hoodie, a hickory work shirt and an undershirt. It was all he was wearing several winters ago, when he was logging in the snow and ended up with frostbitten fingers and toes. It’s all he’s worn since, opting primarily for the protection his mind offers him.

“You just hang in there, and say to yourself, ‘I’ll make it, I’ll make it, I’ll make it,’ and that’s how you learn how to control all that stuff,” he said. “It’s all in your head. If you think about it, it’s bad. But if you start doing something ... playing around, stuff like that, it goes away, and you’re fine.”

“I’m not a robot,” he continued. “I got problems, everybody’s got problems. Maybe you feel sad or something. But then you come sit over here, quiet, you hear a couple of birds, you hear the creek, and you’re just calm, and relaxed. That’s it.”

The whistle blows and the carriage starts back down from the landing with three empty chokers, and something else dangling from one of them. J. stops the carriage, whistles back with the Talkie Tooter, and lowers the chokers down. It’s the plastic bag full of bratwursts that Neumeyer brought up to landing. Only now, they’re wrapped in tin foil and piping hot, and there’s a bag full of hotdog buns alongside them, and bottles of ketchup and mustard, too. Neumeyer has even thought to cook up a brat for the reporter.

They choke the logs, blow the whistle, and send them back up. They tear into the sausages, dribbling ketchup on their rain coats. They say, “Gracias, Michael,” out loud. There is a hint of diesel and grill smoke in the air. The rain falls, and falls, and falls.

The rigging crew looks on as logs are yarded up the hillside.

Refill

Rachael Davis fills up a water bottle at Barview Jetty County Campground, near Garibaldi.

Supplies

A picnic table of essentials ready to be packed up. Hikers can resupply in towns like Manzanita and Rockaway Beach.

Packing up

Christopher Smiley disassembles a tent before leaving the campground at Barview, preparing for a new day’s journey.

MEMORIES OF

Bayocean

Childhoods in a lost resort town

Words & Images: Lissa Brewer

Susan Bagley Barr still remembers the winter morning in 1951 when a rogue wave swept through a gap in the dune ridge and onto the blue DeSoto her mother was driving along Bayocean Peninsula.

She was in the third grade, riding in the backseat with her older sister, Sally, wearing a favorite peach-colored dress with a white collar. The girls were headed to school in Tillamook, east of the narrow sand spit where the Bagleys had lived for the past six years, when the surge caused the car to stall.

“At that point, my mother grabbed us, and we grabbed our lunch boxes and ran for the Cape Meares side,” Barr said. “I don't know what happened when we got over there. I do know that I dropped my lunch box, and that somebody found it on the ocean side a week later.”

That morning foretold more of what was to come for families who lived on this part of the Oregon Coast. “It was scary,” she said. “It’s scary when you’re running from something that might take your life, and that was, I think, the beginning.”

Susan, Sally, and their mother, Elizabeth Bagley, spent the rest of the school year living in a one-bedroom Tillamook apartment. For months, they continued to visit Bayocean on weekends. Eventually, those visits would come to an end.

In 1907, the 4-mile-long sand spit on the western edge of Tillamook Bay was just beginning to be developed as a grand, exclusive summer resort. By 1960, all of it was gone.

Looking south toward Cape Meares from Bayocean Peninsula.

History & Heritage

A promised land

In 1907, the 4-mile-long sand spit on the western edge of Tillamook Bay was just beginning to be developed as a grand, exclusive summer resort.

Thomas Irving Potter had convinced his father, Thomas Benton Potter, a developer who had found success in Portland, San Francisco and Kansas City, and in coastal towns like Half Moon Bay, California, to invest in the pristine shore. With the promise of a Pacific Railway & Navigation Co. line from Portland by railroad magnate Elmer Lytle, the Potters bought land from homesteaders and sold 1,000 lots within three months.

Bayocean Park was to have a 300room hotel to rival the celebrated Hotel Del Monte of Monterey, designed by Portland architect John Wrenn on a 100-foot ridge overlooking both the bay and the Pacific. Beside it, a 60-room annex would house a full-time staff.

“Twelve acres of a naturally beautiful park have been set aside as the hotel grounds,” read one advertisement that ran in The Oregonian on Oct. 4, 1909. “This park extends toward the bay nearly to Bay Boulevard, the equivalent of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk.”

Only the annex was built. Harold Bennett remembers playing in its ruins as a child in the 1940s.

“When we moved in, it was just a concrete shell for the first floor,” Bennett, who moved with his parents to the spit from Sioux City, Iowa, at the age of 2 in 1942, said in an interview at his home in Cape Meares, “and then they had one or two wooden floors above that.”

Barr remembered standing up on the cement foundation with her father, George Bagley Jr., and looking out at the horizon. “At that point, we were looking down to the ocean. And, of course, that's before everything continued to erode and get flatter,” she said.

Before erosion started, Bayocean thrived. The town had paved streets, electric-lit sidewalks, a general store, two restaurants and a working pier. There was even a saltwater natatorium with a wavegenerating machine, where Bagley Jr. and his brother, Bill, used to swim. In all, 59 cabins and other dwellings were built on the spit.

By 1960, all of it was gone.

Susan Bagley Barr, right, and her sister, Sally, pose in front of their dad’s crab boat, the Sally Sue.

The Bagley family’s blue DeSoto, parked outside their home.

Photos: Susan Bagley Barr

Retracing steps

For Jerry Sutherland, hiking the brushy, salalcovered peninsula continues to fascinate. An independent historian and author of the recent book “Bayocean: Atlantis of Oregon,” he has spent years compiling maps that show how the landscape has shifted over time.

“You walk out there now, and it’s nothing like it was,” he said.

Sutherland once helped Barr locate a property where her grandparents stayed during early visits. George Bagley Sr., who was appointed circuit court judge for the judicial district that included Washington and Tillamook counties in 1915, eventually purchased several Bayocean lots.

Changes came slowly. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at first recommended a dual-jetty system at the mouth of Tillamook Bay, but later reached a compromise. One jetty, on the north side, was completed in 1917.

The Corps had never before built only one jetty and hadn’t considered how it might affect the coastline.

“Once the North Jetty was built, that started the erosion,” Sutherland said. “Houses got moved back to avoid it because the lots were 100 feet (deep).” Yet even as some fell into the sea, others were going up. The last house on Bayocean Spit was built in 1950.

At that time, Barr was living in a house backed up to the bay.

“The living room went from the front of the house to the back of the house, and then there was the large window that looked out behind, and it had a fireplace, and we had the little doll bed in one corner that we played with,” she recalled, “but we were outside a lot, running around.”

She would wander down to the bay, sinking into the sand and, further, the mud flats neighborhood kids called “the big punches.” She rode a bicycle, picked strawberries and tended to a flock of banty chickens, who sometimes followed the kids down to the beach.

Up in the forested hills, a group of friends nicknamed themselves “The Poison Berry Club” for the salmonberries they liked to pick — though salmonberries aren’t poisonous. “We used to go up on the hill, and you could look out on the ocean,” Barr said. “My mother had my dad’s whistle from the army, and she would call us back.” “I didn’t realize that there were any problems,” she said.

Elizabeth Bagley stands at Jackson Gap after the Nov. 13, 1952, washout that turned Bayocean Spit into an island.

Saying goodbye

Perry Reeder Jr. was about 6 years old when his family moved to Bayocean.

It was the summer of 1944. As with many who arrived on the spit during World War II, after the natatorium and other structures had collapsed, the Reeders were drawn by affordable housing and lucrative job prospects. Naval Air Station Tillamook had given a boost to the local economy, and the family was able to rent a cabin for $10 a month.

“It was like paradise growing up down there because there were a lot of other boys,” Reeder Jr. said. “We made lifelong friends with those families, and those boys are like brothers to me.”

As he flipped through a photo album at his home in Oceanside, a few miles south of Cape Meares, he pointed out friends and neighbors from years gone by. There were Francis and Ida Mitchell, owners of a local mercantile, and a group of boys who often went surf fishing together. He spoke of wartime blackouts, air raids and the U.S. Coast Guard Beach Patrol, war dogs who kept watch over the shoreline.

Like Barr, he has fond memories of what was once a sandy beach on the bay. “The northwest wind always comes up at 11 o'clock here on the coast, and it blows on the bay side,” he said.

Over the years, Reeder Jr. has attended reunions of Bayocean alumni, including those who were students at Bayocean Schoolhouse as children. The school closed in 1948. Bennett was a student, too.

Back in Cape Meares, he pointed to the schoolhouse building, one of the few surviving structures to be moved off the spit, which is now a community center steps from his front door. Walking down the street, he pointed to another, the Pagoda houses. “They were actually two houses that sat within a breezeway of each other, and my mother cleaned those houses,” he said. “I remember when they were moved because they took a tractor up there and made kind of a road, a sand road, and put them over there as one house.”

A winter storm on November 13, 1952, left a nearly mile-wide gap between Bayocean and the mainland, turning a peninsula into an island. Letters on a sign in a storefront window were covered up so that instead of “Watch Bayocean Grow,” it read “Watch Bayocean Go.”

Photo albums of Perry Reeder Jr.’s at his home in Oceanside.

A view of the natatorium, which collapsed in 1932.

Looking south toward Cape Meares from Bayocean Peninsula. Harold Bennett points to the Pagoda Houses, among the few structures to be moved off Bayocean Spit to Cape Meares.

After earlier breaches, a winter storm on Nov. 13, 1952, left a nearly mile-wide gap between Bayocean and the mainland, turning a peninsula into an island. Letters on a sign in the Mitchells’ storefront window were covered up so that instead of “Watch Bayocean Grow,” it read “Watch Bayocean Go.”

The Bagleys’ home was on stilts, ready to be moved, but didn’t make it.

“My dad went back with his brother to tear down the house and bring out the lumber so that we could rebuild in Cape Meares, where they purchased a lot,” she said. “Helen Reeder (Perry Reeder Jr.’s sister) and I went with him for the week, and at that point, we had a wonderful time because we got up and had too many pancakes for breakfast, and then we headed out and just had the ocean to ourselves, along with our dog, of course.”

That was the last time Barr would see Bayocean for many years.

“I remember it as a place to meet friends, explore, play games, walk the beach and look for agates,” she said. “It was a great place to be a kid. There were kids around. We had the ocean. We had the bay. We could ride our bikes up and down the cobblestone street and then meet again the next day.”

Further

reading

“Bayocean: Atlantis of Oregon” by Jerry Sutherland, Beaver State Press, 2023 Also, follow Sutherland’s blog for stories and updates at www.bayocean.net

“Bayocean: Memories Beneath the Sand” by Perry Reeder Jr. and Sarah MacDonald, self-published, 2017

A commemorative sign along the Bayocean Townsite Trail.

Chinook tribal members carry the first salmon by canoe for the annual First Salmon Ceremony. Here, the tide is low, meaning a push toward the water.

still here

A photo essay by Amiran White

Brian Davis holds his grandson, Roscoe Davis, 4 months old, while talking with Donna Martinez during the First Salmon Ceremony at Tansy Point.

Tony Johnson, Chinook Indian Nation chairman, shows the first salmon to elder Anna Mae Strong before it is placed on the fires.

While Chinuk Wawa was never lost, like many Native languages across the U.S., it did face a steep decline. However, recent efforts have helped people reconnect with the language.

It is believed by the Chinook that their ancestors are carried on the fog that rolls in along Willapa Bay.

The Chinook are proud to maintain an unbroken canoe culture. The nation and individual families own canoes used for ceremonies, travel and work.

Members of the Chinook Indian Nation culture committee meet at the tribal office in Bay Center, Washington, in a house donated by a tribe member and renovated by volunteers.

Many practices of the Chinook people, such as the weaving of baskets with sweetgrass, are passed down through generations.

Rachel Cushman shares a moment with her son Kanim, 5, whose name means “canoe” in Chinuk Wawa.

Bethany Barnard learns how to strip bark off an old cedar tree.

For the Chinook, the water, rocks and trees hold memories and teachings that continue to connect them to their land.

A traditional hat is woven with cedar.

Light beams through a traditional plankhouse built in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service near Ridgefield, Washington.

Baby nettles are parboiled, then frozen for use throughout the year in soups, stews and teas, as was tradition to alternate between stored winter foods and harvests from spring until fall.