We started Day 14 with a visit to Fort Stevens, which is now an Oregon State Park. In a past life it was a Civil War-era nine-sided earthworks fort. There is a reconstruction on the site of this 1863 fort with the entrance into the earthworks.Ft. Stevens was also used for coastal defense during WWI and WWI and there are still gun batteries to climb over and view, plus an interesting museum detailing the history of the fort. We clambered and hiked all over and also saw the foundations of WWII barracks and the site of a Native American village.
It was also fun to look across the Columbia to the Washington side and see some of the sights we had visited previously, like Cape Disappointment with its lighthouse, Fort Columbia which assisted with coastal defense, and Lewis & Clarks’s Station Camp with Dismal Nitch further on to the right.
The park includes Clatsop Spit, so we drove out there because it’s the most northwestern tip of Oregon and since we’d done that in Washington, we figured we should also do it in Oregon and then we could say we’d driven the whole coast of both states. We drove out to the south jetty of the spit and stood where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. We saw many groups of pelicans flying on the ocean side.
We walked along the beach on the Columbia River side of the jetty and got quite close to some bald eagles sitting on the sand. When we got too close they flew into some trees just behind the beach. We also saw hawks and sandpipers.
The park also contains what’s left of the Peter Iredale which ran aground in 1906 and part of the superstructure is still in the sand. A rather unusual sight on a public beach.
We got back to chasing Lewis & Clark on the Oregon side of the river and visited the Fort Clatsop section of the Lewis & Clark National Historical Park. We walked through the reconstructed fort where they spent the winter, walked to the spring where they got fresh water when it wasn’t raining, hiked to the canoe landing, took my picture with Sacagawea and then the rangers kicked us out because they closed at 4:00.
We followed the Corps of Discovery down to Seaside which is a busy beach town. We parked on the main drag to walk along the shops to the turnaround and the statue of Lewis & Clark, then sat overlooking the ocean for a bit, walked back to our car, getting fresh Oregon ice cream on the way.
We then went looking for the Salt Works. It’s a little gated square between some homes with a reconstructed cairn showing how the members of the Corps boiled salt water to make salt during the winter they were at Fort Clatsop.
We followed the Corps of Discovery farther down the coast to Ecola State Park which had lovely views of Tillamook Rock Lighthouse and Haystack Rock, then back onto Highway 101, but never found the beached whale site, so we were done with Lewis & Clark, because that’s as far south as they went.
We finished the day with a stop at Cannon Beach to walk out to the beach and see Haystack Rock a little closer.
And also to see artsy trash cans in town.
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