Cape Meares Lighthouse

Author's Comments

The lighthouse is small and that is the point. Thirty-eight feet of white tower at the edge of a two-hundred-foot cliff, and the scale of it only makes sense once you have walked the paved path down through the spruce and seen how the land falls away beyond it. The composition I keep returning for is the wide one, taken from the south side of the trail in late morning, where the lighthouse sits low in the frame and the Pacific opens up behind it with Three Arch Rocks visible in the middle distance on a clear day. May and June are the months I would choose. The marine layer burns off later in the morning here than it does inland, and there is often a window between nine and eleven when the fog lifts off the water just enough to reveal the rocks but still leaves a softness in the air that the light catches. Bring something long if you care about the wildlife refuge. The murres and the puffins are out there in numbers most people do not realize. Do not skip the Fresnel lens if the lighthouse interior is open. It is a genuinely strange and beautiful object up close, all glass and brass and impossible geometry, and the detail shots reward a careful eye. And then walk the short spur to the Octopus Tree before you leave. It is not on the way to anything, exactly, but it is one of those Sitka spruces that does not look like it should exist, and it photographs best in the diffuse light that comes through the canopy on overcast mornings. The whole headland takes maybe two hours to work properly. Give it three.

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