Ecola State Park

Author's Comments

The first time I drove out to Ecola I made the mistake of arriving at midday, and the light was flat and the headland looked merely pretty. I came back the following evening and understood what I had missed. Tillamook Head is a viewpoint that needs the sun low and southwest, the kind of late summer or early fall hour when the marine layer is thinning and the coast below begins to separate into planes - Crescent Beach in the foreground, the rock stacks in the middle distance, Haystack reading as a dark silhouette miles to the south. The depth is the thing. On a good evening the haze stacks the headlands into receding blues and the whole coast looks like a Japanese print. The forest behind the viewpoint is its own argument for coming. Sitka spruce of a size that takes a moment to reckon with, draped in moss, the trail to Indian Beach winding through them in a green half-light that almost no one bothers with because the headland view is so immediate. I would say walk it. The forest is older than the road and quieter than the parking lot, and the light through the canopy in the late afternoon does something to color film that I have never quite been able to describe. Indian Beach itself is worth the extra few minutes of driving. Smaller crowds, a different angle on the rocks, a creek mouth that catches reflected light at low tide. I have made photographs there I could not have made at the main overlook. Bring layers. The wind off the headland is colder than you expect, even in August.

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