Kalaloch Beach 4

Author's Comments

The tide is the whole conversation here. You can come to Beach 4 at the wrong hour and find a pleasant stretch of Olympic coast and not much else. You can come at a minus tide on a May morning and find an entirely different place, an inverted world where the rock that was underwater an hour ago is now exposed and dripping and crowded with life. I plan these visits around the tide chart and nothing else. The trail down through the spruce takes maybe ten minutes, and the forest dampens sound in a way that makes the first sight of the beach feel like an arrival. On the right morning the rock formations stand exposed in a way they will not be again until the next low cycle, sculptural and barnacle-crusted, and the pools between them hold whole small economies of ochre stars and green anemones and mussels packed shoulder to shoulder. This is detail country. A wide lens has its uses here, especially when the morning fog is still lifting off the water and the sea stacks farther down the coast go ghostly in the distance, but I find myself working close most of the time. The colors in a tidepool are surprising the first time you really look - purples and oranges and a particular acid green that does not exist elsewhere in nature. Move carefully. Watch where you step. The animals are living in the few inches of water you are leaning over, and a returning tide has its own schedule that does not negotiate. Two hours is enough. Come back up the trail before the crowds start down.

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