Ozette Triangle (Cape Alava to Sand Point)

Author's Comments

The boardwalk goes for miles before the ocean ever appears. You walk it in a kind of green silence, hemlock and cedar pressing close on both sides, the planks dark and slick from a rain that may have fallen yesterday or last week. Sound is muffled. Light comes down in narrow shafts. It is the strangest approach to a coastline I know, because for a long time you have no sense that a coastline is coming at all. And then the trees end and the Pacific is simply there, enormous, and you are standing at the western edge of the country with three miles of beach between you and the next trail marker. I have done this loop in late August and again in October, and the second is the one I would recommend. The summer haze burns off by mid morning and the shoulder season light has a clarity to it that the beach deserves. Cape Alava in low golden hour, with the sea stacks throwing long shadows across the wet sand and the tide pools holding sky, is one of the more genuine landscape photographs I have made anywhere on this coast. The petroglyphs are easy to walk past if you do not know to look. They are carved into boulders near Wedding Rocks, faces and orcas and forms I cannot name, and the Makah have been here longer than any of this language can hold. I do not photograph them closely. It does not feel like mine to do. Bring more water than you think. Watch the tide tables. The boardwalks deserve respect when they are wet, which is most of the time.

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