Ruby Beach

Author's Comments

The first time I came down the trail to Ruby Beach it was January and the sky was the color of pewter, and I remember thinking that the beach had been arranged by someone with a very particular eye. The driftwood is the first thing you notice. Enormous bleached trunks stacked like the bones of some older forest, silvered by years of salt, and you have to climb over and through them to reach the sand. Then the sea stacks come into view and the scale shifts again. Abbey Island sits offshore like a misplaced cathedral, and on a falling tide the water pulls back to reveal a foreground of black rock and tidepools that hold the sky in fragments. I have made my best photographs here in the last hour before sunset, when the light comes in low from the west and finds the western faces of the stacks, turning them briefly warm against a cooling ocean. A long exposure smooths the surf into something more like fog, and the driftwood holds its texture in the foreground. The contrast is what makes the picture. Time it with the tide. An hour or two before low gives you the rocks, the pools, the room to work without having to retreat. Come in winter if you can stand the weather. The crowds thin, the light gets more dramatic, and the storms that roll through leave the beach rearranged in ways that feel almost intentional. This is one of the most photographed beaches on the Olympic coast and there is a reason. It earns it.

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