Third Beach

Author's Comments

The walk in is a kind of decompression. A mile and a third through coastal forest dense enough to muffle the sound of the surf until you are nearly at the sand, and then the trees open and the Pacific is just there, framed by headlands and punctuated by sea stacks that rise out of the water like the remnants of some older coastline that did not entirely give up. I prefer Third Beach in late September. The summer hikers have mostly cleared out, the light has begun its long slide toward the horizon earlier in the evening, and the marine layer behaves more cooperatively. Strawberry Bay Falls drops onto the south end of the beach in a thin ribbon that is more atmospheric than dramatic, and at golden hour, with the right tide, it becomes part of a composition that includes the stacks, the wet sand, and the low sun working through sea spray. Bring a tripod. The long exposure is the photograph here - water smoothed to mist, the stacks rendered as silhouettes, the beach itself going slightly ghostly in the diminishing light. A wide lens does most of the work, but I have made some of my favorite frames at fifty millimeters, isolating two stacks against the horizon and letting the rest fall away. The trail down is steep and often muddy, and the trail back up at dusk with cold fingers and a heavy pack is a different kind of honest work than the descent. Worth it. This is one of those Olympic Peninsula beaches that gives you exactly what you came for and then keeps giving in ways you did not anticipate.

Gallery