Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area

Author's Comments

The first time I walked down to Cobble Beach I stopped before I reached the sand because there was no sand. The whole beach is basalt, smoothed by centuries of ocean into round black stones the size of fists, and when the tide pulls back they make a sound I have not heard anywhere else on the coast. A clattering. A long exhale of stone against stone. You feel it through your boots before you parse what it is. The lighthouse stands above all of this on the headland, ninety-three feet of white tower against whatever sky the day has decided to give you. I have photographed it in flat winter light and in the kind of October gold that makes everything look painted, and honestly the flat days are sometimes the better ones. The tower wants weather. It wants fog peeling off the water, or low clouds breaking just enough to let one shaft through. The composition I keep returning to is from the beach itself, low to the cobbles, the stones filling the foreground in their wet black gleam and the lighthouse small in the distance. It is a picture about scale and texture more than about the lighthouse as a subject. Golden hour is the obvious answer and it is the right one. Time it with a low tide if you can, because the tidepools at Quarry Cove open up a whole second photograph entirely, anemones and ochre stars and the small architecture of a world that exists only for a few hours at a time. Stay for the whales if it is spring. Stay anyway.

Gallery