Day 53: Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area

We wake up pretty early again this morning, and leave the campground right after breakfast. There is no time to loose, for a good reason: the sun is shining in the blue sky! It is the first day like this on our Oregon Coast journey. We drive south to the John Dellenback trailhead, the most adventurous and challenging of all the trails in Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. We read that the formation of these massive dunes is related to the gigantic explosion of the volcano that created the caldera that would later become Crater Lake.

Anyway, our walk begins on an easy trail in a conifer forest. Then suddenly, the forest opens up to the impressive Umpqua Dunes. Some of them topping 500 ft, the dunes occupy a space 2 miles wide by 4 miles long. And we have to cross that area to reach the beach. There doesn’t seem to be a trail anymore, so we just follow the foot prints in the sand to get to the highest sand dune. The day is beautiful and nobody is around. Once we’re in the middle of the dunes, it really feels like you’re in a gigantic sand desert.

 

 

We follow foot paths on the sand, but those paths sometimes disappear because of the wind. Really fast, we realize that some portions are on hard sand, pretty easy to walk on, while some other portions are this loose sand that makes the hike a lot more strenuous. We walk up and down the dunes until we reach the coastal forest, with the beach right behind it. But that coastal forest is thick, and there is no trail crossing it where we are. We are a bit lost, so we decide to walk north after looking at the simple map we have with us.

 

And after walking a little while, we end up finding the trail and crossing the coastal forest, that is even thicker than it looked from the dunes. We encounter a couple of snakes along the way and then we arrive to the beach. Miles and miles of seemingly untouched beach, with not a human being around. The sun is high now in the blue sky, the tide is at its lowest. It’s like we're explorers that, after crossing a gigantic desert for days, found a pristine beach. We hike along the beach for a while, finding some interesting shells and a couple of sand dollars. Yellow finds a good walking stick and a weird flag caught in the bushes.

 

Well, the explorers have to get back to the RV to eat their lunch. So we are back on the dunes after crossing that thick coastal forest again. And it seems that there is actually a trail crossing the dunes, consisting of wood sticks sticking up inconsistently from the sand. Mostly, we are following footsteps when they are around, and try to head east when we don’t have anything to follow. It is another 2 mile walk on the sand, and it gets difficult, but fortunately, we can continue directly on the trail when we reach the conifer forest.

Back to the RV, we drive back to the campsite to have lunch and spend the afternoon studying and planning. Yellow cooks an Ethiopian-style dinner: white rice, collard greens and red lentils. Yummy!