To Hug a Point. June 26. Part 1.

Dear Trail Friends,

I woke up early enough to be on the beach by 6:30am after a very leisurely morning breaking down camp and packing up gear. I was surprised that a number of people including the volunteer guides to the tide pools around Haystack Rock were already on the beach. Thinking about the boy playing  the wood flute, I meandered along the tidepools and gave myself time to look and see what was there. Sea anemones (photo 1) are creatures of great beauty. I do not ever want to take beauty for granted. 

 

In the early morning quiet, the rock shapes stood out against the mist and I found myself particularly moved by the seagulls here and there perched on them. 

 

May I digress a little about seagulls? Trung (the owner of the Seaside Hostel who dreams of starting a school in the art of living) told me that she had watched a mother seagull teaching her child (who was almost as big as she was) to fish. It was when the anchovies were running,  and Mother Gull had an anchovy in her bill. She would drop it near  Baby Gull,  then snatch it up again,  teasing and tempting Big Baby with it. Trung also once watched a gull step up and down on the earth, putting all of her weight on one foot, then on the other, as if she were marching in place. Trung discovered that the gull did this to disturb the worms with her movement, so the earth would tremble and they would come to the surface - and she would then eat them. It reminded me of a kitten kneading her mother's breast. 

The beach was not at all boring - so different from the first day's walk from the Columbia River to Seaside. The sand was far from perfectly flat so there were lots of tide ponds and creeks through the sand. Not wanting to take my shoes off or get them wet, I followed quite a labyrinthine path avoiding the waterways. Photo 3 shows a young family plunging through one of the tide ponds. 

 

As I looked ahead I tried to imagine which promontory was Silver Point, which Humbug Point, which Hug Point - all of which I had been warned to walk around at low tide. 

Photo 4 is a series of photos showing how I saw two points ahead (and wondered which they were), then three points ahead  (and thought I knew which they were), then four points ahead (and decided to look at my map and let gps tell me which was which). 

 

Once I knew I was in the section of the hike between Silver Point and Hug Point, I felt very lucky to have such a low tide (-2.4) and to have started hours before low tide so I could easily get past all the points before the tide got high. I started to wonder what it would be like to hike them with an incoming high tide. What if I had to bail? The guidebook had said that one could always hop up to the highway and hike the shoulder, but when I looked around, I saw steep, heavily grown areas and no access. I thought the guidebook was attributing superhero powers to hikers who could just "hop up" to the road. Photo 5 is a view of that steep "access" - Highway 101 is beside the telephone pole. 

 

I'm afraid this photo fails to convey how radically inaccessible the road looked to me. I was amused how much of the hike I spent appreciating the low tide by imagining the various disasters that might have befallen me had it been high. I even had a conversation with a young woman beach-biker about such disasters and my lamentable lack of superhero powers. A little later I took a picturesque (I think) photo of her on what would turn out to be Hug Point. (Photo 6). 

 

Well - the scene of as picturesque. The photo fails to do it justice. Not wanting to soak my shoes ( or take them off) I decided to climb over Hug Point. I was not at all sure there would be a way down on the other side. In fact, when I was half way over, I asked a young family if there was a way - and they assured me there was. There turned out to be a ledge (which I learned later was cut into the point so cars could drive over when the tide was too high to drive around - in the days when the beach was the only coast highway there was). 

Photo 7 looks back at Hug Point and the ledge/road, after I found my way back down to the beach. 

 

To be continued in "To Hug a Point. June 26. Part 2. "


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