With such an early Spring this year, we were lucky enough to get a nice day to visit the coast in April!
First we stopped at Umbrella Falls next to a fish hatchery. Besides the fish, we saw a Golden Eagle.
We decided to visit Hug Point so Dana could show us the waterfall there and a portion on an old wagon road that went along the beach.
Everyone enjoyed the sand, and playing in the little river that flowed off the the waterfall.
Can you find Dana?
This part of the wagon road had to hug the rock point, thus the name for the beach. The wildlife has reclaimed the rocks and now there are lots of creatures to see.
Dana took Magnus up to the top of the falls to play.
The beach was covered in piles of these, by-the-wind sailors, or velella velella. They are a hydrozoa related to the Portuguese Man-o-war, but are not poisonous. The winds and currents were just so to bring bunches and bunches up on the Oregon beaches. They had started to dry up and they smelled. But once you got between them and the water, the smell wasn’t noticeable.
We also found this log covered with deep water barnacles. The tidal barnacles we are used to don’t move much when we can see them above the water. But these ones only grow on debris in open ocean, and didn’t seem to care if they were in the water or not. They wiggled their necks and stuck out their little feather tongues.
We stopped in Cannon Beach to get ice cream for all the hungry people and then we went to Youngs River Falls, a waterfall discovered by the Corps of Discovery in 1806.
No comments:
Post a Comment