Winter Discoveries on the Oregon Coast

January 1, 2013

Here is some great information from BeachConnection.net offering plenty of reasons to visit Oregon's beaches during the Winter Season. Book your Oregon beach rental now at Beachcombers NW, and don't miss out on these fun adventures!

Neskowin Ghost Forest by BeachConnection.net

Wild Winter Wonders to Look for on Oregon Coast ~ by Oregon Coast Beach Connection 

Winter on the Oregon coast means plenty of storms but that, in turn, means the most exciting and even strangest finds of the entire year. Oddities like Whale Burps and Ocean Burps are likely to be see, and even rarer discoveries some 4,000 years old may be possible as well. Also, whale watching is only just now winding down in late January. Agates are often a treasured and regular find after storms. Look for large gravel beds in the sand as these will yield the goodies. This happens all over the coast. Erosion plays a big role in keeping sand levels low, and thus more of these will be around in more places. But erosion brings out some truly outstanding treasures and often surreal ones or objects 4,000 years old or more.

Ghost Forests are a semi-common find during winter's low sand levels. They can come and go quickly with the sand levels, however. Ghost Forests are stumps of trees that have been buried under the sand. Depending where you find them, they could be 1,000 to 4,000 years old. Essentially, these were choked off by being covered by sand and sediment millennia ago, but that same process also kept them from the decaying effects of oxygen, thus preserving them. What you'll find are actual stumps or just root systems odd, complex looking forms that are perhaps a little eerie in appearance. They almost look like petrified wood. How they got that way also has its eerie aspects. Many scientists believe this was a slow geologic process where the landscape simply changed over a matter of decades and covered up the trees. Others believe it's firm evidence of some massive tsunamis and frightening earthquakes which caused the ground to abruptly drop as much as thirty feet.

There are a stand of Ghost Forest trees visible year-round at Neskowin, about 2000 years old. But during the winter, older ones might be found at several places, including: Cape Lookout State Park, Arch Cape and Hug Point (near Cannon Beach), Moolack Beach near Newport, and a mile north of Seal Rock. Also sometimes making an appearance are extremely surreal and rare objects called Red Towers. Only a couple feet high, if that, these are basically beach sand cemented by red iron oxide. Once they show up, they're destroyed within a matter of days. But in the meantime they have quite the strange, dreamlike appearance, like something out of Dr. Suess or an album cover from the band Yes.

Winter storms can often leave oddities and treasures, like clumps of objects filled with stuff coughed up from the seafloor (which can sometimes include still-living creatures), or you may actually still find the coveted Japanese glass float. Among the finds: Whale Burps. Compressed chunks of beach grass that are so hard they can't be broken, and sometimes look like bales of hay. Ocean Burps. Also known as detritus, these are extremely varied finds left over from deep in the ocean. Look for a brownish mass of wood and grassy matter from afar, but up close is a small treasure chest of natural oddities like cockleshells, hermit crabs, squid eggs, casings from other eggs, moon snail shells and somewhat rare rock finds. You never know what you'll run into.

Whales are still quite abundant along the coast until the end of January. The big migration week in December was really only the beginning. They are still moving past in great numbers until the first week of February then it abruptly stops. Whales start appearing again in March, and of course there is yet another Oregon Coast Whale Week in that month. ODFW suggests finding a calm day and a high viewpoint, such as Neahkahnie Mountain near Manzanita, Cape Foulweather near Depoe Bay, Ecola State Park at Cannon Beach or the Cape Perpetua Visitors Center near Yachats to name a few. You'll want to look out a few miles beyond shore. Learning good binocular technique will help spot the whales, ODFW said. Gaze out onto the ocean, focusing on medium distances until you see a puff of white. Then raise your binoculars while continuing to look at the place you saw the puff. This technique takes some practice, but generally works better than swinging the binoculars around looking for something. Just keep your eyes focused on the whale and raise the binoculars to your eyes, looking through them, not into them.

For more information, visit Oregon Coast Beach Connection on these and other interesting aspects of nature and winter on these beaches.  

~Thanks & have fun AT THE BEACH!