Third Beach

Last weekend we decided to get out of the house and stretch our legs, so we drove out to the coast and hiked to the imaginatively named Third Beach. It's fairly easy 1-mile hike, but it takes me three times longer than the average person to complete because I stop constantly to examine my surroundings and take a dozen pictures of the same thing. At one point I asked Tom – a power hiker – if it made him crazy that I stopped all the time. After a pause he said, "No, because that means you're enjoying yourself." Aw, I don't care if he was lying, that was sweet.


We managed to get there just before the tide was reaching its lowest ebb and walked down the beach to find a sheltered spot to eat our lunch. Third Beach is one of my favorite beaches in the area because it's close to home, easy to get to – but never crowded – beautiful, and there are plenty of places to explore, especially at low tide. We've even been lucky enough to find a glass float there.

There are several streams and small rivers that flow into the ocean at Third Beach. The waterfall in the picture above is one that falls over the cliffs at the south end. We decided to turn north from the trailhead, which meant crossing a wide stream that flowed across the beach and must either be crossed at the top, where there are logs spanning it, or at the bottom, where it spreads and becomes shallow.

I decided to tiptoe gently through it at the bottom, but ended up crashing across in a particularly ungraceful style. Tom tried it jump it a little higher up and forgot to calculate for the poor take-off the soft sand would cause, and fell a little short. Of course, neither of us brought a change of shoes, so we both walked around with soggy feet for the rest of the day.

The low tide left most of the rocks, and the critters on them, exposed to our curiosity and the seagull's appetites. I saw several seagulls attempting the nearly impossible feat of eating a starfish.

This extreme act of greed involves a lot of juggling of the starfish to find the exact angle that will allow a creature with five arms, all pointing in different directions, to slide down a narrow chute. The job is complicated by other opportunistic seagulls who will steal that tasty morsel in an unguarded heartbeat.

Now, I know that many people dislike seagulls, but they're one of my favorite birds. They have huge personalities, are actually pretty smart and are survivors. They're like the weeds of the bird world.



At the north end of the beach is a rocky point that is only exposed at the lowest tides. Of all the times we've hiked to Third Beach, this was the first time we were able to go around the point. We were rewarded with a hidden cove with large rocks, lots of tidepools and its own stream.

While Tom decided to explore around the next point, I poked around in the tidepools, looked for hidden treasures under the rocks, watched eagles soaring far out over the ocean and tried not to fall in the water with my camera. Eventually it was time to head back to the main beach, before the tide rose high enough to trap us in the cove.

Because of the high number of cargo ships and fishing boats that pass the Oregon and Washington coasts, there is always something to find, caught among the driftwood. We usually play an informal game of "If I Was Stuck On A Deserted Beach..." and I've come to the conclusion that if you got lucky and landed on the right beach, you could make a nice life for yourself.

This time there were an unusually high number of rubber gloves. I even found a matching pair just a few feet from each other. Because no trip to the beach is complete without creating "art" from our found objects:

Sadly, there were no dried clumps of eelgrass anywhere to use for hair.

On the hike out I stopped to take pictures so many times, Tom finally reminded me that if we planned to get to the car before the sun went down, we had to keep moving. One of these days we're going to spend three or four days doing a long hiking and camping trip down the coast. Anyone interested?