Cape Perpetua Hike

Overview

The Siuslaw National Forest's Cape Perpetua Scenic Area is one of the jewels of the central Oregon coast. The rugged lava headland, an oceanic shield volcano, is much more than a landscape of rock meeting ocean. There are pocket beaches, tide pools, blowholes, a lush creek, old growth Sitka spruce, and wildflower meadows. Fingers of weathered lava jut into the surf at sea level and, from a historic stone shelter at 745 feet, you can look out on the whole vista. A network of trails leads through here, and you need to give yourself time to do them all. While you can drive to other trailheads in the Scenic Area, plan to be here on a balmy day and take your time. Walk down past the Visitor Center on a paved trail. Tall Sitka spruce shade salal and thimbleberry thickets. Pass the site of an old CCC camp with only the foundation remaining. At a junction, keep straight and then go through a tunnel under the highway. At another junction, go left for the Spouting Horn on the Captain Cook Trail. The trail heads into a salal thicket where cow parsnip blooms in late spring. At the next junction, make a left to begin the loop. The trail heads up into a dark spruce thicket. Bear right at the next junction (left is up to the highway), and switchback down to an overlook over the Spouting Horn near Cooks Chasm. (The horn spouts best from its blowhole at high tide.) Steps lead down the bluff to the rocks whence you can hop and skip towards the tide pools around Good Fortune Cove, another narrow inlet. Look for Thor's Well on these rock platforms: this is another collapsed sea cave, about 20 feet deep, that fills with high tide surges and seems to erupt. After Memorial Day, rangers are on hand to explain the chitons, urchins and other denizens of the tide pools. The best pools are closest to the crashing surf where the rocks form a volcanic shelf above the ocean surges. Pick up a trail heading up from the rocks and reach the loop at a footbridge. Go left past a sign explaining shell middens at an overlook and then pass through a

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