Today we had an open agenda so we took a cruise up the Smith and Umpqua Rivers and took a side trip to the Umpqua Lighthouse south of Winchester Bay. The Smith River dumps into the Umpqua near Reedsport, OR. Back in a previous age, I did some logging in the Smith River watershed but it was about a million years ago. The trip up the Smith today was to see if I could recognize some of the sights and roads that seemed so vivid to me but, alas, I could not identify anything. The drive up and back, however, was gorgeous. We spotted a massive bull elk with unwieldy antlers looking up at us from the shoreline. He was magnificent.
After about 20 miles on the Smith, we headed back toward the ocean until we made it to US-101 in Reedsport. About a mile south on 101 and we turned east again, this time up the lower Umpqua River to where we knew the Roosevelt elk from the surrounding timber hang out. No sooner had we spotted the pasture where we sometimes see elk and there they were. It appears there are either two large herds or one really humungous herd that have wandered down into the roadside pasture where they know they won’t be shot by some overzealous hunter or poacher.
The big bulls were dutifully chasing off the young suitors interested in their harems. Much grunting and whistling and chuffing was being used by the big guys trying to keep the youngsters way out at the edge of the cows. They augmented the noises with some road work as they chased the young bulls off into less interesting parts of the pastures. Mating season is next month and I suspect the big bulls will become more feisty with the punks come fun time.
After quite a while, we finally moved off and headed back west toward the coast. We made it to 101 again, turned south and pulled off going west about 5 miles later in Winchester Bay. We took a long drive into the impressive Oregon Dunes which run from North Bend to Florence. They are big dunes – some Sahara-sized specimens were spotted, many of them with fancy dune buggies squirrelling around.
Standing above the dunes at the mouth of the Umpqua is the venerable but still operating Umpqua Lighthouse. It is the last human-manned light on the Oregon coast. It is also unique in that it puts out both white and red light so the beacon at sea looks like it does a couple whites and then a red. The lighthouse looks out over the ocean but it is surrounded on the other three sides by conifer trees. If you stand near the lighthouse in the evening, you can see the slowly rotating lights on the trees and then the beacons blast out to sea. It is a gorgeous old structure allegedly architecturally quite similar to the Heceta Head Lighthouse north of Florence. We will probably return here to see the facility doing its thing at night.
There’s some lighthouse and elk pix you can see if you click here