This morning the weather looked a bit ugly with light rain, low clouds and fog. After about 10;00 AM, the rain quit and the skies looked like they were clearing so we headed out on an exploration of the coast range and the beautiful coastline between Brookings and Cape Sebastian. Peggy was the driver today and I was assigned navigation duties, including routing and destinations. I figured the first thing we would look for was the devastation left by the Chetco Bar Fire which continues to burn way east of Brookings but is out on this side.
We started by exiting Harris Beach SP and crossing US-101 onto a long, serpentine, narrow road mountain trail called Carpenterville Road. It wanders up and down the foothills of the coast range, ultimately popping out of the hills and into the Pistol River Valley. Unfortunately, as the designated person to select destinations, I did a rotten job because most of the road was in mountainous terrain and it was foggy so we couldn’t see anything to the east.
Once we got to Pistol River, we drove up the paved roads on both sides of the river. The south bank road is only about 3 miles long so it didn’t take us long to get turned around before discovering some place where we couldn’t. The north bank road was a bit longer but we ran into the same problem and headed back west to 101, spotting turkeys and some kinds of ducks we couldn’t identify. It is very pretty up the Pistol. I wish the paving ran further upstream.
Once on 101, we turned north up to the south boundary of Cape Sebastian where we turned around to go south and started a program of checking out all the fabulous viewpoints and pullouts that overlook a most extraordinary section of coastline. The shoreline and inshore waters are dotted with massive rock monoliths that rise to amazing heights from the Cape all the way to below Brookings. The cliffs are vertical and unforgiving to stupid wanderers who try to scale them. To make things better, the weather put on a show with sunny sections, dense fog clumps and clouds blasting by us.
There seem to be many arched rocks protruding from the ocean and all of them seem to be called Arch Rock. We saw not less than 5 Arch Rocks in 20 miles but it does seem they would give them different names so when someone says, “Have you seen Arch Rock?” we could reply with anything other than, “Which one?” Funny names or not, they are pretty snazzy.
To finish the day, we continued south past our RV location and headed up the north bank of the Chetco River to see if we could rubberneck some burnt ground from the recent horrible fire. We found it. The fire destroyed everything. We ultimately got turned around by a nice Forest Ranger who told us we could not go any further upriver because they didn’t want us in with the firefighting men and equipment. After looking at the burnt terrain, we didn’t need any encouragement to turn around and leave the work to the workers.
We took some nifty coastal pictures today. See some of them by clicking here