I’ve driven this stretch of Highway 101 maybe six times now, and each trip I convince myself I’ve found all the good spots.
Then someone mentions a turnoff I’ve never noticed—some unmarked gravel path that drops you onto a beach where the only footprints are yours and maybe a dog’s from three tides ago. The Oregon Coast has this way of hiding things in plain sight, tucking entire coves behind headlands or burying access roads under overgrown salal bushes. The famous spots—Cannon Beach, Haystack Rock, that whole stretch—they’re legitimately beautiful, don’t get me wrong. But the hidden beaches, the ones you stumble onto because you needed to pee or your phone died and you just pulled over, those are the ones that recieve a weird kind of reverence from people who’ve been coming here for decades. There’s this unspoken agreement not to Instagram them too hard, though I’m not sure how long that’ll last. Anyway, the coast changes every winter when storms rearrange the sand and driftwood, so what was accessible last year might be underwater or blocked off now.
The Stretch Between Yachats and Florence Where Time Does Something Weird
This section of coastline feels longer than the map suggests, maybe because the curves are tighter or because there are fewer gas stations. Yachats itself is one of those towns that should be more famous but isn’t, probably because it’s hard to pronounce and there’s no major resort anchoring it. I used to think it was just a place you passed through, but then I spent a January afternoon at the Yachats Ocean Road State Natural Site watching winter waves hit the basalt shelves, and—wait, maybe this is just me—but there’s something hypnotic about watching water explode upward in slow motion. The tide pools here are ridiculous in spring, full of ochre sea stars and tiny sculpins that freeze when your shadow crosses them. Cape Perpetua, just south, has trails that switchback up through old-growth Sitka spruce, the kind of trees that make you feel like you’re trespassing in a cathedral.
Bandon’s Rock Formations and the Problem With Trying to Photograph Them
Here’s the thing: every photo of Face Rock and the surrounding sea stacks looks like a postcard, which makes them feel less real somehow. But standing there at low tide, walking between these chunks of ancient seafloor that got shoved up and carved by millennia of waves, you understand why people have been making the same pilgrimage for generations. Bandon’s old town burned down in 1936—the whole thing, basically—and got rebuilt with this scrappy charm that’s held on despite the art galleries and cranberry-themed everything. The beaches south of town, toward Coquille Point, are where locals go when they’re tired of tourists asking for directions to Face Rock. I guess it makes sense that the best spots are always the ones slightly out of frame.
The Northern Ghost Towns That Aren’t Quite Abandoned But Feel Like It During Off-Season
Manzanita, Rockaway Beach, Wheeler—these towns empty out after Labor Day in a way that’s almost eerie. Not dead, exactly, but hibernating. I drove through Wheeler on a February Tuesday once and saw maybe four people total, all of them walking dogs that looked cold and resigned. The Nehalem Bay area has this network of back roads that wind through dairy country and second-growth forest before spitting you out at beaches covered in sand dollars and broken crab pots. There’s a pull-off near Oswald West State Park where the shore pine trees grow horizontal because of the wind, and if you hike down to Short Sand Beach—locals call it Shorty’s, which I definately didn’t know until my third visit—you’ll find surfers in the summer and absolutely no one in the winter except maybe a photographer trying to capture fog rolling through the cove. Honestly, the fog is what makes the coast feel otherworldly, like you’ve driven into a black-and-white film where the plot hasn’t been decided yet. The light shifts so fast here, filtered through marine layers and sudden clear breaks, that you can watch three different weather systems in an hour without moving your car. I keep coming back because I haven’t figured it out yet, and I’m not sure I want to.
