The Beach

We are about 15 miles from the shore of the Pacific, here in Forks. At the airport where we are conducting the study, we're about 9 miles closer. You wouldn't know it at the airport - no salt sea smell, no gulls wheeling overhead.

Rialto Beach is north of the mouth of the Quillayute River. South of the river are First Beach, Second Beach and Third Beach, named in order north to south (further south are Beaches 1 through 6, named south to north, but mysteriously lacking a Beach 5. There are Ruby Beach and Shi Shi Beach as well, so it's not all numbers). All of these beaches are part of the Olympic National Park, which covers the beaches, a strip of land protecting the Queets River from glacier to ocean, and then most if not all of the Olympic Mountain Range. Confusingly, there is an adjacent Olympic National Forest, and the Park (not the National Forest) encompasses the Hoh Rain Forest and the Quinault Rain Forest.

Here's a good map of the Olympic National Park.

While a guide book I have describes Rialto Beach as "spooky", many of the locals recommend it as the superior beach in the area. It has a 1.5 mile walk to "Hole in the Wall", a dramatic natural arch with a tidal pool behind it. (To be fair, about as many others recommend Second Beach, which is known for the 20 minute walk in the woods to get to, and its own multiple tidal pools.)
I've been to Rialto Beach twice now, once with Nate and Glen and once with HomoDomi's family, who came up to visit over the weekend. Nate, Glenn and I walked down the beach to Hole in the Wall -- the Parks path was reported to have washed out in the December storms that caused so much damage to the whole Pacific Northwest coastal areas, and indeed, I found nothing longer the 20 feet of tended "path". The beach was an easier walk.

The first thing you see when you step onto Rialto Beach is a scattering of tall islands just over the water, perhaps close enough to walk to at a very low tide. The largest of these is named: James Island. It served as a fortress for the Quilleute Indians when they were being raided for slave-trade. In those days you could run to it at low tide (and perhaps swim at high tide). The Army Corps of Engineers dredged a channel between James Island and the shore, and now pilot whales and others swim through it during their migrations north in late March and south in the fall.
I am not much of a Beach Person. I like to check them out, and I am not immune to filling my pockets with shells and keepsakes. But I don't particularly long to lie on, or party at, a beach. There's always too much wind -- after an hour or two, my ears are tired of the swooshing and crashing, and instead of being awed by my own insignificance against the mighty ocean, I just want to be calmly insignificant, somewhere quiet, without pounding natural rhythms. I mention this because I don't notice beaches much. After my initial exuberant embrace of them, I'm mostly cringing from the sun or the wind or the waves. But I am told that Rialto Beach is unusual. HomoDomi thought it one of the most beautiful beaches he's ever seen.

It is quite wild, for one thing. I've only been there at lowish tide, but even then, there's very little sand. And the sand is black, or more exact, dark gray. Above the sand is a wide swathe of dark gray rocks -- all smoothed and rounded, not sharp at all. When you start to examine them, particularly once you get about halfway up the beach towards Hole in the Wall (beyond the reach of the casual rock collector and small children) you'll notice that the dark gray is made up of the full spectrum of color. I found brown, green, yellow, white, dark red and even pink rocks, among the grey and black. They range from tiny pebbles to fairly large rocks -- I brought home an almost perfectly round, flat gray rock about as big as my hand, including my extended fingers.

Above the rocks are piles and piles of driftwood, including whole trees, like beached dinosaurs at the top of the shore. They fell down during long ago landslides (some were sawed), drifted down river to the ocean, and have been tossed back up onto earth by the seas. We found one (cut) monster about 4 feet in diameter with rings enough to date it back to before Lewis and Clark were exploring south of here (but who knows how long it has been resting high on Rialto Beach?).

Behind the driftwood (drift trees?) is a line of tall dead trees, still standing, stripped of all greenery and bark. I don't know what these are -- I mean, I don't know how the eco-system keeps this band of trees still standing. And when they ultimately do fall over, do the trees behind them die? How did they get so tall, and then die? Or maybe they are still alive, ghosts of trees, perhaps.

And last of all, behind those, is forest, dark, green, lush, and miraculously quiet, sheltered from the roar of the surf by the piles of trees and the stand of dead ones. We thought it was rain forest, because it is lush, full of ferns and shiny green undergrowth and masses of hanging moss on every branch, but once we saw real Rain Forest, we realized this is just wet forest. (Story about that to come.)

Both days were lovely at the beach (aside from the noise). Glenn and Nate were copacetic walkers, even though we misjudged the distance to Hole in the Wall (pictured right, from inside, standing above a pink-tinged tidal pool filled with sea urchins and green anemones) and got both tired and concerned that we would not make it back to the car before the tide climbed so high the beach would be impassable.

The children contested dominance for the beach with the waves, and lost, wetly. The grown-ups worried about riptides and sneaker waves, and collected sea-bleached driftwood to take home to burn (it is said to give off blue and green flames).

This last photo, I can't weave into the story -- it shows the standing rocks at the north end of the beach (Hole in the Wall is just to the right and behind them).