Cape Lookout Weekend

Cape Lookout felt like a very Oregon kind of summer weekend: muddy trails, misty tide pools, wild huckleberries, cold ocean water, beach fires and a few too many mosquitoes.

Travis and I camped at Cape Lookout State Park for three nights, with Kaya and Jordan joining us Friday afternoon. The trip started slowly, which was exactly what I needed. After setting up our new tent, we walked down to the beach and ended up watching one of the prettiest sunsets I’ve seen in a long time. We ran back for our chairs and drinks and sat in the sand talking until it got dark.

Friday was our hiking day. We walked the Cape Lookout Trail through an incredibly green, muddy forest, stopping along the way for coastal views and lunch at the end of the cape. The unexpected highlight was finding wild huckleberries growing beside the trail. I had never picked them before, and we ended up filling an entire lunch container while snacking on them as we walked. Later, once our friends arrived, we somehow convinced ourselves to swim in the Pacific. It was freezing at first, but once we were in, jumping around in the waves was ridiculously fun. We ended the night around a fire on the beach with s’mores and drinks.

Saturday was our biggest exploring day. We started at Short Beach around low tide, where seemingly every exposed rock was covered in sea stars, anemones and other tiny creatures. In the misty weather, it felt like the Oregon Coast distilled into one scene. From there we visited Cape Meares Lighthouse and the strange, many-armed Octopus Tree before heading to Oceanside for lunch at Roseanna’s. Seafood, marionberry cobbler, an ice cream flight at the Tillamook Creamery and a beer in the afternoon made food almost as much a part of the day as the scenery.

On our way back to camp, we squeezed in a short walk to Munson Creek Falls, then returned to the beach for another bonfire. Someone had left behind a crescent-shaped sandcastle, so we built our fire inside it as a windbreak. Later, the father and son who had made it happened to walk past and stopped to tell us they were happy to see someone using it. It was such a small interaction, but it became one of those moments that made the whole evening feel especially memorable.

By Sunday morning, everything was soaking wet and we were tired enough to be ready for home. We packed up, took one last walk on the beach and made our way back toward Eugene.

What I liked most about this trip was that no single attraction carried the weekend. It was the accumulation of little things: coffee walks on the beach, discovering huckleberries, swimming in cold water, finding tide-pool creatures, eating good food and sitting around fires after dark. A weekend like this works because the plan does — enough structure to get us outside, fed, and where we wanted to be, so all the little things had room to be the easy part.