Monday (Apr 18)
My three nights are up, so time to get going. I have a pretty short drive today, so I do not actually leave until 2:30-ish.The construction stoppage epidemic has spread to 101 north! I spend a while at two different stops. Nowadays I just turn off the engine and the podcast and read my book.
I need diesel and am unwilling to gamble that I can make it to Oregon, where GasBuddy tells me it’s very cheap. I stop at the Reservation station at the Klamath River. There are very few stations up here, or much of anything else really.
Crescent City is physically beautiful – a spectacular coast drive (Pebble Beach Drive :), nice clean neighborhoods, but soooo boring and (I think…) culturally vacant. I enjoyed doing the tour today – follow the coast west then north to the bottom of the airport, then due east to a left on Northcrest, which cuts off a good chunk of boring 101 and instead takes you on a lovely drive through the countryside, near Lake Earl and the very jarring entrance to Pelican Bay Maximum Security Prison, home of the worst of the worst and all manner of unspeakable horrors behind those clean pastel walls and fresh green grass – whew! I try not to think about it too much.
WHUFU page for: Lucky 7 Casino
This place is super user-friendly. There is an RV parking area at the back of the lot, and another across the road behind the reservation gas station. The second one is more level but seemed a little sketchy. I am going for the first. Glad to be here!
Wifi was dead for most of the evening, but when it came back it was pretty good. There are a couple of stations in the casino with free coffee and even a cappuccino machine!
You can hear the surf at night when the traffic is gone. The ocean is right across the highway, complete with a bench on the bluffs to watch sunset. Sweet little fountain with colored lights to entertain your inner stoner. Nice, friendly place.
tonight:
This place is super user-friendly. There is an RV parking area at the back of the lot, and another across the road behind the reservation gas station. The second one is more level but seemed a little sketchy. I am going for the first. Glad to be here!
Wifi was dead for most of the evening, but when it came back it was pretty good. There are a couple of stations in the casino with free coffee and even a cappuccino machine!
You can hear the surf at night when the traffic is gone. The ocean is right across the highway! Sweet little fountain with colored lights to entertain your inner stoner. Nice, friendly place.
Tonight is Game 2 of Round 1 of the NBA playoffs for the W’s. That is what motivated my decision to casino-camp tonight – looking forward to the casino bar and the game. The fish and chips in Crescent City killed my appetite for the casino’s prime rib special ($18.95 – why is prime rib such a big deal?), so I just drank Lagunitas IPA and gesticulated at the tv – I’m not a yeller if I’m going to be the only yeller in a bar, and mailed with the Warriors group when the wifi came back.
Tuesday
Grab a tasty beverage from the cappucino machine, then northward.
My Brookings coffee place – the Whistle and Bell – hit the spot just as it did last time. Then up the hill and out of the harbor, across the mighty, giardia-laden Chetco, then a few busy blocks to the Fred Meyers, also great! Very user friendly, got things I’ve been thinking about getting for weeks. Additionally however, I got a bunch of chicken and mashed potatoes that are actually not very good. But they looked soooo good at the time – the well-known dangers of shopping while hungry!
So hungry that I stop at the first pull-off with a good ocean view and snarf about half the potatoes and a breast and a drumstick. Why did I get breasts? Breasts are boring, I’m a dark meat guy all the way. I was clearly not mentally fit to be making food decisions.
I’m still hungry, so I stop in Gold Beach, for iced tea and clam chowder at the Port Hole. After my night of beers in the casino bar, that really hits the spot. The Port Hole is not particularly good, but I’ve stopped the last two times I’ve been through. It is pretty “authentic”, the other half of it’s building is the thriving Port Hole Fish Market, and seems to be part of a working harbor. So, despite the fact that I’d give it maybe 3.5 stars, I enjoy stopping there.
After than it’s really not far to tonight’s campground.
WHUFU page for: Humbug Mountain State Park
Driven past many times, finally stopping!
Good news: It's in a lush, peaceful crevice in the mountains along a little burbling stream which opens onto a driftwood-strewn beach 1/2 mile away.
Bad news: US 101, also runs through the same narrow crevice so you rarely hear the burbling stream. You hear semis rocketing past 40 yards away all night.
In the summer, you can camp in the Lower Loop, 600 yds from the beach. In the winter you have to walk (or bike!) an extra mile from the Upper Loop.
tonight:
This cool, shady glen is hitting the spot. If only the noise of US 101 wasn't 50 yards away.
Good phone bars at the beach! Beach is almost a mile down the canyon, through the main part of the campground, which has always been closed when I've been here.
Picture a creek tumbling down a steep, narrow leafy green canyon to the beach – awesome place to be, right? Now add to that picture the only north-south route west of I-5 sharing that canyon with you … still awesome-ish, but well short of perfect.
I am in any event really happy to be here, to park in the shade and quiet (except for the trucks) and chill. I take a rejuvenating nap and after that it’s still early enough for a long hike to the beach for sunset/moonrise.
Wednesday
First town out of Humbug heading north is Port Orford. i stopped at the Massacre Rock turnout because I never have before. It was interesting, but mostly I realized I’m pretty hungry and I don’t want to wait an hour to make it to my fave place in Coos Bay. Yelp tells me the place right above the parking lot has wifi, so change of plans! In I go. It was a pretty awful place. It’s only asset other than wifi was an amazing view, down the coast all the way to Humbug Mountain, but the the waitress was loud and a little crazy and the the food was greasy even by breakfast standards.
Too long day, my planning these days is distorted by my need to see the W’s playoff games, next one Thursday. Thursday I want to end up at a place where I can walk to a bar, and I’ve decided that Winchester Bay is that place. Therefore today I drive past Winchester Bay so as to camp in some nature-ish place further north. Tillicum Beach was to be that place, but I am really tired of driving past pretty places and not stopping, so I abort the last fifty miles to Tillicum and instead turn off at Sutton Campground for the night. I was there once years ago, nothing special, but it didn’t suck, so let’s do it.
WHUFU page for: Sutton Campground
Nice clean bathroom, no shower, near 101 but quiet, 20 yards out of the campground you're in the sand dunes
tonight:
expensive, costs the same as Perpetua and Tillicum, with no ocean accessibility.
The popular hike is out of B Loop north into the dunes. This time I took the hike out of A Loop down Sutton Creek. It was really cool this time of year with the creek flowing strong.
Kind of a boring place. Trees are thick so it’s pretty dark. Quiet, few campers this time of year so it’s easy to find a spot with no one else in sight – my favorite :). Huge mosquitoes.
I won’t take back “boring”, but I nonetheless stumbled onto a really cool hike and thus had a memorable evening. It started within sight of my campsite. The trailhead is immediately to the left of the Loop A Group Camping area. It follows the meanderings of Sutton Creek for two or so miles, down to where Sutton Road ends at a turnaround. The vegetation is so dense that bushwhacking shortcuts is entirely out of the question, and it’s super shady, so even though there’s a moon, it would be a rough hike to be stuck on after dark. So the plan is to take the trail down in the waning daylight, then the road back up in the moonlight. My usual sunset hike plan. Worked awesomely. My new app tells me it was 11,000 steps!
The other major feature of the hike, other than the cool and quiet and the almost violent rain forest lushness of the vegetation, was the Rhododendrons! They were all over the place for the whole length of the trail, and appear to be at peak bloom. I took a few pictures.
Thursday
Doesn’t warm up very quickly in the forest, but I hang out til noonish anyway.
Reaped the benefits of yesterday’s long driving day, I had almost no driving today. Lazed at Suislaw Roasters for a long time. Got diesel. I didn’t really need it, but it’s sooooo cheap ($1.95!) and I got to wipe the bugs off my windshield. Went to the Safeway, ate my Safeway potstickers on a bluff over the river. Drove by a couple of Craigslist rentals – if I follow my plan I might be staying at these places as I escape the heat in future summers.
WHUFU page for: Windy Cove Campground
There are two separate campgrounds, Windy Cove A and B. A is the closer to civilization. B has two loops, one of those loops is no-hookups, my loop!
Very nice showers, well-mowed, easy walk to the marina, and such stores and restaurants as there are in Winchester Bay. I covered the town from one end to the other then ended up at the local bar for two beers.
Checkout time is 11AM, which just isn't right! I have dawdled till nearly noon and no one has hassled me.
tonight:
The hillbilly ghetto has unfortunately set up where I camped last time, so I am across the "cove" where their loud, drunken voices (at 5 in the afternoon) are less annoying. My impression is that this is where these people live.
The campground wifi Douglas County provides works pretty well!
The geology here is very interesting. The south side of Winchester Bay is a 60′ tall thickly vegetated wall of rock (sandstone?) that is deeply scalloped every 50-200′. Wave action?? Who knows.
So that side of the bay is a series of little coves: some campsites, a rock projection, then another, then a big one that divides the high-rent and low-rent sections of Windy B, then the biggest that goes all the way to the road and devides Windy A from Windy B. Couldn’t have been designed better for a campground … except for the chronic problem of Oregon hillbillies nestling in like a bad fungus in the dark corners of the low rent coves.
Friday
It rained pretty hard last night, and was gloomy early. But now the sun is out and the air is extra fresh. I’m feeling much better about today now.
Sitting here in the van watching the huge RVs rumble past, to and from the mega RV park on the next jetty down, enjoying the sparkling fresh air, not really minding my wet butt from the lawn chair which sat out in the downpour last night.. Oh great, here come the hillbillies. The rain apparently drove them to somewhere else last night, but they’re back, to take the tarp off their tent and start the party again. Glad I’m leaving.
Some kind of law enforcement thing going on in this part of the coast today. From this morning’s coffee place in Reedport (a strange trip in itself – along with coffee and sandwiches they have live music and sell washing machines) I could see two different sets of police lights, one north, one south. When I drove north a third unit was stationed at their speed trap spot, glaring out his window right at me … he dearly wanted a reason to f— with me. Glad I’m white and going the speed limit. Dislike the whole experience.
The reason I went north instead of south was to drop in to the Visitors Center at the north edge of town and see what they could advise me on what to do today.. I suddenly decided this morning that I didn’t want to leave the coast just yet, my plan to go inland could wait another day. So where to stay tonight? The VisCen told me of the Horsfall area. Last turnoff before you get to the bridge over mighty Coos Bay (the biggest between San Francisco and Seattle they say – Eureka/Arcata disagrees) into North Bend. I’ve looked at it with interest many times but never driven down it. Glad I did!
So, south again, through the trooper gauntlet. Still there, still cranky looking. A county car came blasting out of a side road in Winchester Bay and scared the f— out of me.
Wild Mare Campground was empty and very deluxe, but the mosquitoes were just awful. Each of the 12 sites had its own horse corral – that’s how deluxe it is! It’s in a swampy area though, so right now most of the sites were also right next to standing water.
I hadn’t really considered camping in the parking area by the beach because it’s also an OHV staging area, and who needs that s—t. But those mosquitoes made me give it a second thought. Turned out to be perfect-ish for what I wanted my day to be!
WHUFU page for: Horsfall Beach Camping
Down Horsfall Road off of 101 are OHV camps and trails, equestrian camps and trails, day use areas, and general use camps and trails.
Wild Mare Camp - set up for camping with horses - was empty and very, very nice, but the mosquitoes were just brutal, so I moved to the OHV camping at the coast, where the breeze keeps the little buggers moving. Very pleasant here.
Just a parking lot with large camping-only RV sized slots on three sides and parking for the beach on the side next to the ocean.
I've stayed here three times now, and there's always a few OHV folks. Their pleasantness or rudeness and the amount of general hubbub varies greatly.
The general rules is that the warmer and nicer it is, the more constant and unending and annoying will be the sound of unmuffled small engines.
tonight:
The huge campers with their little fleets of noisy OHVs have self-sorted to the north side, we few non-OHVers are on the south.
So it’s about 4 pm, and I’m gonna be hanging out in this parking lot the rest of the day – woo! Do this (blog) for a while, then decided to do my walk of the dayby heading back up the road to the horse camp. There is a nice looking loop hike if I can handle the mosquitoes. I can’t. It was ok as long as I was in the open, but as soon as the trees got thick enough to muffle the wind they started swarming, and that’s not how I want to spend the afternoon. Abort long walk, back to the windy but bug-free parking lot.
Next best is an exploratory walk to the crest of the levee, then back down and up to the really nice observation deck. Walking in sand requires so much effort! After that I went “home” (the other side of the parking lot) for dinner. Out at sunset to play in the waves – just a perfect vacation day.