Second Beach
After a walk through the woods and another mile or so down the beach, you can’t go any further — the cliff and stacks of Teahwhit Head are impassable even at low tide. Waves crash onto the rocks here, stirring up the sea in a confusion of surf and foam. Gulls circle and dive into the breaking waves to snatch up small invertebrates floating there.
This day was showery, with tall banks of clouds. Tide was near low, otherwise we couldn’t get even this close to the headland.
Somehow the water is swirling in many directions among the the stacks. Gulls circle and dive.
First Beach
Between headlands, waves break with less energy, except where they encounter rocks or big hunks of driftwood. Along the middle of First Beach, the Big Log is a barrier that surf breaks over at high tide, with foamy swash circling around behind where crows and gulls pick at whatever gets washed in.
We stay at a cabin on First Beach, which is part of the Quileute Indian Reservation. We’re too old and creaky to backpack out onto the beaches north and south to camp anymore. So thankful the Quileutes continue to maintain these wonderful cabins, especially when it’s pouring rain for days!
This day showery bands of billowing clouds swept onshore, providing intermittent sunbreaks. I took these pics at high tide this morning during a short interval between showers.
Rialto Beach
In the afternoon of this same day, we went north across the Quillayute River to walk Rialto beach after the tide began to recede. There’s a stretch of giant driftwood not far from the parking lot that is impossible to round until medium high tide at the very least. You risk your life — no joke — if you try to run around it between waves. Even typical high tide waves will sweep you down the beach and out to sea into steeply deep water where surf boils and crushes you. Bushwhacking inland is usually impassable too, and was certainly this time, the spruce/salal forest flooded with recent heavy rainfall. We take tides and tide tables seriously…. waited until it was low enough to walk. On the way back, the tide had ebbed a few feet more, and it was a piece of cake walking the wide black gravelly beach.
We stood here for a long time watching one gull foraging on the two rocks in the surf zone. As a tide ebbs, fresh critters become accessible on the mussel beds there. But no matter how random and chaotic the surf here, the gull never gets caught by a wave breaking on the rocks.
How does the gull know exactly when to jump up? The waves arrive at irregular intervals with varying size, speed and direction. There’s abstract thinking going on there, in this creature we think of as simple and “bird-brained.”
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