Pacific City

Cape Kiwanda

Love this little beach town. If I were to move to Oregon, this is where I’d live. (No danger of that happening; the unpredictable threat of earthquakes and tsunamis is much scarier than the predictable threat of hurricanes. You have to prioritize your natural disasters.)

Cape Kiwanda, on the north end of the beach at Pacific City, is this cool sandstone point with an even cooler sand dune behind it. It’s approximately 500 feet tall, and people actually climb it—for fun! Think of slogging through deep sand, like at the beach, only uphill—for more than 500 feet. Three feet up, slide back down a foot, catch your breath, do it again. Slowly, meticulously, making your way up the dune. Why? We hear the views are spectacular, some of the best along the Oregon coast. Well, I’ll just have to be content with the views I’ve had, which have been pretty amazing.

The Dune

While on the beach, we watched as two people towed their fishing dories out of the surf behind their trailers. Once the dories are high and dry, they crank them up onto the trailers and away they go. Just like that. No need for a boat ramp. Now we know why fishing dories are flat on the bottom. This beach is one of the few in Oregon where you can drive vehicles on it.

pulling fishing dories out of the surf and onto trailers

There is another Haystack Rock here, making a total of three along the Oregon coast, and seven in the state. The most well-known is at Cannon Beach, farther north on the coast. But this one is the tallest, at 327 feet, making it the fourth tallest sea stack in the world. Unlike Cannon Beach’s Haystack, however, Pacific City’s is not intertidal; you can’t approach it by land, even at low tide. I don’t know. To me, that only adds to the mystique.