We spent a wonderful week in Port Orford, Oregon, a tiny town on the Oregon coast.
The entire port is right here in this photo. The boats belong to fishermen and the yellow cranes lower the boats into the water and raise them up again after night. These are day fishermen who go in and out every day so the fish they catch is very, very fresh when it goes to market.
Brandan, Becky, Helen and Gibson arrived late Monday night and we eagerly began exploring the area on Tuesday morning. Our beach house was on Coast Guard Hill. Until the 1970s, the Coast Guard manned a watch tower on this hill to keep an eye out for floundering boats.
The Coast Guard operated scruffy rescue boats like this one. The boat may not look impressive, but it is self-bailing, self-righting and capable of maneuvering in the roughest water. Boats like this saved many lives before being decommissioned in the 1980s.
This is a view of Agate Beach from the top of Coast Guard Hill. We had a view of this beach from our house and tried to find a path down the hill to the beach. Cape Blanco is the farthest point of land visible in the photo.
It turned out there is not a path. This is a photo of Helen and Gibson on Agate Beach after we made the 5 minute drive. The weather was sunny and cold.
We love this selfie Helen took with the ocean reflected in her sunglasses.
Brandan found the beautiful remains of a starfish.
And a sea urchin. The beach was also littered with agates, living up to its name.
Spring Break didn't officially begin until Thursday so Helen and Gibson brought schoolwork with them. Brandan also had several projects to work on. This was not a bad spot to work remotely.
This is a photo of Gibson joining his US History class.
Helen completed a fun science experiment where she taped her thumbs to the palms of her hands and timed herself performing difficult tasks like cutting a circle out of paper, tying her shoes and buttoning a shirt.
This is a photo of Brandan getting started on a puzzle we brought from home.
We also enjoyed playing at Battle Rock Beach which was a 5 minute drive from our house in the other direction. Becky took this photo from the top of Battle Rock and it shows Brandan driving one of Gib's RC cars on the sand below.
Abe drove up on Wednesday afternoon. He had 3 soccer games during the week and timed his visit so he would only miss one. On the bright side, he scored a goal at each of the two games he made it to.
This photo is back at Battle Rock Beach. We discovered a tunnel underneath the rock at low tide. At high tide, the tunnel is covered up with water.
And Sofi came on Thursday! Abigail and Charity generously picked her up from the airport late Wednesday night and she drove herself up in the morning. The University of Utah canceled spring break this year because of the pandemic, but Sofi snuck away for a long weekend. We were excited to be all together. She arrived on the day with the very worst weather of our trip with pelting rain and fierce wind. We visited the Cape Blanco lighthouse anyway.
Cape Blanco is the very westernmost part of the lower 48 states. Only Alaska and Hawaii are farther west. We could see the light flash from our beach house.
The wind was blowing so strongly that you could lean into the wind and it felt like the wind was holding you up.
We stopped for saltwater taffy at a gift shop. The salted caramel and marionberry flavors were delicious. The birthday cake flavor was suspicious.
Thursday night was the awards ceremony for the state DECA competition. Both Helen and Abe are on Crater High School's team. In a normal year, they would get to take a trip with their school and enjoy a fun week of competition and sightseeing. This year the event was virtual. Participants submitted their prerecorded entries about a month ago. Helen and Abe joined the awards ceremony by zoom in the kitchen while the rest of us watched a movie in the family room. We were close enough to hear and cheer whenever someone from Crater won an award. Helen won 8th overall in business service management and 6th overall in sports and entertainment. Abe won 4th place overall in quick serve restaurant management. We're proud of them for the work they accomplished and the awards they received. Helen was working on another homework assignment during the ceremony.
Helen convinced Sofi, Abe and Gibson to go night swimming in the ocean with her. Just to be clear, the ocean along the Oregon coast is not warm in the daytime. They left about 12:30 am, long after Brandan and Becky had gone to bed. Gibson stayed on the shore as a human lighthouse (phone flashlight!) so the others didn't get lost in the dark. This is a photo of them driving home with the van heater turned up to 85 degrees.
On Friday we hiked Humbug Mountain, the highest point along the Oregon coast. We think whoever determined this honor took "on the coast" very literally since you can see a higher mountain to the left in this photo. Humbug Mountain is in the center of the photo and its edge meets the ocean. It was named following an expedition in 1851 which tried bushwhacking through the dense forest, hoping to find a path across the coastal range to the gold mine country on the other side, a supposedly easy task according to their leader, Captain William Tichenor. They got turned around and ended up heading north instead of east. After several days of wandering, they reemerged on the coast. In disgust, they named the peak "Tichenor's Humbug" after the leader of their group.
We read that the hike was both 5 miles long and 3 miles long, a significant difference. Hiking the trail we realized it's a three mile loop that goes up and over the mountain, but you have to take a 1 mile out and back trail to get to the loop. It's really 5 miles. This is the end of the straight part of the trail before we chose whether to go east or west. The trail has a signpost every quarter of a mile. This seemed like overkill during our hike, but that was before we learned about the expedition that was lost on the mountains for days.
Surprisingly, there are only a few spots along the trail where you can see the ocean, even though the ocean surrounds western half of the mountain. Here are Helen and Abe at one of those rare spots. We saw even less of the ocean than we might have because of rain and fog.
The landscape was extraordinarily lush and green.
We crossed a few small streams. Or maybe we kept crossing the same stream, just like Tichenor and his men.
Almost there...
...at the top!
Here is the geological marker for the summit, placed in 1937. Humbug Mountain is 1761 feet tall.
We came up on the west trail so we decided to go back on the east trail. We enjoyed hiking through the dense coastal rain forest.
Taking a family photo on the beach was one of the items on our wish list for the week. We got a brief window of clear skies and dashed to the beach for photos. Luckily, none of us our vain enough to mind a little (or a lot?) of windblown hair.
After we finished with photos, Helen, Abe and Gib enjoyed outrunning the waves until it started raining again.
Sofi and Brandan picked up dinner from The Crazy Norwegian. They make amazing fish and chips, the best we've ever had. It helps to have fresh fish coming into town every day. Dinner was so memorable that we stopped for a photo on our way out of town. Their fish tacos and burgers were also good.
We finished our puzzle in time to pack it up and take it home. The black section on the back of the Mandalorian's neck and shoulder might have taken as long to put together as the rest of the entire puzzle.
Helen kept the midnight parties going by cooking up a batch of waffles on Friday night. By the way, Gibson is not unhappy. He just likes to copy Shawn Spencer's signature lip curl from the TV show Psych for photos.
Brandan and Abe left the coast early Saturday morning so Abe could get home for a soccer game and Brandan could attend a patient's funeral. The rest of us took the long, slow way home along highway 101, stopping for lunch at our favorite restaurant in Brookings. Port Orford is a gem among the many beautiful towns on the Oregon coast and we enjoyed our stay very much.
We dropped Sofi off at the airport on Sunday afternoon. We're so glad she got to spend a few days with us.
In other news, Abe submitted his mission application and is waiting for his mission call. Exciting times! This is the photo from his application, looking exactly like a missionary.
