9/17/2007 – Cascade Head Hike

This past Saturday I had the priviledge of hanging out with two of my friends from church, Sam and Elyssia. Sam had suggested a hike on the coast near Lincoln City that he and a friend had done maybe six years ago. So, I met up with Elyssia at Lloyd Center and we drove out to McMinnville where we met up with Sam at the Evergreen Aviation Museum. (Just as a side note, I’ve never actually been in there but it looks like it would definitely be worth a trip sometime). We left my car somewhere near there and took Sam’s car out to the trailhead. It ended up that we couldn’t find the trail Sam originally had in mind, but we still had a great time exploring and checking out the awesome views of a much more accessible easy hike.

The directions we had told us to take Forest Service Road 1861 off 101, just a few miles north of Hwy 18 and to follow that until it hit a dead end. Well, there was an unmarked fork in the road, so we opted first for the right fork, which seemed to head in the direction Sam remembered. And before we could reach a dead end, there was a large tree down over the road. So, we turned back and checked out the other path. On that one we drove by a well established trailhead and continued on until that road dead-ended. There we talked to some other hikers and found that from there you could hike down to near the ocean level–not the hike Sam did before, which went up to a high viewpoint. So, after some deliberation we decided to try the blocked off road again. We parked before the fallen tree and walked to the dead end, where we tried to find the remnants of Sam’s long lost trail. We ended up finding some sort of trail (perhaps a deer trail) and followed it for a while, until we heard the sound of a car passing by depressingly close. It turns out that our deertrail was now paralleling the road only about twenty feet away! Sam tunneled through the thick brush that hid it from us and sure enough, the road. We had a good laugh about that, took some victorious photos and walked back to the car along the road. So, at that point we gave up on the original trail we were hoping to go on and decided to check out one of the two options we saw on the left fork.

The established trailhead we had seen was one maintained by an organization called The Nature Conservancy. I believe at least part of the land we hiked through was private land that this organization had purchased in order to protect it. The trail was really nice and yet not overly developed-looking. We hiked maybe a mile in to the high viewpoint where we had some amazing views up and down the coast. We decided to stop there and brave the “hazardous cliffs” as our lunch spot. Sam and Elyssia graciously shared some of their lunches with me as I hadn’t thought that far ahead this time. After we ate we hiked back to the car, refreshingly not tired, and headed back into town. We decided to get dinner and had some tasty Thai food together followed by dessert at Sam’s place. He had recently bought an amazing new home CD player and flat speakers almost as tall as me that blew me away with their sound. We hung out there and listened to music and talked until almost midnight. It was a really fun day and really nice to get to know Sam and Elyssia a little better. Lord willing, Sam and I will be doing some more hiking this coming weekend.

Click here to see some of the rest of the photos from the trip. Thanks for reading. :)