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| Dead Man's Cove |
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| A Bald Eagle at Cape Disappointment |
A friend in our homeschool group generously invited the other families to visit their beach house, and we were really excited to check out this spectacular area. Jasper spent a lot of time just playing with his friends and wandering the beach in search of seashells, but I did return with a few pictures to share.
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| North Head Lighthouse |
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| Jasper was amazed by the Bull Kelp. |
We went to Cape Disappointment, which was named by Captain John Meares, when he missed crossing the Columbia River Bar and ended up there instead. The bar is a treacherous place where the Columbia opens into the ocean, and is still notoriously difficult to navigate. (These days ships can hire a bar pilot to arrive via helicopter and assist with the maneuvers). The very first lighthouse in the Pacific Northwest, and the oldest still working on the West Coast, is the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse. We discovered that the Coast Guard still maintains an observation point there. This lighthouse cannot be seen from the north, so the North Head Lighthouse was built nearby. There is a fascinating museum at Cape Disappointment, the
Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, which tells the story of their epic journey and their arrival at long last at the Pacific Ocean.
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| Checking out the bunkbeds at Fort Clatsop. |
We visited
Fort Clatsop to see the reconstructed fort where the Lewis and Clark Expedition lived during the winter of 1805-06. They took only two weeks to build the original fort. In stark contrast to Fort Vancouver, so few traces of the original fort remained that archaeologists are uncertain exactly where it was. Nevertheless, the reconstruction was really amazing to see, and the museum has many cool things to look at.
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| From inside the Power Room at Ft. Columbia |
We also had a chance to visit
Fort Columbia, which was built between 1896 and 1904, and the original buildings are still there. This is a lovely spot to explore.
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| Fort Columbia |
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| The beautiful Washington Coast. |
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| The breathtaking Astoria-Megler bridge, the longest continuous truss bridge in North America. |
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