Serendipitous discovery

It occurred to me when I got home still hankering a bit for the camping life that I live in a pretty good tourist area that a lot of people drive a long way to visit and that I really could and should take full advantage of that, so I planned and took several excursions that are ready to be blogged, with pictures.

But the one I want to blog about today is the unplanned one.  Or only semi-planned, anyway.  

In the interest of discovering more of what’s nearby, I downloaded a new map app (Topo Maps) that does more than I probably need or quite know what to do with.  As with any new toy, I then itched to try it out.  One of the things it has is trails marked on it for which you can select and get length and elevation information, so I looked for and found some around here.  The first one I tried turned out to be a dirt road on posted land, but there was a hike nearby that CJ and I took instead (a story for another day).  Yesterday I set out to check out another, south of Bandon.  Stopped in Bandon to check out the cheeses at Face Rock Creamery to see if they’d be a viable alternative to Tillamook cheese (nope), then had lunch in Old Town (fish and chips, pretty good).  Was early for lunch, so CJ and I walked down towards the lighthouse to kill time, and got this view for our reward.

After lunch, I set up the phone for directions to the possible trail, and headed south.  Nearly there, I spotted one of those nice brown signs that included the hiker icon, and made a fast decision to check it out.  Turned out to be the best decision I’ve made in awhile.  Not that I’ve been making bad decisions lately, but you get what I mean.  It was further off 101 than I anticipated, but you drive past several cranberry bogs, which are pretty this time of year, so that was no hardship.  And at the end you arrive at the New River Nature Center.  Which, it turns out, has several very walkable trails of excellent length and difficulty level (read: easy) for senior citizens like me.

Tried the North Trail first, which shortly connects to the Ridge trail, which makes a long skinny loop (see the top trail in blue below.  The parking lot is where the road coming in meets the blue trail lines.)

Not far up the trail, this inspired me to get out the phone for pictures.

One of the biggest mushrooms, or fungi anyway, I’ve ever seen (though I understand theres’s a true monster over in the Malheur forest called the Humungous Fungus that’s one of the largest living things in the world.  That may require an excursion of its own someday.)

Saw more fungi later, some pretty red ones

And some white ones that looked like they might have been edible, though I woudn’t bet my life on it.

The trail runs through mixed forest (nice for walking on the Oregon coast, which more often than not gets a lot of wind), including a fair amount of tall, very healthy looking manzanita.

I love manzanita.  Many of the walks in California I used to do with the dogs included manzanita, though usually not as tall as that (I think they deliberately cut back the big stuff for fire control.  There was one huge, beautiful stand of it that for whatever reason they tore out entirely. 😢). I didn’t even know it grew this far north, so I was thrilled to see it.  Here’s another shot.

There was also some cedar in the mix.

The park service, or whoever runs the place, has done a very nice job with it.  Trails are well-marked, and there are several benches placed strategically around them.  This one is at the intersection of the Ridge Trail with (I think) the Huckleberry Trail.  At this point, I decided to head back to the parking lot to put on better shoes for walking on sandy trails.

Thus equipped, we headed down River Roadoad toward the boat ramp (see the map above).  The boat ramp is at the first spur on the left of that blue loop.  It turned out to be further than I though based on maps, but very doable.

There are a couple of trails taking off to the left of the road on your way down that I want to get back to explore.  This one is labeled as Accessible, so might work for my scooting relatives—I checked it out a short distance, and it looked good as far as I went, which wasn’t far.

Turns out there’s another parking lot/day use areadown bnear the boat ramp.  Also equipped with a rest room.

The New River, according to the map, comes out to the coast down by Floras Lake and then turns and runs north for several miles along the coast just inside a set of dunes.  I walked down to the boat ramp to see what I could see, and what I saw was a river, much wider than I anticipated, with the ocean way in the background.  You can’t see ocean in this picture—that’s all river, looking south— but just wait.

Debated whether to head back up the road or go around by trail—trail won.  This one is called the Ocean View trail, which . . . well, maybe is fair, because there are a few places where you can see the ocean, but mostly it too goes through forest.

However, a short way down the trail you come to the Ocean View Spur (top spur on above map), which is worth the short detour.  There’s another strategically-placed bench

And views worth dwelling on.  Here you see the full effect of the river between you and the ocean.

About here is when I started wishing I had the camera with me.  One of the things I thought was cool was the whitecaps being kicked up by the wind out on the ocean in contrast to the relative calm of the river water, but the phone didn’t do a very good job of capturing that.  I tried zooming. . .

But it’s not a lot better.

Here’s the river from there, heading north.

The next stretch of trail was the most strenuous, thanks to soft sand and some uphill bits, sometimes both together.

Thanks to the soft sand, there were also a BUNCH of deer tracks.

They all seemed relatively small to me, which made me wonder if that batch of coastal deer have evolved to be smaller, but I’m no expert on deer, so who knows.

Got up to a ridge with peek-a-boo views of the ocean

And eventually got to a clear place with a bench from which the following were taken, both zoomed.

Because of the clearing, the wind was honking along there, enough that one did not care to turn and face it because of sand being whipped into one’s face.

From there it was a relatively short hop back to the car, partly along the first trail we had done.  Total distance walked, approximately 2.7 miles.

This had been such a lovely discovery and experience that I debated whether to return to the original goal of checking out the trail identified by Topo Maps, but it was only a couple of miles further on so decided it would be stupid not to.  However, sure enough, this is what was there:

Looks like a lovely walk, but—private and posted.  That’s two for two for the “trails” they’ve identified around here.  I need to email them with questions.  What looked at first to be a seriously cool feature is now looking like at least a partial bust.