Haystack Rock

The rock looks as if it grew out of the coast, and in a sense it came from hundreds of miles inland. Between about fifteen and seventeen million years ago the Columbia River flood basalts poured out of fissures in what is now eastern Oregon and Washington, and some of the flows followed the old course of the Columbia all the way to the sea, burrowing into the soft marine sediments along the shore. The lava hardened underground. Uplift and the waves stripped the sediment away and left the hard basalt standing; Haystack Rock, Tillamook Head, Arch Cape and Saddle Mountain are all pieces of the same flows.

At low tide you can walk to its base across one of Oregon's marine gardens, where tide pools fill the rocks and climbing and collecting are banned. Everything above the high-tide line belongs to the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge. From April into August tufted puffins nest in burrows on the grassy upper slopes, one of the few places on this coast to see them from shore, alongside murres, guillemots and cormorants. Volunteers of the Haystack Rock Awareness Program, begun in 1985, the last summer cars were allowed to drive the beach, set up at low tide from February into October.

The town's name came in from the sea too. The Navy schooner Shark wrecked on the Columbia bar in September 1846, and that fall Tillamook people sent word to its officers that part of the hull, with guns on it, had come ashore south of Tillamook Head. One of the guns, buried and uncovered by the sand for decades, named the beach, and the town of Elk Creek took the name in 1922 at the Post Office's insistence. The gun is in the Cannon Beach History Center and Museum; two more turned up at Arch Cape in 2008.