Ruby Beach

A short trail drops from the highway through spruce to a beach where Cedar Creek fans out across the sand, driftwood logs are stacked at the tide line, and sea stacks stand in the surf, Abbey Island the largest of them. At low tide the rocks hold anemones and sea stars. It is one of the few places on the Olympic coast where US-101 comes close enough to the ocean to walk down to it.

Offshore, about three and a half miles out, is Destruction Island, flat-topped, with a lighthouse first lit on January 1, 1892. Its name carries two encounters on this coast, both recorded only by the ships. In July 1775 the Spanish schooner Sonora, under Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, sent seven men ashore for wood and water, near what is now Point Grenville on the Quinault coast to the south, and all seven were killed; Bodega named the island Isla de Dolores, the island of sorrows. In 1787 the fur trader Charles Barkley of the Imperial Eagle sent a boat's crew up the river just north of here, and they did not come back. Barkley called it Destruction River. Later chart-makers moved his name out to the island, and the river took back the name of the people who lived on it, the Hoh.

What the Quinault and the Hoh made of those landings, and why they ended as they did, is nowhere on the charts; the names keep the sailors' grief and nothing else. The beach belongs to Olympic National Park, and the Hoh reservation sits at the river mouth a few miles north.