Oregon’s South Coast

Day One — Cape Blanco to Coos Bay

6 min readFeb 24, 2015

This is the first piece of a series about the Oregon’s South Coast. You can read the second part here: Oregon’s South Coast (II), and the last one here: Oregon’s South Coast (III).

It had been a year and a half since we moved to Oregon and we hadn’t been to the Southern Coast yet, so we fixed that this last President’s Day weekend. A roadtrip from Coos Bay all the way down to Crescent City, California; base camp in Port Orford.

The drive to Port Orford from Portland is barely 5 hours.

The “Cabin”

I’ve said this many times, traveling in the winter has many advantages, some of them unexpected. Many places are not quite ready for tourists yet; after renting a small and cheap cabin, we ended up staying at a big house with a huge yard. For the same price!

The house was outside of Port Orford, a small town of just 1,000 people. A really really quite place. No service and no wifi, but plenty of nature. Some deer were hanging out in the backyard, and the dog had a lot of fun chasing them. That can be dangerous, but I couldn’t change her mind.

By the way, deer here are much smaller than inland. Dunno why.

The plan for the first day was to go back north up to Coos Bay. Since we didn’t have service at the house, we couldn’t plan too much (no, we don’t plan trips in advance — probably a bad idea); we just stopped by every single sign to a State Park and such.

A short one, just 3 hours round trip. And a really gorgeous day to be February.

Cape Blanco

As the name suggests, this cape was named by a Spanish explorer in 1600. It’s supposed to be called that way because of the color of the headland, but I couldn’t tell why this cape looked “whiter” than others to that explorer.

Anyway, the cape has a 120-year-old lighthouse, a couple of beaches and trails.

We found a lonely seal on the beach. Exciting at the beginning, but turned out sad. The poor thing seemed to be dying. Still with enough strength to growl at the dog though.

Floras Lake

Next to Cape Blanco, Floras Lake State Park. A pretty cool entrance to the park, green everywhere and full of cows and sheeps. After that, a lake with a few houses and people kayaking, and finally a huge and empty beach.

Coos Bay

We got to Coos Bay kind of late, so we didn’t spend too much time in this city. Oh well, town, with less than 16,000 people. Some pretty cool buildings and breweries are pretty tempting for another visit, plus the fact that this city is a must-go if you want to watch whales. It’s supposed to be one of the best places in Oregon to see the Gray Whales (actually we saw 3 whales further south, but they were so far we couldn’t tell what they were).

Oh well, a place we’ll have to check out another time.

Bandon

We didn’t have too much time in Coos Bay because we wanted to watch the sunset in Bandon, a little bit further south. Bandon’s beach is just awesome, and the sunset didn’t disappoint.

A pretty cool town of just 3,000 people.