Tahkenitch Dunes Hike

You never know when it will be a good week to spend on the beach in the winter. Mostly it is cold and rainy. But sometimes the sun comes out and shines and makes things very pleasant.  I have been really lucky in the past and I find myself with even better luck this week. We are staying on the Southern Oregon Coast for a few days and the weather has been fabulous. Clear, a little cold, but very sunny. 

As part of our desire to do new hikes we have picked the Tahkenitch Dunes for our efforts. 

Ever been to the Oregon Dunes? They are huge areas of tall dunes that, since you really can’t build on them or mine them or cut trees down from them, have been set aside as National and State parks and recreational areas. They are really quite beautiful and imposing, with the large (moving) mountains of sand rising seemingly out of the sea and pushing like slow moving giants across the landscape. 

The trail we have picked for today is a loop made out of a couple of intersecting trails. We will park at the Tahkenitch Dunes campground and hike the Tahkenitch Dunes Trail pretty much straight to the Ocean (2 miles). Then we will hike along the shore for a mile until we interesect with 3-mile lake trail which we will follow the  3 miles back to the trail head. Though that all adds up to 6 miles, because of rounding and switchbacks I think it ended up being more like 7 miles. 

Sallal Tunnels

I really liked this hike because, though somewhat difficult, it was a interesting melange of intersecting biomes. When we first started, we were in a young doug fir forest, the earth was a loam and sand mix and the understory was very thick with huckleberry and salal, both growing in tall bushes that overhung the trail and made it a bit like hiking through a tunnel. The Tahkenitch Dune trail branches off the main and heads straight for the beach. As we wend through the tunnels I can see something tall through the branches off to our left. We are working our way around it, however, and don’t have to do much climbing before we get to the dunes. 

Coming on the dunes is very sudden. The trail skits a sunken swampy area, turns a corner, and then there before and below you is the bright sand of the rolling dunes. Down a little more of the trail and the woods end suddenly in a steep downward embankment of sand. The trail guide warned that the dunes are a moving thing and the trails across them may be hard to find. They are marked with 10 foot high round wood poles with a blue stripe on top. Be looking for those but don’t be too surprised if you can’t find them. Today, the trail has not wandered much and we can see some footprints through the sand that stretch off across this set of dunes to a trail entrance on some forests that we see over toward the ocean. Oh yes, we can also see, and hear, the ocean. Just over there, a mile or so. 

Dunes

People lost in the dunes often leave a trail of 
extra garments to try and find their way home

It is significantly harder to walk across the soft moving sand of the dunes than the firm pine needle base of the rest of the trail. Your feet sink in a bit and if you are going up hill, you always slide down half a step for every step you take. The hills can also be quite steep and switchback trails are not employed on the dunes themselves. I am not sure why but I assume it is because they would just collapse down upon themselves. Going toward the ocean isn’t that hard, however, because that is mainly  downhill. 

Scrub Pines in Sand

After a few hundred yards of moderate slugging we get to our third different set of plant life. Here we have the scrub pins that grow out of the flat sand in a lower area that has signs of frequent flooding; perhaps a seasonal shallow lake or bog. The walking here is easy, but we have lost sight of the sea. You can still hear it, especially when a big wave booms somewhere along the beach. We now crest a little rise and can see the beach sand and the Tahkenitch creek flowing through the shore dunes and blocking our direct path to the ocean. There is a crossroads with a sign indicating that the Tahkenitch Creek Trail is joining with our Dune Trail. We now turn left and the trail follows the creek south for a while. 

Another crossroads. Now you have a choice of going out to the beach for a hike or turning inland a bit and hiking across the Dunes directly for a mile or so. Both ways leave you the oppoortunity of joining up with the 3 mile lake trail. I think it is just random chance that the 3 mile lake trail is listed as being 3 miles long.

And what is with all of the places in this area that are named after distances? 3 mile lake. 10 mile lake. 6 mile creek. I asked a local (Ok, my sister) and not only did she not know, but she hadn’t really noticed the names and assumed I was just keying into some unrelated random event (Oh, like I would do that). But I pointed some of them out to her  on a little road trip (Along with a large number of blue cars) and she is now a believer. Deep and meaningful research on the internets revealed no obvious solution to this conundrum so I have created my own. I think it has to do with logging and logging train tracks. I think these things are all distances of train track back to the central town or facility. One would leave from the town and go out ‘To that Lake at mile 3 of the tracks’ to cut down trees. Train tracks always have the big mile markers on them, you know. And there you have it: Science at Work !!

Tahkenitch Creek and Beach

Where were we? Oh yes, we had decided to follow the trail to the beach, which to my surprise was still another quarter of a mile away, as we still had to get around the mouth of the Tahkenitch creek and a also pass a little headland at the creek mouth. Once to the sand we stopped and sat down on a nice grey sun and sea weathered log and have a little rest and a snack. The sun was hiding and the fall ocean wind had a bit of a bite to it so we pulled an extra layer out of our packs and sat and enjoyed our Fig Bar and the ocean waves.

A lot of the coastline of Oregon is accessible to motor traffic and you will often see vehicles driving across the firmer sand closer to the water at low tide. Today we saw a little 4 wheel vehicle in the distance coming in from the north, but it was stopped by the creek flowing to the ocean.  As we walked South along the shore, we eventually came to a sign in the sand that said driving north passed the sign was prohibited. There were some wheel tracks there. 

Beach Grass and Trail/Mile Marker

A mile of hiking along the beach brought us to the trailhead that exited through the rising sand on our left. Along the Oregon Coast, shore access points are usually marked with large yellow signs with mile markers on them. These help you find your way back to your vehicle but also server as reference points for calling for help (‘We have a person floating out to see at marker 137’).  Here we turn away from the sea and hike through a section of dune grass common along the shore. This is our fourth different environment area. 

What I was expecting, at this point, is that we would reverse back through each of the ecosystems that we had traversed through on our way out. The scrub pines, the dunes, the tunnels of salal. I was almost right. 

We did go through the (now dry) boggy areas and then we got a chance to slug through the dunes again. This time the slugging was bit harder. There were more up and down to the dunes and the up parts were steep and slow. My partner said she was walking behind me and stepping in my steps as that was easier. It reminded her of being a little girl and stepping in her fathers steps when out walking in the snow. 

Now we did one last slow clump up a big dune and we came to a firm footing in pine covered high dunes with a little sign indicating which way to go to the ocean or to the campground (where our car sits). This is the 3 Mile Lake Trail (or perhaps the Three Mile Lake Trail). But where, wonders my Partner, is 3 mile lake? (or perhaps, Three Mile Lake). Well….. what is that over there? We walk along the top of the dunes for about 50 feet and we come suddenly to a very steep slide. It goes down 80 feet or so of losely held sand right into the water of a tall pine-lined lake.  3 Mile Lake!! (Three Mile Lake !!)

Three Mile Lake!!

This is a good example of how the lakes along this area must have been formed. There is a creek running out of the mountains and the sand gets pushed up against them from the shore by wind and storm and these big dunes dam up the creek and make these little, but often long, fresh water lakes that parallel the shore a mile or so away. And the Dunes are so tall. How do they get so tall? Why don’t they spread out and flow into these lakes and drown them in sand? Please leave your answer as a comment at the end of this blog. 

After our view of the lake, we followed the sign toward the Tahkenitch camp site. We are now on the 3 mile lake trail heading toward our car. This trail is listed, variously, as 3 miles, 3 and a quarter miles, and 3 and a half miles. I think it depends on which direction you are going. But that is besides the point. The point is that I was expecting a sort of easy downward trail back through the salal tunnels to the car. What I got, however, was a steadily upward set of switchbacks through yet another biome. This time we were hiking through a traditional Oregon Coastal forest of giant sitka and sword fern. We are not on a sand based hill either, this is a good old fashioned dirt and rock mountain going up 700 or 800 feet. I can see it climbing. We also have to go up a little gorge valley to get around 3 mile lake and its little feeder creek. We eventually hit a bridge, but then we have to switch back up the hill again. This is much harder and longer than I was expecting. When you come to unexpected obstacles in your path, they seem to take a lot more out of you than expected obstacles. So it was with this hill. Which just seemed to go on and on. Where did this hill come from? We didn’t pass it on the way to the beach. Did it sneak in here when we were eating our snack, with our backs turned? None of these answers is very satisfying. I suspect ancient Aliens. 

Sitka and Fern Forest

Anyway, climb up the hill through the really beautiful forest. Large Sitka but NOT old growth. You can see the old growth off through the woods encrusted in fern and huckleberry. Century old sawed off tree trunks 4 times the girth of the existing living giants. The sign back a the trailhead explains that this area was ‘harvested’ around 1910. That means that big sitka that we are looking at are around a hundred years old. How old does that make the trees that were cut to make those huge stumps? Half a millenia?

We finally come to a spot which I think of as the top of this range. There is a little bench seat built there and we have a view looking west at a patch of dunes and the creek winding through the sand to the ocean. A good spot. We sit down and eat the rest of our lunch. We are now hiking down, we have about 1.5 miles to the car. 

We have one more interesting thing to run into. We are heading down this steep straight section of trail and below us we can… sand. A sand dune is at the bottom of the hill, it intersects the trail and extends up and up and up. Wow that is a big hill of sand. We get to the bottom and the well walked trail ends in the sand. There are trails in the sand going in a couple of directions and we choose the most likely one. We are now walking along the side of the dune as it pushes out into the forest on a steep forested slope. It is pretty clear that the old trail used to be here and the sand has flowed in during the last 5 or 10 years (or perhaps last year) and overrun the trees and trail. There are some big sitka that appear to have 10 or 20 feet of sand covering over their roots. We walk up in their low branches. This encroaching dune extends perhaps 100 yards across the trail and then, just as suddenly as it began, it is gone and we are back on the dirt and leaf trail. A little more hiking and we leave the Sitka and are back in the pine and salal tunnel area of the start of the hike and, sun of a gun, there is the intersection with the Dune trail and just 10 more minutes and we are back to our car. 

So,  think I counted 6 different eco-sytem biome thingees:

1) Pine and Salal tunnels

2) Dunes

3) Sandy Scrub Pine area

4) Beach

5) Beach Dune Grass

6) Sitka semi-old growth forest.

A very visually stimulating and diverse hiking experience.