You would think that, having spent the day driving down from Seattle, climbing to the tip-top of the Astoria Column for a panoramic look at the geology around the mouth of the Columbia River, exploring Ecola State Park, and wandering about Hug Point’s geology both north and south until the tide chased us away, I’d be sleeping in a bit the next day.

You would be wrong.

I popped wide awake just around five in the morning.  Now, I could’ve tried to go back to sleep, or read a bit, but there was this ocean less than a mile away.  So out of bed I bounced, and promptly found out that the parking lots for the beaches don’t open until 6 in the ay-em.

Bugger.

What to do but drive about aimlessly, and run into the reason why Lincoln City bears its name?

Lincoln Statue

Lincoln’s actually the reason why Lincoln City’s called Lincoln City, because the city’s named after Lincoln County, and Lincoln County got its name from none other than Abraham Lincoln.  And the city shall always be called Lincoln City because of this statue.  The artist, Anna Hyatt Huntington, made that one of her conditions when she gave it to the city.

I’ve always liked Lincoln, ever since I was a wee little girl.  I liked him before I found out all that stuff about him being a great leader and freeing slaves and so forth.  I liked him because of this:

Abraham Lincoln: The Marine Layer Stops Here

He always had his nose in a book.  Would do anything to get his hands on a book.  Read anywhere and everywhere.  “Abraham Lincoln did it, too!” is a powerful argument in defense of one’s obsessive reading habits.  Those weird enough to prefer the Midwest over the West can call upon Lincoln for backup, too: the little plaque on this statue mentions that he could’ve been the governor of Oregon Territory, but he politely told those offering the position to stuff it. 

Now, you may be thinking, “But what about the beach?!”  Well, we’ve actually been standing on it this whole time. 

Dig beneath the concrete, pavements, buildings, and landscaping, and you’ll find Pleistocene sand and dunes.  Dig far enough, and you’ll hit Tertiary mudstones.  And that tells a story of tectonic uplift that spans hundreds of thousands of years, while the sea level bobbed and dipped in response to the waxing and waning of ice ages.  During the Pleistocene, the sea level sometimes rose higher than it is today.  Waves eroded nice, flat beaches on ye olde Tertiary bedrock, carving wave-cut platforms.  Higher seas deposited sand all over the nice new platform.  Wind picked up sand and busily built dunes.  Then, glaciers (and the land) rose, seas fell, and a lovely flat marine terrace got left behind, while the sea busily went to work carving a new wave-cut platform and created a new beach at the feet of the old.

Bluffs and Beach

And it’s finally 6 in the ay-em, so we can head to the current beach rather than the fossil one.  Here we are at the “D” River Beach Wayside, where we can discuss a hell of a lot of geology in one short space, while the sun rises behind us.

Note those sea cliffs to the left.  They get up to more than a hundred feet high, and if you wander over for a closer inspection, you’ll see they’re composed of terrace sandstone, topped with a dollop of dune sand.  Near-vertical, bald bluffs get carved into those (geologically) young Pleistocene sediments by waves, stress-release fracturing, rainfall, groundwater seepage, and graffiti.  Indeed, graffiti.  That is, in fact, the main reason for the bluffs’ retreat inland: people carve crap into the cliffs, kids dig caves, and the next thing you know, the cliff face is weakened enough to fall down and go boom.  Hard to believe, innit?  But you might want to mention to anyone you see out carving away that the homeowners up top might get very annoyed when their house follows the falling bits down onto the beach.

Let’s have a look at this beach, because it’s an interesting feature.  It’s what’s known as a dissipative beach, and you’ll see why in this photo:

Marching Waves

Stand here for a few moments and watch the waves hurtle up the broad, barely-sloped beach.  Watch them lined up along the entire length, which by Oregon standards goes on forever.  By the time they make it partway up the beach, they’re exhausted.  The most they can do on a normal day is merely nibble the toes of the bluffs, if even that; in fact, conditions are generally mild enough that talus accumulates at the base of the cliffs, sometimes lounging on the beach for years.  During severe storms coupled with a high tide, when waves can be dozens of feet high (and one wave on one memorable occasion measured 95ft, nearly as tall as the tallest cliff), the talus gets swept out.  Even then, waves don’t mount a direct assault on the cliffs, and never does manage to undercut them.  For a while, though, bits fall off the cliffs at a higher rate, until a new respectable pile of talus builds up.

Those winter storms, incidentally, don’t remove just talus.  The whole beach goes away, revealing the silt-and-sandstones of the Nestucca Formation.  For a while, you can wander about on Eocene bedrock, until the sand comes swooshing back.

And you know what’s really wild?  Might as well never have happened at all.  Sand sweeps up the beach in one direction in summer and in another during the winter.  It gets poked, prodded, rolled and razzed by the waves.  And yet the net littoral drift of all that harassed sand is a big fat 0.  Zero.  Nada.

Look north for the reason:

Headed Off at the Headland

Ah, yes, our old friends the rocky headlands!  We’re in the shadow of the Columbia River Basalts even here, where you’re surrounded by sand and sedimentary stone.  You see, those lovely hard volcanic headlands have nosed their way into deep enough water, and there are sufficiently many of them all up and down the coast, that they’ve formed pocket beaches nearly the entire length of Oregon.  Some of those pocket beaches are long, like the one at Lincoln City, and some are tiny, but they’re all little kingdoms unto themselves.  Oregon’s sand is not allowed to flee.  Not for long, anyway.

Have a look at the fine sand here:

You’ve got your basic quartz and feldspar, and a few minerals that tell us a lot of this sand eroded from the Klamath Mountains, along with bits from the Coast Ranges and suchlike.  The really neat thing about this is, the sand here isn’t the same as sand elsewhere on the Oregon coast.  Those little pocket beaches jealously guard their sources.  On some beaches, you’ll find sands eroded from the local headlands, some more long distance; some coarse, some fine.  The coarse stuff especially, which erodes from the sea cliffs, doesn’t seem to have got much of a look-in before about 300 years ago, when the enormous subduction zone earthquake that sent a tsunami to Japan lowered bits of the Oregon coast and thus led to some pretty vigorous sea cliff erosion action.  Neat, eh?

The time has come to reveal why this is the “D” River Beach Wayside:

A River Runs Through It

The time has come to introduce you to the D River, which has been claimed by some as the world’s shortest river.  There’s even a sign that says so, so it must be true.

Evidence

Here it is very nearly in its entirety:

D River East

D River Central

D River West

D River and the Sea

Long View of a Short River

There was a time when it was known simply as “the outlet,” before a contest decided that the world’s shortest river deserved the world’s shortest name.  And an outlet is about all it is – the thing’s only 440 feet long at low tide.  When you get a very high tide, the river’s down to 120 feet.  And yet, it’s wider than some rivers in Arizona, and certainly has more water in it.

That water does fascinating things there on the beach.

Bouncy Water

It moves along pretty quickly, for all there’s not much slope.  As it plays around with the beach sand, it seems to create its own little jumps, which it then leaps joyously over.  The water gets so excited in places it froths:

Foamy!

You can see river gravel in its bed:

River Rocks on an Ocean Beach

 Which the ocean waves sometimes filch, and then run up the beach:

Wave-Bothered Gravel

You can sit and watch the river erode a bank into the beach:

Erosion in an Instant

And see some very entertaining erosional forms:

Making Tracks

This is a river that seems to live life from concentrate.  It may be the shortest river in the world, but it’s certainly not the dullest.

So where the hell is this very short river coming from, you might wonder.  There’s this lake, you see, formed in uplifted marine sediments about 14,000 years ago.

Devil’s Lake

It’s 680 acres, a third of a mile wide, three miles long, and (drumroll, please) all of 21 feet deep.  But it nestles between the Coast Range foothills and the coast like the liquid equivalent of a Montana sapphire.

Sapphires and Emeralds

Its watershed covers all of 12.1 square miles.  And its outlet is none other than the D River.  Neat!

These images were taken at Regatta Park, where the bastards were getting ready to have a bloody regatta, which meant I had to take my shots quick and get out.  No time to linger.  But that gave me time to find a truly fine exposure of the Pleistocene dune and beach sands on NE Devil’s Lake Road:

Layer Sandcake

Someday, if nothing untoward happens to it like, oh, say, getting completely eroded away, this old beach deposit may end up becoming sandstone, and some future geologist will be cooing over its bedding:

Streaks and Stripes

And because I can’t resist, here’s just one more:

I Think the Biology Is Jealous

With that, it was time to return to the hotel, where my intrepid companion was probably awake and wondering WTF I was out doing.  We’d soon be on our way to hook up with Suzanne in Netarts Bay on our way to Cape Meares, but as you’ll soon see, we got waylaid by Cape Kiwanda and one of the most fascinating sandstone headlands on the entire Oregon coast.

We’ve had an eventful first day in Oregon so far.  We saw the mouth of the mighty Columbia River at Astoria; watched the Columbia River Basalts plunge into the sea at Ecola State Park; and done a bit of desultory spelunking at the north side of Hug Point.  The sun’s getting ready to sink into the sea past shattered sea stacks of brecciated basalt.

Grande Ronde Silhouette

And if we don’t get our arses round Austin Point and back before high tide, we’re going to be hugging something other than geology soon.  It’s a mad scramble through a tangle of biology up to Highway 101 if you get stranded on the beach.  So let’s get a move on.

The character of the place changes a bit down here.  And it’s a good place to talk about basalt.

First off, if one’s just taking a casual look round, it’s easy to be deceived.  What with all these dikes, stringers, sills, and so forth, it’s easy to think that these basalts are natives.  In fact, for a while, that’s just what geologists thought.  The source didn’t seem like it could be too far from here.  After all, the way the Columbia River Basalts insinuated themselves into the local strata, it looked just like they’d arrived from below.

However, that’s not what gravity and chemistry tells us.

A Finger o’ Basalt

Check this dude out.  If he were a local, he’d be rooted pretty far down, thousands of feet in fact.  But gravity studies revealed that all that lovely, solid basalt stops just a few hundred feet beneath the surface.  Weird, inexplicable – until you look east, and realize there’s a whole big plateau of this stuff covering appreciable parts of Oregon and Washington.  But most of the basalt flows we’re used to travel only so far and then peter out: a mile, a dozen, sometimes a hundred.  But nearly half a thousand?  Read some of the old scientific papers on this area, and you’ll see that geologists struggled with the idea.

But then came chemistry.  And chemical analysis said, “Yup, that’s sure Columbia River Basalt, that is.  Eye-din-tee-cull.”  It boggles the mind – we’ve had zero experience with state-spanning flows of flood basalts in recent history.  If I’m remembering rightly, humans in historical time never have witnessed such a thing.  But it happened here.

Down here to the south, the Grande Ronde looms more.  And it’s a mass of fractures and fragments, welded together.

Scarface

Make sure at some point to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the point and look out to sea.  It’s a wild and wonderful view.

Rampart

Clamber over the riot of rocks, basalt rising up on both sides of you.  Once you’re through the gap between head and stack, you’ll suddenly emerge from igneous to sedimentary again.

Dipping Down

If you’re looking at those layers and thinking, “Hmm, tilty,” you’re not wrong – they’ve got a pronounced dip.  Why this is, I have not yet discovered, but I imagine it has quite a bit to do with hanging about on the edge of a subduction zone.

Sandstone Slope

Notice the basalt stack right to the right of it, there?  That’s remnants of a big dike of Grande Ronde basalt that sheared off the Astoria Formation, and now protects it from the worst of the waves.

Down near the tide line, when you can find bits that aren’t all covered in crunchy-coated biology, you can see just how smooth and slick basalt can become when polished by sand-laden waves.

Scoured Basalt

The spaces between the sea stacks and the headland form channels, and so we end up with these lovely smooth bits that look like they’ve been scoured out by a river.  See how fractured and fragmented it is, even polished?  When the basalt hit the coast and plunged into the cold Pacific waters, it cooled rapidly enough to shatter.  In places, it actually boiled the water, and you can see red oxidized basalt where that happened.

Things look rather different where the water’s been at the sandstone.

Carven

Looks like the sea’s trying to tunnel through here, helped by pebbles.

I want to turn your attention now to the head, where you can see basalt and sediments getting really intimate.

Entwined

See how the basalt threads its way through the sandstone, there?  When it reached the coast, it sank into the mud and sand, butted in between layers, and wove itself into any space it could find or make.  In places, it incorporated the sediments into itself.  Told you this is XXX geology.

Jaunty Basalt Cap

If the Columbia River Basalt’s Grande Ronde formation hadn’t made it out to the coast, it’s quite possible, even probable, we wouldn’t be seeing these lovely cliffs.  We certainly wouldn’t have the imposing heads and monolithic sea stacks.  Sandstones and mudstones aren’t as inclined to hold up against wave action, as we’ll see when we get to Parte the Fifth.

In places, the intruding Grande Ronde squirted up through the sediments.  Remnants still stand watch, tall and imposing.

Sentinel

Get closer to one of them.  Let’s choose the one that’s tilting like a charming drunk.

Leaning Tower

Notice how chunky it is, some of it blocky and some more brecciated.  This basalt didn’t have a long, quiet cool-down.  If you’ve ever wondered why sea stacks look so rough, now you know it isn’t just the relentless pounding of the waves – it’s the explosive action of rapid quenching.

Come closer still.

Jumbly-Wumbly

Check that out.  Chips, cracks, and even some rough conchoidal fractures off to the left, there.  This is some seriously broken rock.  It makes it a lot of fun to explore.  Unfortunately, before we could get really immersed in it, we were getting immersed in something else.  Stupid high tide.

Gazing North

One last, long, lingering look; one last fond pat for the rocks; one final moment to contemplate the power of good Mother Earth to create and destroy; and then it’s off to the Land o’ Lincoln (City), where we’ll meet the world’s shortest river.

Seems like only last year I was promising you I’d get to the next installment of Oregon Geology anydaynow.  Heh heh heh whoops.  Well, better late than never, right?

For those of you just joining or wanting to refresh yourselves on the series to date, Parte the First ’tis here and Parte the Second ’tis there.  When we left off, we’d just watched the Columbia River flood basalts hit the ocean, and things had got a bit steamy.  Were this metaphor to be extended, Hug Point would have to be rated as XXX geology.  Here, basalts and sediments got really intimate.

Hug Point, viewed from Austin Point

There’s something for everyone here.  You want sedimentary rocks?  Gots ’em.  Basalts?  Yup.  Fault?  Even so!  Hydrology, check.  Coastal wave processes, oh check.  And if you’re with non-geo types, you can distract them with the pretty scenery, the nice historical wagon road to the north, and the tide pools, while you go get your rocks on.

I can’t do this place the justice it deserves.  It’s so rich geologically that an amateur like myself can merely stutter over some of its more outstanding features.  But I’ve got a ton of pretty pictures – so many, in fact, we’re going to have to split proceedings into a North Hug and a South Hug.  So come feast your eyes and feed your soul.

Two things drew me to Hug Point: the cave and the waterfall.  We’ll begin with the cave, since it’s right there to your right the instant you step off the stairs.

The Completely Awesome Hug Point Cave

This is one of the greatest wave-carved caves on the face of the earth, because it’s got a lot going on.  Let’s paint the broad outlines a bit.  The pale rocks are the sedimentary sandstones, mudstones, and conglomerate of the Astoria Formation.  The darker stuff is Grande Ronde basalt, which blundered into the Astoria on its mad dash to the sea around 15.6 million years ago.  And I do mean in to – dikes, sills, and breccia abound, basalt and sediments doing a mad little dance as they suddenly found themselves trying to occupy the same space.

Sediment vs. Basalt – Fight!

The cave shows a wonderful example of a basalt dike (or sill, I’ve seen it described both ways in my sources) intruding the Astoria Formation.  Here, it looks like the basalt squeezed its way in and made itself right at home.  Out in the weather, it’s that interesting reddish brown color.  Inside, it forms part of the roof of the cave, glistening black against the pale gold sandstone.

Basalt and Sedimentary Goodness

We’ll just have another view into the cave, then.  It’s too yummy not to:

Delicious Geologic Goodness

And yes, the cave’s big enough to stand up in.  You’d think it’s too small to get lost in, but there are ways of getting lost other than the geographic ones.  My intrepid companion very nearly didn’t manage to extract me.  There’s all too much to look at here, from the rocks stained by iron oxides:

Nature Red in Tooth and Rock

To the utterly intriguing contact between basalt and sandstone:

Contact Fascination

To the crazily contorted sediments:

Folded, Spindled and Mutilated

To the breccia:

All Broken Up

And the wave-plucked conglomerates:

Holy Conglomerate, Batman!

The back shoulder of the cave alone tells a long story:

Tilted Sediments and Conglomerate and Breccia, oh my!

The cave itself is like a geologic version of War and Peace.  If I was a little more geologically literate, I’d probably have been in there reading it until the tide came in and drowned me.  And then, just when you think you’re gonna make it round the headland, bam!  Another cave:

Ooo, Caves!

This one is a slot rather than a great gouge, but it’s awesome and it’s fun to nose into.

Rather Like a Baby Slot Canyon

Once you finally extract yourself from caves, you’re whacked in the eyeballs by some really incredible headlands:

Thar Be Hug Point!

If you have not yet divested yourself of heretics not fascinated by geology, now is the time to aim them north and babble about wagon trails that could only be traversed at low tide, and oh-did-I-mention-tide-pools-go-play-with-a-starfish-now-there’s-a-good-lad.  That should keep them occupied long enough for you to salivate in peace.

You’ll also notice another cave in the distance.  You will be tempted by it.  I assure you that, should you have had your fill of spelunking for the day, other things are going to drive that cave right out of your head.  For instance…

Mmm, Basalt!

…this enormous basalt shoulder now looming to your left.  Let us pause to admire this sill.

Shiny!

Here, it seems the Grande Ronde tried its damnedest to form respectable columns.  This was not an easy matter.  You know what happens to hot things when they hit cold things, and the basalt flows, still hot even after a four-hundred mile journey, had just come smack up against cool mud and cold seawater.  Had you been here, the place probably would’ve been covered in great gouts of steam.  Of course, had you been here, it’s very possible you would have gotten un-gently sauteed by hot lava, so it’s probably best you weren’t.

So, no slow and stately cooling here for the most part, and columns aren’t well-defined like they are further east where the flows could really pile up and take their time cooling down, but here we see some columnar ambitions.  And it’s so black and shiny!  Water seeps down the cliff face, making everything positively gleam.

If you stand still here, nose to rock, lovingly tracing out patterns of cracks and joints, you’ll notice you’re hearing a roar.  This is not the surf.

Fall Creek Falls

Turn around, and you shall see one of the prettiest little waterfalls in the known universe, hurtling joyfully along a NE-SW trending fault line.  Fall Creek leaps over t
he lip of Astoria Formation sandstone and goes pelting for the ocean.  You, on the other hand, probably will not.  If you’ve got any aesthetic sense at all, you’ll go sit yourself down beside the falls, right where the rush and roar of water drowns out other beachgoers’ voices, and enjoy the views.

Serenity Among the Sediments

Steams Flowing Out to Sea

As you relax there in the sun, snuggled up against warm sandstone, contemplating wave, wind and water, don’t forget to make friends with the rocks.  The sandstone’s really pretty here, full of sparkly flakes of (I’m nearly positive) mica.

Sparkly

Eventually, you might be able to tear yourself away and scramble up beside the falls for a good look at the fault.

Fault Line

Plenty of nice rock to poke around up there, including one that may still be in an amusing shape when you visit.

I Dub Thee Pecker Pinnacle

Random humans for scale.

The rocks up here form walls and ramparts – it’s rather like scrambling around in a natural-born castle.

Battlement Boulders

It feels like a very different world from the rough, tough basalts.  These rocks are smoother, rounded, but feel like sandpaper when you stroke them.  The basalt had actually been quite smooth and cool.  And yes, I do indeed spend my vacations petting rocks.  You of all people should understand.

Before you head back down, don’t forget to amuse yourself by gazing over the lip of the falls.

Falling off the Edge of the World – Whee!

Oh, to be a drop of water just now!

It’s about this time that you reluctantly wrest your eyes from the rocks and look up to see what the sun’s up to.  It’s hard to explore geology in the dark, after all.  And you see this great big blue thingy crashing into the rocks.

Oshit, That’s Right – There’s an Ocean…

It’s about that time you realize that the tide will be coming in soon, and you’ve got a whole south sector still needing exploring.  So, with reluctance, you tear yourself away from the great and glorious north, and begin your trek down the beach.  Which we will have to save for next time, because we’re already pushing it on pictures here.

You can see why, though, can’t you?  Told you this place was outstanding.  They may have named it Hug Point because wagoneers had to “hug” the cliffs on their travels, but a geologist might have named it that, too.  You want to hug it and squeeze it and pet it and love it and take it home with you.