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Oregon's sea of sand: Explore 45 miles of shifting dunes, forests, and wetlandsall teeming with wildlife - Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area

Sunset, March, 2002 by Bonnie Henderson

Some days the sand is light and dry as sugar, falling away underfoot. After a rain it's like soft-serve ice cream, yielding gently. Then there are winter days when the east wind blows, scouring the sky of clouds and freezing the dunes hard as marble. Always, the dunes are a sculpture, and a work in progress.

It takes a lot of sand, a lot of wind, and a flat coastal plain to create a shoreline dominated by dunes. On Oregon's south-central coast, those elements come together like nowhere else, and the results are stunning. Broad expanses of open sand undulate, sweeping up into steep mountains or falling off into lakes, ponds, and shallow quagmires of quicksand.

Amid that sea of sand, islands of forest appear, dense with Sitka spruce and salal and evergreen huckleberry. Meandering through both sand and forest are creeks the color of tea. Bordering it all is a wild beach with nary a hotel or outlet mall in sight.

The "dune sheet," as geologists call it, stretches about 45 miles from the mouth of Coos Bay north to the base of Heceta Head, and represents the largest continuous complex of sand dunes in the coastal United States. In 1972, Congress preserved a vast portion of it--most of the land between the beach and U.S. 101 from Coos Bay to Florence--as Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area.

Aside from a few primitive campgrounds, picnic areas, and trailheads, it has been left wild, allowing the wealth of plant and animal life that thrives in the dunes to remain relatively undisturbed. Three state parks in or near the dunes provide more interest, from a functioning 108-year-old lighthouse to lakes perfect for canoeing and kayaking.

Hiking the dunes

This wild coastline is a hiker's dream. Except for five access routes that lead from U.S. 101 to beachfront parking, the Oregon Dunes shoreline is roadless. Trailheads appear regularly along the highway their routes heading west to the beach or winding through dunes to connect with other trails. Where it crosses open sand, a trail may be nothing more than a series of blue-topped wooden posts indicating general direction; where the trail crosses fragile wetlands, small bridges or raised platforms will keep your feet dry.

The dunes can reward you with moments to savor throughout the year: Watch a solitary bald eagle glide high above a creek or an osprey dive for a fish; follow deer tracks in the sand; flush a river otter from streamside; enjoy clouds of pink rhododendron blossoms in mid-May; or witness spawning salmon run a gauntlet of hungry harbor seals to enter a creek mouth in the fall.

A land on the move

This open dune landscape reforms itself minute by minute--and may in fact, be reforming itself beyond recognition. Most of the pale green grass seen throughout the dunes is European beach grass, introduced around 1910 in Coos Bay to stabilize dunes at the mouths of navigable rivers.

The scheme may have worked too well. Wind blows seeds along the shore, where they take hold and send down deep roots. The plants' slender blades catch sand blowing inland and settle it into an ever taller foredune. Wind scours the dunes just inland, creating marshy depressions inviting to shrubs and trees, and slowly the forest expands.

Despite efforts by the Forest Service ranging from bulldozing to hand-pulling and burning, scientists now believe that the active dunes may be gone in a matter of decades, eventually replaced by forest.

Vegetation of the dunes isn't unique to our era. The introduction of beach grass appears to have accelerated a natural cycle of sand advance and dune forestation. Geologists believe that such cycles have occurred at least three times in the past 20,000 years--but they may have taken hundreds or even thousands of year to complete, rather than just decades.

No one can say with certainty how much humans have contributed to the changes in this rare coastal dune ecosystem. But to one degree or another, the dunes are always changing; it is their nature. Whether you visit tomorrow, next season, or in 20 years, take a good, long look--you'll never see the same ones again.