August 16, 2007
It rained in the night and well into the morning. Neither of us had any desire to get up and pack camp in a steady rain, so we just laid in our snug down sleeping bags and read our books while the steady patter of raindrops soothed our spirits in the gray light. It was basically like reading the Sunday paper in bed with coffee, only we were reading novels and laying on Thermarests with water from nalgene bottles.  Talk about relaxing! For an hour I had been convincing myself that the rain was tapering off, but by 9:00 it really was. By the time it got to a drizzle, we got dressed and quickly packed up camp, wet tent and all, and started down the trail. The sun came out shortly thereafter, sending brilliant fresh shafts of sunlight coursing through the trees, glinting off of every raindrop-laden fern frond. We hiked back to the car, and then drove north again to Yachats. Throughout the week, we had been growing steadily more fond of "The Joes" Coffee Shop. I think it is called this because the owners are Joe and Joanna, but I’m not 100% sure on that. Anyway, they make a latte called a Snickers which has hazelnut creme plus chocolate and caramel syrup that Andra and I both grew pretty fond of. It’s a good drink on an ordinary day, but on a day when you’re coming off a night sleeping on the ground and packing up a wet tent in a fine drizzle, it is positively divine. We grabbed a large Snickers latte and two delectable pastries to go, and enjoyed them at a bench overlooking Cove Beach. We spent time nearly every day at this bench. By the end of the week, it was referred to in conversation as "our bench". The waves were huge on this morning, definitely the largest we saw all week, and we watched for quite some time as the enormous surf pounded the volcanic rock shoreline and sent geysers of white water shooting 20 feet into the air. The sun came out, warming our faces, and I felt perfect out. A verse from a song we played in the car came to mind, "But it won’t last man, just a passing moment gone." Too true. 

By 12:00, we were at the Cape Perpetua visitor center, spreading the tent’s rainfly out over the top of the car to dry it in the sun. After picking our fill of blackberries growing wild nearby, we started off up the Cook’s Ridge Trail, where we encountered more lush coastal forest, consisting of uncounted ranks of skyscraping spruces and hemlocks over a sea of ferns bathed in dappled sunlight. We passed by the Discovery Loop and stayed on the Cook’s Ridge trail as it led uphill, steeply at times. At intervals benches were situated near the trail, and at almost every one, we stopped to take off some layer of clothing deemed too warm to continue wearing. The humidity was near 100%, and I was soon dripping sweat from my brow. Every 2 minutes, I was wiping my face with my bandana. At the Gwynn Creek junction, we were near the high point of the trail some 900 feet higher than the trailhead. I noted that there were 4 distinct fern species that I could pick out. The sword fern was the most abundant, and obvious, growing in massive clumps like small palm trees. The deer fern was the smallest and perhaps the best looking, and the only dimorphic example I noticed. In the sunnier locations, bracken ferns grew to stately heights near chest level. The rarest fern, though still pretty abundant, is a fern that I believe is called a chain fern. It only seemed to grow in the wettest places, such as in the perpetually-wet soil right next to streams, where it grew to a height of 3-4 feet. This chain fern had the most complex branching pattern. There may have been more species, but those are the ones that were abundant enough to capture my attention. 

We continued on, now on a slightly declining trail grade, through a section of forest in which there were about 4 incredibly huge trees. The boles of these giants were scarred black by fire, and the first branches were so high up, positive ID was impossible without binoculars. I suspect they were hemlocks, due to the reddish color of the bark, but they could well have been spruce. Down we went in the Gwynn Creek ravine, until at last we came to the spot where we had camped the night before. Kind of a strange way to arrive there. Passing that by, we continued on to the junction of the Oregon Coast Trail, and took it north along Highway 101 towards the car. On this trail, we caught nice glimpses of the ocean and Neptune Beach, and were treated to a view of the spouting horn, only slightly impeded by the graceful arching bridge over Cook’s chasm. We arrived back at the car about 3 hours after we began, and the tent was dry. We picked a few more blackberries from the vines nearby, then hopped in the car and headed south for more adventure.