At first glance, there’s not a lot to Bottle Beach. Driving at 55mph, it’s easy to miss the small brown sign indicating there’s a state park turnoff ahead. The iconic olive drab park sign isn’t at the entrance to the dusty gravel parking lot. Instead, it’s in front of the restroom, at the beginning of the park’s only trail. I visited on a hot day in August and realized that my experience was about what isn’t here, both at the time of my visit and in the past.
It’s for the birds
What wasn’t there when I visited was the very thing, actually things, the park is known for: birds. In spring, peak season at Bottle Beach State Park, more than a million birds stop in this area, one of the most important feeding grounds on the Arctic-to-Patagonia Pacific Flyway.
Bottle Beach sits on the southeast shore of Grays Harbor, a large bay about 45 miles north of the Columbia River on the Washington coast. On a map, Grays Harbor looks vaguely like a bird’s head in profile, which is appropriate given its importance in seasonal migration. Picture the curve where the bird’s chin becomes its throat. That’s Bottle Beach.
Birders consider Grays Harbor a world-class destination for shorebird viewing, especially in the spring, when they’re likely to spot dunlin, semipalmated plovers, and sandpipers (Western and least). Bottle Beach is particularly known as a good place to see red knots, a small sandpiper distinguished by its bright terra-cotta red breast during mating season.
Numerous parks and wildlife refuges around Grays Harbor offer one-stop dining for birds on the move, including Bottle Beach, where volunteers have logged more than 130 species. The beach’s position between the estuaries of the Johns and Elk rivers gives birds access to fresh- and saltwater habitats and biologically rich riparian areas.
And while I’m sure it’s exciting to see spring migrators, I think the fall birds have the edge in terms of the sheer lyricism of their names. Who doesn’t want to glimpse plovers (black-bellied and American golden), dowitchers (short- and long-billed), whimbrels, and marbled godwits?
It’s an avian paradise, as evidenced by two bird blinds, bird-themed fence, and several interpretive signs. But I visited Bottle Beach in late summer, when the place was empty. Even the birds were scarce, sheltering in the shade on this warm, still afternoon.
Boomtown and birds, circa 1890
The short trail from the parking lot starts out as a boardwalk that generally parallels the highway for the a couple hundred yards. The boardwalk ends and the trail becomes gravel, turning sharply right toward the beach. A small pullout comes in from the highway, and a few interpretive signs mark the spot. Once again, I was struck by the sense of not-much-there.
As it turned out, there once was a rather large something right where we stood. It’s the site of Ocosta-by-the-Sea, a short-lived boomtown platted in 1889, the year Washington became a state.
Ocosta was to be the Northern Pacific Railroad’s coastal terminus, a deep-water port where trains could unload lumber, known as “green gold” for its primacy in the region’s economy, and other resources onto ships bound for San Francisco and beyond. “Nothing can prevent making this the most important harbor north of San Francisco, if not the chief harbor of the Pacific Coast,” one booster proclaimed.
In 1890, Northern Pacific offered town lots for sale. On the first day, fortune-seekers shelled out more than $90,000 to stake their claim in a town that consisted of ten houses and nine real-estate offices. Within a few years, Ocosta boasted a school, post office, three churches, three hotels, a bank, a lumber company, a brewery, and more than 400 residents.
An account of the young town highlighted the excellent duck-hunting (“fine mallard, canvas-back, sprig, and teal”) on what is now Bottle Beach, noting the birds were “exceedingly palatable … entirely free from the rank, fishy taste which taints the flesh of nearly all fowl killed on salt water.” Visitors were served “the fattest of ducks browned to a turn,” with one duck per guest the custom. The author notes that Ocosta residents assumed every “enlightened man” would know how to carve a duck, and thus served them whole (presumably with a knife alongside). Even in 1890, the area was known for its birds, though more for their gastronomic qualities than migration patterns.
Then bad luck hit.
The boom busts
A severe winter in 1892-1893 smothered the new railroad tracks under landslides, and huge drift logs blown in by storms added to the damage. The economic recession of 1893 dried up investment, and the Northern Pacific went into receivership. Ocosta couldn’t recover, an all-too-familiar fate forecast in a contemporaneous poem attributed to newspaper editor Charles Gant:
Just think a few short years ago
When Washington was new,
When suckers flourished in the east
And fakers were not a few,
There came a gang of Boomers
With oily tongue and pen
And they built a fancied garden
For the unsuspecting men.
On the green hills sloping
To the tide flats down below
They planted seeds of fancy
And a town began to grow.
And soon there was a sea port,
A future great to be,
On the sand flats of Grays Harbor
Twas “Ocosta-by-the-Sea.”
By 1909, the population had shrunk to 150, and lots could be had for $30. By the 1950s, only a few dock pilings and the brick foundation of a railroad turntable remained. A more recent account reported that today, Ocosta’s “chief distinguishing feature is a 90-degree bend in State Route 105.” Ouch.
In fact, Google Maps shows the platted former town, as well as the sharp turn of the highway. Nothing of the town is visible in the park, so it’s a little weird that it’s on the contemporary map.
At low tide, you can still see some pilings offshore, but it’s difficult to imagine this quiet, jellyfish-dotted beach as the hub of a busy town.
Between the beach and the highway
One of Bottle Beach State Park’s interesting features is the space between the beach and the highway. Three decades before Ocosta bloomed into existence, Reuben Redman settled here. Today, the slough that feeds the marshy tidal wetlands here is named for him. Crossing a small bridge over the slough, we saw bird and small mammal prints in the mud below. The water trickled almost imperceptibly past.
These wetlands are separated from the beach by what appears now to be a natural dike, but I wonder whether this too is a ghostly remnant of vanished Ocosta. At any rate, it makes a nice trail to the northern bird viewing platform and some largish spruces, as well as a distant view of Westport, the coastal town on the southern peninsula of land that brackets Grays Harbor.
A state park for birds
Bottle Beach exists largely because of the efforts of two avid birders, Ruby Egbert and Bob Morse, who championed the importance of the site for migrating birds. They pulled together government agencies and conservation organizations — Washington State Parks, Grays Harbor County, the Nature Conservancy, Washington State Department of Fish & Wildlife, several chapters of the National Audubon Society, and the University of Washington — to create the park.
Egbert, the first lifetime member of the Washington Ornithological Society, donated between $100,000 and $200,000 so the state could purchase the land. The park opened in 1995, and its Ruby Egbert Natural Area commemorates her contributions.
We were hot and tired from walking through the empty park with no people, few birds, and only ephemeral clues to a long-gone past. (Even the name is a mystery. Was the beach a good place to find old bottles thrown up by the tides? Were bottles manufactured nearby? Does it have something to do with the brewery that once graced Ocosta? No idea, and I couldn’t find anything in reliable place-name books, including Edmond Meany’s 1923 classic Origin of Washington Geographic Names.)
Nonetheless, it’s intriguing to imagine the place full — full of birds squawking and diving, bills poking the tideflats for the food that will sustain them on their long journey, or full of hopeful people looking to make a life on the edge of the bay where the railroad tracks met the shipping lanes. Perhaps I’ll come back during the spring migration, and see at least one of those scenes come to life.
Fast facts about Bottle Beach State Park
- 75-acre day-use park with 6,000′ of shoreline
- $10 daily parking pass (buy the annual Discover Pass, a bargain at $30)
- hiking trail, interpretive signage
- beach, picnic area
- birding, wildlife viewing
- bird blinds and platforms
- dogs allowed only during hunting season, mid-October to mid-February