Cape Disappointment State Park – state parks quest #17

I hold deep affection for Cape Disappointment State Park. I’ve probably visited it more than any other state park, and last year, when Mr. Adventure and I considered where to spend the winter solstice, Cape D (as it’s colloquially known) was the obvious choice. Winter storms there can be epic, making it the perfect place to welcome the season.

First things first: Cape Disappointment is anything but disappointing. So why does it have that name?

Naming Cape Disappointment

Cape Disappointment is the moniker bestowed by John Meares, a seafaring explorer who in 1788 sought the mouth of the Northwest Passage, a water route across North America to the Pacific Coast and thence to Asia’s lucrative trading grounds. Since the early 16th century, Europeans had plied the West Coast of North America looking for a more efficient way to ship trade goods to Asia. It took nearly a year of sailing to reach what is now the Pacific Northwest coast, so it was among the last to be explored, with Spanish explorers via California and Russians via Alaska among the first whites to arrive. In 1778 Captain James Cook explored the coast of Oregon and points north, but found no Northwest Passage.

Meares, an English fur trader, wanted to avoid taxes imposed by The East India Company, which monopolized British trade in the Pacific. After losing two-thirds of his men to scurvy on an expedition to Alaska in 1786-87, Meares returned to his base in China, registered two ships under the Portuguese flag, and set out again for the North Pacific. He used Nootka Sound, on Vancouver Island, as a base, exploring south in 1788 as far as Cape Lookout near present Tillamook, Oregon. Along the way, he mistook the Columbia River for a wide bay, dubbing the hulking bluffs on the north Cape Disappointment to register his frustration.

Meares was neither the first nor the last to name the cape. In 1775, Spanish explorer Bruno de Heceta called it Cabo San Roque. More saliently, the Chinook Indians who have lived along the lower Columbia River for millennia know it as Kah’eese. A few years after Meares, American Robert Gray, the first white explorer to cross the Columbia River bar, named it Cape Hancock. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t stick. “Cape Disappointment” is, after all, a lot more evocative.

Cape D is the southern tip of the 28-mile-long Long Beach Peninsula on Washington’s southwest coast. With nearly a million visitors each year to the park, plus another million to the park’s Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center, it is a popular destination for good reason. Two lighthouses perched on high basalt bluffs face the endless Pacific, sandy shores make for excellent beachcombing and fishing, and groves of giant Sitka spruce festooned with moss and lichen form an atmospheric forest. Meares didn’t know what he was missing.

Winter storms and yurts

For our solstice weekend, we drove to Cape D through howling winds and rain, the car shuddering from the  occasional gust. We enjoy winter storm watching and that’s what we were going to get. To mix things up a bit, and because I am past the “I’ll camp in any weather” age, we rented our first-ever yurt.

When we arrived at our yurt, small branches littered the campground. We unloaded at a run in a futile effort to stay dry, then leaned into the wind and walked to the beach. Beachfront tent sites are closed during winter, strewn driftwood a tangible reminder of the power of winter storms. Squinting into the monochrome dusk, only the white foam of waves distinguished earth from sky. We beat a retreat.

Our first night in a yurt was instructive. These are basically tents with infrastructure and floors. Washington State Parks yurts are comfortably appointed with beds, a fold-down couch, table and chairs, electricity, and, thankfully, a wall heater that dried our soaked clothes overnight and kept things cozy. The walls are heavy-duty canvas, which means every drip on the conical roof, every branch cracking, every creature scrabbling outside was audible. Wind gusts slammed into the yurt and trees creaked overhead. We heard it all. Just like tent camping, I realized it was going to take a night to get used to sleeping semi-outdoors. But unlike tent camping, we were warm and dry. I could definitely get used to glamping like this.

The next morning, it looked like the trees had had a fight the night before. Small branches, cones, and needles covered the ground. But the rain had decreased, and the wind had died down. The sky was still lowering gray, but that didn’t bother us. After all, this is the Northwest, where there’s no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate gear. We pulled on rain jackets and boots —  my friend MizFitz says you aren’t a real Northwest camper until you automatically bring rain boots on your trip — and headed out.

Waikiki Beach

I’ve been to Cape Disappointment State Park so many times that I was momentarily stumped about where to start. It’s a big park, nearly 1,900 acres, with a variety of experiences. We headed first to Waikiki Beach, a small sandy area just north of some of Cape D’s dramatic headlands. Several sources claim the beach is named for Hawaiian sailors who washed ashore here after a shipwreck in 1811. A jetty built in the early 20th century has filled in the lowlands west of the beach, and it’s an excellent place to watch storm-engorged waves barrel into the cape’s cliffs while the Cape Disappointment lighthouse stands guard in the distance.

Piles of driftwood on Waikiki’s north end were slick with mildew. Clambering over invited sprained ankles or worse, so we stood and watched wetsuited skimboarders whipping across the shallows. Brrr.

At the main access to the beach, visitors can experience a piece of the Maya Lin-designed Confluence Project, which I wrote about in my post on Sacajawea State Park. A boardwalk inscribed with Lewis and Clark dates, mileage, and journal quotes leads to the beach. More interesting to me was the crushed oyster shell path into the forest. Every few steps, verses of a Chinook prayer are inscribed on panels interspersed on the trail. Reading the verses forced me to slow down. The experience is a walking meditation. At the end, the stump of a cedar tree that predates Lewis and Clark sits in a clearing. Five trees around it have long metal strips where Chinook people would have stripped bark for use in clothing, baskets, fishing gear, and more.

Baker Bay 

Less than a half-mile away, across the narrowest part of the cape, another Confluence Project installation celebrates Chinook culture on Baker Bay. Hold up your left hand and make a fist with your thumb pointing down. The space between your thumb (representing Cape D) and your hand is Baker Bay, just inside the mouth of the Columbia River. It’s big, four miles across, with the logging port of Ilwaco nestled in its northwest curve.

When Captain Robert Gray sailed across the Columbia bar in 1792, he anchored in Baker Bay and traded with Chinook Indians there, inaugurating a decades-long practice. A basalt fish cleaning table sits near the park’s boat launch, a tangible reminder that visitors are standing in the traditional homeland of the Chinook people. A Chinook origin story is carved into the top of the table. Cleaning fish here would feel ceremonial, as if you were taking part in an ancient and ongoing practice that sustains a culture.

A short boardwalk curves along the water beyond the fish cleaning table, offering broad views of the bay beyond. As we explored, the clouds began to lift. It wasn’t going to clear, but at last we could tell where the water ended and the sky began.

Station Cape Disappointment and the Graveyard of the Pacific

Because the weather still wasn’t great, we decided to hike to one of Cape D’s two lighthouses. A path from the parking lot leads to the weathered black-and-white Cape Disappointment Light a little more than a mile away. To get there, we walked down and around Deadman’s Cove and past part of  the Coast Guard station. 

U.S. Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment is the largest search and rescue station on the West Coast. Fifty crew members work here, responding to more than 100 calls for help each year from the Graveyard of the Pacific, the extremely dangerous area where the Columbia River — the only river that pierces the Cascade Mountains — empties into the Pacific Ocean. Dense fog, fierce winds, and swirling currents make the Columbia Bar, three miles wide and stretching six miles into the ocean, one of the most hazardous in the world. Waves can top 30 feet at the bar entrance during winter. More than 200 ships have sunk here since Captain Gray’s Columbia Rediviva made the first successful crossing by a Euro-American in 1792. Some shipwrecks are still visible at low tides along the coast.

Cape Disappointment Light 

The Cape Disappointment Lighthouse was built in 1856 to help with navigation. It was the first active lighthouse on the Northwest coast and the eighth on the West Coast. Ironically, the ship bearing supplies to construct it wrecked while trying to cross the bar. Although none of the 32-member crew died, the ship and its cargo were lost. It took another two years before construction began. The Cape D light became part of the Union’s coastal fortifications during the Civil War. Washington, it’s worth noting, was then still a territory.

A short, scenic trail leads to the 53-foot-tall lighthouse. Severe weather has pummeled the tower. Paint is flaking off and water streaks its sides. Its daymark, the pattern by which the lighthouse is identifiable during daylight hours, is two thick white bands with a thinner black band separating them, and a black lantern room roof.

A few steps from the tower is a tiny, painted brick hut with antennas on its roof. Interpretive signs outside explain the Columbia River Bar and lighthouse history. Inside, barely visible through the streaky glass, a Coast Guardsman is on duty, watching the weather and the water. A couple other visitors poked around, squinting into the wind at the steely Pacific. Undoubtedly accustomed to tourists like us, the Coastie’s gaze never wavered from the water. 

When built, the lighthouse had a few shortcomings. The headland was too small to contain both the light and the keeper’s residence, so the keeper’s house was a quarter-mile away and down a hill. Its cellar tended to flood in winter, filling the house with a damp chill. The lighthouse’s 1,600-pound fog bell was too far away for most ships to hear and its sound was often drowned out by the pounding surf. Most problematically, the light could not be seen by ships coming from the north, which prompted the construction in 1898 of North Head Light, two miles away. You can’t see one lighthouse from the other, and both still operate to aid navigation at the mouth of the Columbia River.

The U.S. Lifesaving Service

When a boat capsized near the cape in March 1865, killing 17 of the 24 people aboard, the distraught lighthouse keeper realized a lifesaving boat launched from shore could have saved more lives. He raised money to refurbish a longboat, successfully used it to rescue the crew of a freighter that grounded on the bar in May 1866, and established a volunteer-run lifesaving station at Cape Disappointment in 1871.

In 1878, Congress established the U.S. Life-Saving Service as a standalone federal agency; a permanent station had been built at Cape D in 1877 and the first paid crew started there in 1882. In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation merging it with the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service to create the United States Coast Guard. In 1967, the Coast Guard established Station Cape Disappointment. The National Motor Lifeboat School, where trainees learn to operate the 47-foot Motor Lifeboats (MLBs) sent into the bar for rescues, operates there as well.

Fort Canby

We walked back to the parking lot and up the hill to the remains of Fort Canby, a 19th-century coastal fortification built to defend the Columbia during the Civil War. Fort Columbia, about six miles upriver on the eastern end of Baker Bay, and Fort Stevens, on the Oregon side, completed the installations at the mouth of the river. Both are also now state parks. 

Constructed in 1863, more than 80 troops took up posts at Fort Canby the next year. The fort continued to expand, with several gun batteries built over the next eight decades. “Big Betsy,” a 15-inch Rodman gun, was originally placed near the Cape D lighthouse but shattered the lantern windows the first time it was fired. The concrete foundations that supported the gun were later moved to the Battery Harvey Allen site at former Fort Canby. The battery’s namesake was a veteran of the Mexican and Civil wars posted at the fort during the 1870s.

Not being a military historian, I didn’t really understand what a “battery” was until I walked around the Fort Canby site. Initially, batteries were simply mounds of earth piled up to conceal the weapons and people behind them. Later, concrete walls served the same purpose, and you can walk around and through the concrete structures, including rooms to store powder and shells, that comprised Battery Harvey Allen. Although it’s hard to imagine this as a busy fort, the remnants of batteries and gun emplacements are a regular feature at Cape Disappointment and other state parks that were once coastal defense outposts.

Fort Canby is named for Civil War general Edward Canby, who helped defeat the Confederates at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in New Mexico. The victory ensured the Confederacy could not develop supply lines across the Southwest. Canby pops up in a lot of places; I wrote about walking the battlefield where he fought at Pecos National Historical Park and his role at Fort Union National Monument in New Mexico.

According to General Ulysses S. Grant, Canby was a better administrator than warrior. He served in various positions during and after the Civil War and was valued for his understanding of law and policy. In 1872, Canby was sent to the Pacific Northwest as commander of the U.S. Army Department of the Columbia. He was killed during the Modoc Indian War in northern California in 1873.

There is no evidence Canby ever visited Cape D, but what had been Fort Cape Disappointment was renamed for the general in 1875, and in fact was the name of the park at its creation in the 1950s. The Washington State Parks Commission renamed Fort Canby State Park as Cape Disappointment State Park in 2003, to better reflect the park’s connection to Lewis and Clark history in anticipation of the expedition’s bicentennial. The name captures the park’s many features beyond its important military history, plus it’s just cool. I mean, who wouldn’t want to check out a place named Cape Disappointment?

Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center

Just beyond Battery Harvey Allen is the park’s interpretive showpiece, the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, which engagingly tells the story of the expedition’s momentous, two-year-plus journey from St. Charles, Missouri, to the Pacific Ocean and back. Visitors follow a trail through the exhibit, which pays special attention to the expedition’s experiences at the mouth of the Columbia. Interactive exhibits and an excellent film round out the experience.

Upstairs, a permanent exhibit about the maritime history of Cape Disappointment includes an early Coast Guard boat, artifacts, prehistory, and a Fresnel lens once installed at the North Head lighthouse. Tall windows curve around the building, commanding mesmerizing westward views of the Pacific Ocean — especially welcome on days when rain and wind are pounding outside. There’s a gift shop, too, whose proceeds benefit the nonprofit Friends of the Columbia River Gateway.

Built in the mid-1970s, the interpretive center underwent a major renovation before the bicentennial commemoration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 2004-2006. Today it is one of the best interpretive centers on the entire Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. Do yourself a favor: don’t skip it. 

Lewis and Clark at Cape D

The explorers spent several days exploring Cape Disappointment when they arrived at the Pacific in November 1805 and fulfilled the mission assigned them by President Thomas Jefferson. Camped about five miles upriver at what is now known as Middle Village-Station Camp (a unit of Lewis and Clark National Historical Park), Clark wrote the expedition had reached “the extent of our journey by water…in full view of the Ocian.” On November 18, Clark and eleven expedition members set out to explore the Cape Disappointment area.

Walking along Baker Bay, one of the men killed a large “Buzzard” with a wingspan of more than nine feet. It was a California condor, a mind-bogglingly large and frankly ugly bird that inhabited the Northwest coast and the Columbia River at least to present-day Hood River, 150 river miles upstream (the last condor was reported on the Columbia in 1854).

They continued walking, visiting a Chinook village on the bayshore. By the time Lewis and Clark arrived, Chinook Indians were well acquainted with Euro-Americans, having traded with them since Robert Gray’s arrival in 1792. Subsequent traders made the mouth of the Columbia a regular stop. The Chinooks drove hard bargains with the expedition, whose members were surprised by the “immoderate prices” the locals charged.

At last, after traveling more than 4,000 miles across much of North America, Clark’s men reached the cape. To get an idea of the primitive forest the party hiked through, check out the park’s short Coastal Forest Loop Trail.

When they reached the Pacific Ocean, the men climbed McKenzie Head, a small hill with a big view. It must have been an emotional moment. Clark wrote the men were “much Satisfied with their trip beholding with estonishment the high waves dashing against the rocks & this emence ocean.”

The next morning, the men’s breakfast consisted of two Columbian black-tailed deer, a species new to science. They explored north up the coast, where Clark noted a large dead sturgeon and whale bones on the beach, and spent one more night before heading back to their camp upriver. Clark’s sightings are marked along the Discovery Trail, a paved hiker-biker trail that essentially follows the party’s route from Baker Bay through Cape D and into the town of Long Beach.

McKenzie Head

One of the places visitors can walk in Lewis and Clark’s footsteps is McKenzie Head, where Clark and his men enjoyed an unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean. A short trail leads to the top of the hill, and after a quieter night in the yurt, Mr. Adventure and I headed up on a frigid morning to poke around the summit and watch the ocean.

When Clark’s party visited, 200-foot-tall McKenzie Head was surrounded by saltwater and connected to the mainland by a narrow neck of land. Jetties constructed in the early 20th century to aid navigation across the Columbia Bar have filled in the area, and the head now sits amid a scrubby lowland. Signs along the trail show what the explorers would have seen and how the landscape has changed.

McKenzie Head houses remnants of another World War II coastal battery. Today, the circular carriages that held the gun mounts have reeds growing in their centers, and they look more like modernist water gardens than coastal defense infrastructure.

Bell’s View

We had to leave in a few hours and wanted to enjoy the sunshine that had finally dispelled the storm. Our last stop in the park was Bell’s View and North Head Lighthouse.

It’s an enjoyable hike to North Head from McKenzie Head, but the 1.5-mile trail was partly submerged during our visit. Instead, we stopped at freshwater Lake O’Neil to check out Cape D’s handful of cabins, complete with rain-flooded picnic area, before making the short drive to the Bell’s View and North Head Lighthouse trailheads.

A quarter-mile-long paved trail through an impressive sitka spruce forest leads to Bell’s View, a wind-blasted viewpoint looking north up the Long Beach Peninsula and west over the Pacific. This was the first part of Cape D to be preserved as a park. Although I haven’t been able to untangle the precise sequence of events, I learned that the Civilian Conservation Corps was stationed at Fort Canby from 1935 to 1938. They fixed up the fort and built roads and trails, including the one to the top of McKenzie Head. In 1938, encouraged by Pacific County Commissioner Thomas Bell, Washington State Parks bought the parcel of land at Bell’s View for a public park. It seems likely that this area also benefited from the improvements made by the CCC.

On this first full day of winter, walking through the rain-washed forest, Bell’s View felt placid. Yet Cape Disappointment’s typical weather is more like what we experienced when we arrived: storm-driven rain and wind. Fog swirls over the cape more than one-third of the year. More than five feet of rain falls every year, on average. And the wind! This is one of the windiest locales in the entire country. As one trailside sign dryly noted, “It is never a question of if the wind is blowing, only how fast and from what direction.”

During winter, severe wind events called mid-latitude cyclones, with wind gusts up to 150 mph, can occur here. The best-known are the 1921 Olympic Blowdown Storm, the 1962 Columbus Day Windstorm, and 2007’s Great Coastal Gale. The wind’s constant scouring is evidenced by the vegetation around the Bell’s View lookout. All the branches and foliage face away from the ocean and toward the bluff, dramatic evidence of the wind’s unrelenting power. 

To keep track of all that weather, the federal government operated a forecasting and observation station at North Head for more than 50 years. The weather forecasts helped ships navigate the treacherous waters around the mouth of the Columbia. Along the Bell’s View trail, a World War II concrete structure served as a combination searchlight control booth, radar surveillance station, and artillery coordinating base. These capabilities allowed soldiers to find and target possible enemy ships and planes, but the mercurial weather required constant vigilance. 

North Head Lighthouse Keeper’s Residences

From the parking lot, another short trail leads to North Head Lighthouse, built in 1898 to guide ships coming from the north. On the way to the lighthouse, we passed two stately keeper’s houses, one single-family and one duplex, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Every time we come here, Mr. Adventure and I have the same conversation, because these houses are available to rent. “It would be fun to have Thanksgiving here some year,” he says. Each house sleeps up to six people and includes all the comforts of home, including a television. I always agree, and then I always forget until the fall, by which time the houses have been booked. If you can find a few friends to share the cost, renting a keeper’s house is quite reasonable, not to mention unique.

North Head Light

As we approached the lighthouse, we could see orange fencing had been blown off (or removed from) poles on the perimeter. Every few feet, signs are posted that warn visitors to stay on the pavement and keep off the steep bluffs, where a revegetation project is ongoing. As you can see from the photo, a few visitors chose to ignore the signs.

Mr. Adventure’s eyes narrowed and he strode down the rest of the trail. “Hey!” he shouted. “Get off the bluff! This is a revegetation area and you’re damaging the plants!” A small family group standing near the edge turned around, startled by his voice. One man called down, “Come on, Bubba, get back up here.” Someone said, “We didn’t know we couldn’t go down there.” Mr. Adventure pointed out the obvious signs and fencing all around, and the group fell silent. As we waited for Bubba to reappear, we started rehanging the orange fencing as best we could.

Bubba and his family headed back up the trail, clearly wanting to avoid the two of us. I was seething. We’ve called out similar transgressions in other places, and it’s beyond annoying. First, even though the orange fencing was down in places, it’s obvious that it’s meant to keep people back from the edge. Second, the revegetation signs are everywhere on the trail leading to the lighthouse and all around it. Third, it galls me that my tax dollars might go to rescuing some chucklehead who thought it would be fun to disregard rules that are there for everyone’s safety and climb onto steep, slippery rocks above the churning Pacific Ocean. I’d much rather my park fees go toward helping rangers maintain the parks, not rescuing idiots, but as I can’t specify how the money is used, I willingly call out the few folks who choose to ignore the rules, damage resources, and endanger themselves and others. 

Breathing deeply to restore the sense of well-being and calm that Cape D always engenders, I wandered around the lighthouse and tried to focus on the truly stunning vistas. The 65-foot-tall light had been in sad shape — decades of storms will do that — but in 2009 the nonprofit Keepers of the North Head Lighthouse began a fundraising drive to restore the light. In 2017, the park unveiled the recently restored lighthouse, with its brilliant white exterior and black lantern roof.

Today the lighthouse gleams against the Pacific Ocean, even as work continues on the interior. Like the Cape Disappointment light, the Coast Guard operates North Head light. Automated since 1961, North Head once boasted a female lighthouse keeper, Mabel Bretherton, who worked there for two years in in the early 20th century. A wind-blown duck crashed through a lighthouse window in 1932, chipping the lens. Just like all of Cape Disappointment, layers of history add richness to everything in this landscape.

Farewell for now

As we pulled out of the park, I said what I say every time I’m there: “I love Cape D so much.” Mr. Adventure agreed. The term “crown jewel” has been used to describe the most spectacular national parks: Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon. It works for our state parks, too. Cape Disappointment, with its stunning waterfront scenery, millennia of history, coastal forests, excellent trails, and lovely camping, is a crown jewel Washington state park. The nearly one million people who visit each year undoubtedly agree.

Fast facts about Cape Disappointment State Park

• 1,882-acre camping park at the mouth of the Columbia River
• $10 daily parking pass (buy the annual Discover Pass, a bargain at $30)
• 8 miles of hiking trails, interpretive center, interpretive signage
• picnic tables, picnic shelters, playground, park store (seasonal), firewood
• 135′ dock, boat ramp, boating, saltwater/freshwater fishing, clamming, crabbing (license required)
• beach exploring, metal detecting
• birding, wildlife viewing
• amphitheater, interpretive center, lighthouses
• 210 campsites include 137 standard sites, 50 full hookup sites, 18 partial hookup sites, five primitive hiker/biker sites; many sites available year-round; max site length 45′
• yurts, cabins, lighthouse residences
• dump station, restrooms, and showers
• overnight accommodations reservable online or call 888-CAMPOUT
• Park brochure
• Park map
• Campground map