Westport Light State Park – state parks quest #27

To celebrate the longest day of the year, a beach trip seemed obvious (sun! sand! warmth!), and we headed to Westport Light State Park. As we pulled into the north parking lot, rain speckled the windshield and wind rocked the car. Ah, yes, a typical early summer day on the Washington coast. I started to wish I’d worn rain pants.

Climbing the sand dunes, the ocean spread out in front of us, gray and misty. Behind, the beach of Half Moon Bay curved toward the small town of Westport, and beyond that stretched Grays Harbor’s large bay. This is Point Chehalis, the tip of the southern entrance to Grays Harbor, and the site of what was once a large village of indigenous peoples. 

Tsihalis

Early white explorers recorded the place name as Ts-a-lis, meaning place of sand, or Chi-ke-lis, meaning shifting sands. In 1853-54, working on the northern transcontinental railroad survey, ethnologist George Gibbs compiled his observations into detailed maps and vocabularies of numerous Northwest tribes. These were published in 1877 in Tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon and Indian Tribes of Washington Territory. Together, they are a useful contemporaneous record of indigenous peoples by a white person. 

Gibbs wrote, “The name Chihalis, or Tsihalis, strictly belongs to the village on the beach at the entrance of Grays Harbor.” However, he added, the name was now associated with the Tsihalis River draining into Grays Harbor and the peoples who live along the river and around the bay. He divided them into the Tsihalis and Upper Tsihalis (I’ll use the modern spelling for clarity). What we know as the Lower Chehalis lived downstream from the confluence of the Chehalis and Satsop rivers and around Grays Harbor, with five villages on the river, seven on the north side of the harbor, including at Copalis, Humptulips, and Hoquiam, and eight on the south. Upper Chehalis peoples lived upstream from the Satsop and into the foothills of the Cascades. Although both Lower and Upper Chehalis peoples refused to sign the 1855 Chehalis River treaty, displacement by white settlers induced the federal government to create a reservation for the Chehalis in 1864. Today, descendants of Lower Chehalis peoples are part of the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe, the Quinault Indian Nation, and the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis, known as “People of the Sand.”

A small interpretive poster at the park says there were 5,000 native people living at Point Chehalis at one time. However, by the time Gibbs conducted his studies, decades of disease outbreaks along the Northwest coast, including a devastating 1853 smallpox event known as the “Big Sick,” had killed many of them (“the smallpox having nearly finished its work,” he wrote, not unfeelingly). A census taken at the 1855 treaty conference counted 217 Lower Chehalis, but it seems probable there were many more, since not all of them attended the negotiations. Gibbs noted that some bands of the Lower Chehalis, including the Whishkah and Wanûlchi, had no interaction with whites and therefore their population could only be estimated. “Even within the recollection of American settlers the population was very considerable,” he said. 

The people of Tsihalis village relied on fish as the mainstay of their diet. They also gathered shellfish, hunted sea mammals such as sea lions, and seasonally ate berries and edible plants. Elk and deer provided game, and the forests of cedar and spruce provided the materials for houses, clothing, baskets, and more. Their location virtually guaranteed they would interact with early white explorers. Captain Robert Gray, sailing north from his first, unsuccessful attempt to cross the Columbia River in April 1792, safely navigated into Grays Harbor the next month. He gave the Tsihalis people a musket, some cartridges, and axes and knives. It may have been their first encounter with white people.

Point What?

Later that year, during Captain George Vancouver’s expedition to map the Northwest Coast, crew member Joseph Whidbey (who has a state park, not to mention an island, named for him), named the point after Lieutenant James Hanson. The name didn’t stick, although his name for Grays Harbor, in honor of the American sea captain, did. In 1841, the Wilkes Expedition mapped it as Chickeeles Point, a clear attempt to Anglicize “Tsihalis.” A few settlers in the 1850s briefly called it Point Armstrong, for the owner of a mill on the Chehalis River, and in the late 1870s it was known as Point Peterson for a local family. Gratifyingly, Point Chehalis has prevailed.

Economic potential 

The Wilkes Expedition’s journal shows that the commercial potential of Grays Harbor was on the minds of these explorers. Wilkes noted that Grays Harbor was the only ocean port between the Columbia River and the Strait of Juan de Fuca (Willapa Bay, 15 miles south, also faces the ocean but its shifting shoals make navigation difficult for large ships), and its position and surrounding forests were obvious advantages for trade. But, he warned, the sandbar-laced entrance was dangerous.

Grays Harbor Light

The 1849 California gold rush and attendant San Franscisco building boom created a huge demand for Northwest timber, provoking the United States government to address navigation safety at Grays Harbor. In 1854, it set aside a lighthouse reserve that included both capes, Point Brown on the north and Point Chehalis on the south. It took another four decades of pressing Congress for funds, but it wasn’t until Grays Harbor started exporting timber in earnest in the 1880s that money was finally appropriated. In 1898, the 107-foot Grays Harbor Light was completed about two miles south of the tip of Point Chehalis, about a half-mile from the ocean on a high point that has since become surrounded by shore pine forest. The lighthouse is the tallest in Washington and third-tallest on the West Coast.

A series of keepers ran the lighthouse, keeping its powerful Fresnel lens lit, until 1939, when the U.S. Coast Guard took over. The agency automated the light, visible 27 miles at sea, in the 1960s. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977. In 2004, the Westport South Beach Historical Society took ownership, although the Coast Guard maintains an easement for maintenance access and the lighthouse continues operating today. For a nominal fee, you can take a tour. If a 135-step climb doesn’t deter you, it’s worth the effort to admire the interior metalwork and views from the lantern room.

The South Jetty

Although the lighthouse sits outside the park boundary, it’s one of the human-made landmarks that tells the story of this place. 

The other is the South Jetty, also constructed in 1898 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains it and dredges the harbor entrance. Erosion threatens the dunes, which have been rebuilt several times. From atop the dunes at the northern end of the park, we spotted a hardy group heading toward the jetty, fishing poles in hand. It’s a popular fishing spot, though one that requires care and common sense because of slippery rocks, strong winds, and big waves.

Cold-water surfing is also popular here, and dozens of neoprene-clad surfers bobbed in the waves like black seabirds, waiting for the right break.

Together, the lighthouse and the jetty enable navigation to Grays Harbor, historically the most important ocean-facing port in the state. Grays Harbor stretches 15 miles from its mouth to its main tributary, the Chehalis River. Along with multiple creeks, four other rivers empty into the harbor as well: the Wishkah, Johns, Humptulips, and Hoquiam. The rivers penetrate deep into the forests, where annual rainfall measured in feet encourages rapid growth of valuable trees like Douglas-fir, cedar, and spruce.

Green gold and fish

Surrounded by some of the richest timberland in the world, logging the surrounding hills for “green gold” began in earnest in 1881. In 1890, a year after Washington became a state, Grays Harbor’s 13 sawmills exported 60 million board-feet of timber. A typical 2,000-square-foot house might require 12,600 board feet of lumber to frame, so Grays Harbor mills shipped enough timber to frame nearly 5,000 large houses that year alone. 

Alert to the possibilities of this resource-rich region, the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1892 selected Grays Harbor as its northern terminus and built a line to Ocosta-by-the-Sea (now a ghost town inside Bottle Beach State Park). Grays Harbor provided half of all the spruce used by the United States in World War I. By the mid-1920s, it was the leading timber port in the United States.

While the timber industry boomed, commercial fishing also increased. Westport became an important base for commercial fishing starting in the 1920s and for sport fishing after World War II. The 1974 federal court decision in U.S. v. Washington, known as the Boldt decision, upheld treaty tribes’ rights to half the annual salmon catch and slowed the Westport fishing industry considerably. To ensure enough salmon was available for the tribes, ocean fishing was restricted to a shorter season and lower daily catch limits. The decline of natural resources industries — and, for that matter, the decline of natural resources after decades of unregulated extraction — has hit the Grays Harbor area hard. Today a town of just over 2,000 people, Westport’s economy struggles.

A state park golf course?

It makes sense, then, that locals are interested in bringing new economic development to Westport. In 2019, Westport Golf Inc., a Seattle-based company apparently founded for this purpose, wrote to State Parks with a proposal to build a Scottish links-style golf course and inn inside Westport Light State Park. 

A Scottish links course is the oldest style of golf course, traditionally built on coastal land not usable for farming or livestock. Tough dune grasses thrive in the sandy soil, and these are cut to create the various holes of the course. That coastal environment makes links courses challenging to play, as there are few if any trees and golfers must content with near-constant wind. Scotland’s venerated St. Andrews is a links course.

State Parks held a community meeting in Westport in October 2019 and in August 2020 signed an agreement with Westport Golf Inc. that lays out what the company must do for its proposal to be considered. Environmental and ecological studies, the first phase of the agreement, are projected to be completed by late 2021.

It’s not the first time a golf course has been proposed here. In 1995, the Port of Westport’s Master Plan called for selling the then-Port property to private developers for a destination resort. The proposed Links at Half Moon Bay would have included a golf course, resort hotel, and hundreds of condominiums. Concerned about the environmental impact of the project, especially the potential for golf-course chemicals infiltrating the high water table, the nonprofit Friends of Gray Harbor sued. After years of back-and-forth in the courts and with several state agencies charged with overseeing environmental regulation and permitting, the project was approved in late 2005, and construction commenced. But within a few years, the developer, Mox-Chehalis LLC, abandoned the project, leaving behind a few half-started fairways.

So far, reaction to the latest golf course idea is mixed. Some support it for the tourism revenue it could generate, seeing the golf resort as one way Westport can revive. Others are wary of potential gentrification and the impact of a golf course, and the chemicals required to maintain it, on nearby homes, native shore pine, rare dune plants, and the unusual intertidal wetlands habitat. 

I’m not a golfer, but I can’t help but wonder about the practicability of a golf course in a town that receives an average of 76 inches of rain per year. Given the weather on the June day we visited, golf might be a stretch.

The golf course idea fits with State Parks’s 2016 plan to develop four pilot park sites as Recreation Concession Areas (RCAs), one of which is Westport Light. The purpose of the RCA is “not to privatize the parks system but to provide park visitors with amenities that are beyond State Parks’ financial capacity or expertise, while generating revenue to help operate the park system.” RCAs are a consequence of constant underfunding of Washington State Parks, which relies on Discover Pass sales and overnight accommodation fees for two-thirds of its budget.

One plus one equals one

That a golf course is again under consideration is due, at least in part, to a land purchase and park merger. What’s now a single, 603-acre state park fronting the Pacific Ocean used to be two. Westhaven State Park included the north parking area and the shoreline along Half Moon Bay. About a half-mile south, Westport Light State Park included a few hundred acres from the beach to the lighthouse. In 2015, the state Recreation and Conservation Office awarded Washington State Parks a $1.9 million grant to create a single recreation destination by acquiring the 300 acres between the two parks. This was the same area proposed for a golf course resort 20 years ago. In 2016, the parks formally merged into Westport Light State Park, although the entrance sign to Westhaven still greets visitors entering on the north access road. 

A 1.3-mile paved trail runs through the grassy dunes above the beach. A joint project of State Parks, the city of Westport, the Port of Grays Harbor, and the state Department of Natural Resources, it extends all the way into Westport and makes for an easy walk along the ocean and Half Moon Bay. Even on a blustery day, families and couples tramp along, bent into the wind and holding on to rogue hats and strollers. Benches and a few viewing platforms are spaced along the way.

Especially poignant are memorials erected to those who loved the sea and, in some cases, lost their lives to it.

What about the beach?

The beach is part of the Seashore Conservation Area, a state designation that encompasses 62 miles of Washington coastline, including 13 miles along the South Beach area between the mouth of Grays Harbor and the mouth of Willapa Bay. Appropriately, visitors don’t see any dividing lines between the state park and Seashore Conservation Area, or between the state park and the trail extension into Westport. 

They also don’t see any physical remnants of Point Chehalis’s history, beyond the jetty and the lighthouse hidden in the pine trees. This gorgeous stretch of coast draws people to play on the beach, walk on the trail, and fish on the water, just as it has done for millennia.

Fact facts about Westport Light State Park

• 603-acre, day-use park with nearly two miles of saltwater beach
• 1.3-mile accessible paved trail with viewing platforms and interpretive signage
• Restrooms, one with outdoor and indoor showers
• Benches, picnic areas with wind shelter
• Saltwater fishing, clamming, crabbing, beachcombing, birdwatching
• Surfing (swimming discouraged because of rip tides)
• Park brochure
• Park map