The house on the hill at far upper right is as close to the ocean as the rich folks can own property. Get provisioned up and head back to the beach for a few more days. The employees bought the grocery store from the owner when he wanted to close it, and they’re keeping it running, so when they say, “thanks for coming in”, they really mean it. The local merchants are glad to get your business- they’re a small town trying to make a living, not a bunch of chain stores. There are two grocery stores, half a dozen gas stations, two with propane, fresh water at the Visitor’s Center on the south end of town, and a free dump at the beach end of 5th Place in the middle of town. When you run low on groceries or fresh water, just drive up to Gold Beach. The stretch of Oregon coast from Pistol River to Gold Beach has these huge chert seastacks, formed at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean out of radiolarian skeletons, and scraped off the Juan de Fuca Plate as it dives beneath the North American Plate. Those people make me nervous – we’re used to a slower pace of recreation. Smaller pullouts are better – you get less traffic from the day trip people swooping in, jumping out, taking a photo, and zooming off again. We usually spend the night at the northernmost pullout or down by the mouth of Pistol River just north of the park, and our days at different spots in between. It’s all public land, and Oregon state law allows you to park (not camp) in any pullout not otherwise marked for twelve hours at a time, as long as you aren’t in a state park. Our night spot – settled in and waiting for it to get dark enough to see the phosphorescent waves. There are a dozen or more pullouts overlooking the ocean and the huge offshore rocks that characterize this section of the coast. Where I boondock is south of town between Gold Beach and Pistol River State Park. The only town of any size is Gold Beach, at the mouth of the Rogue River. I call it Pistol River, but nobody’s ever heard of that, which is to be expected because there’s really very little in the way of towns and other development on this part of the coast – just the way we like it. Ginny Evans dropped by to help us with the heavy workload – I think everyone but me is taking a nap. We have spent weeks at a time here the last three years, watching the ocean and enjoying the cool summer weather. Last month I wrote about the great boondocking stretch of beach south of Yachats, OR – now I’ll tell you about a similar and equally spectacular section of the Pacific Coast Highway that’s just as boondocker-friendly.
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