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Home / Washington Business - July/August 2006 / Travel Washington: Long Beach |
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Travel Washington: Long Beach |
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Written On: July/August 2006 |
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Written By: by Ron Dalby |
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Una Boyle, executive director of the Long Beach Peninsula Visitors Bureau, makes one thing quite clear at the start of any conversation—Long Beach isn’t just a single town, it’s a community of incorporated and unincorporated villages strung out along a 28-mile-long, 1.5-mile-wide spit of sand running north from the mouth of the Columbia River. The Pacific Ocean thunders ashore on the west side and Willapa Bay gently laps the sand to the east. The two largest towns—and the only ones that are incorporated—are Long Beach and Ilwaco at the southern end of the spit where it attaches to the mainland. The unincorporated communities include such places as Oysterville, Surfside, Nahcotta, Ocean Park, Klipsan Beach and Seaview.
"We have lots of little communities here," Boyle said, "and they all take themselves very seriously."
The occasionally salty-tongued Boyle makes no bones about what brings people to the area, "It’s the beach, the beach, the beach. No question about it."
And it is indeed a beautiful beach, fully 28 miles long, firm enough to drive on, perfect for building sand castles, and just right for sitting around late evening campfires sharing stories with friends and family. An arch over the road leading to the beach from downtown Long Beach proclaims this to be the longest beach in the world, although some Australian visitors a couple years ago disputed that.
You do, however, want to avoid swimming in the Pacific Ocean off this beach. The water is cold and the currents are dangerous. According to Boyle, the ocean usually claims one or more lives every year, usually people who ignore the oft-repeated and frequently posted warnings about staying out of the water. It’s still okay, though, to take of your shoes and socks and get your feet wet at the water’s edge. Just don’t turn your back on the ocean when you’re this close.
It takes no brilliant flash of insight to realize that the major industry on this peninsula is tourism. From the moment you turn onto the peninsula at one of the two entry points in either Ilwaco or Seaview, you are besieged with leisure-time attractions—everything from bumper cars to charming, cozy antique stores. The problem, as always in one of these kinds of communities, is separating the hucksters—even though Jake the Alligator Man can be lots of fun—from those who are truly worth your time.
Making your way around Long Beach or Ilwaco, you’re better off on foot than in a vehicle. There are just too many tiny shops and other attractions to take up time that would otherwise be spent in the heavy traffic along the main highways through the towns.
Ilwaco, for example, offers walkers a charming line of shops overlooking the boat harbor. Several galleries, fishing charter operators and restaurants—specializing in fish and chips, of course—line the route, and it’s possible to spend a day or more just visiting the owners and considering their wares.
Boyle notes that commercial fishing is no longer particularly important on the peninsula but tourism fishing—meaning charter fishing—is a big draw. One of the reasons is a fishery almost unique in the nation—the opportunity to board a charter boat in quest of a sturgeon.
"I only know of maybe two places in the country where you can get sturgeon charters," Pat Gentry said. She was behind the counter at Sea Breeze Charters overlooking the Ilwaco harbor.
In the interest of conservation, sturgeon bag limits and size restrictions are confusing, but Sea Breeze and other operators in Ilwaco can help anglers sort through the maze. About $85 gets you on board one of these boats for a 5:30 a.m. departure. Gentry says they stay out until everybody has a sturgeon to bring home—or all day if the fish aren’t biting. Fishing was a little slow at the end of May, but she figured it would pick up and get pretty good by early June.
Next door to Sea Breeze, Randy and Marie Powell own and operate the Shorewater Gallery, which offers an eclectic collection of mostly local art but with some offerings from as far away as New Zealand.
"We call it Ilwaco Harbor Village," Marie said while indicating the line of shops overlooking the harbor. She’s a former high school math teacher turned artist and gallery owner.
"It shouldn’t be the Long Beach Peninsula," Randy grumbles with a smile. "It should be Cape Columbia." He is, of course, referring to the area as a whole and an existing name which might tend to send his potential customers to the town of Long Beach instead of his and Marie’s spotless gallery in Ilwaco.
Working with the other galleries in Ilwaco, Randy and Marie help organize three "art walks" every summer on the second Thursdays in July, August and September. Then they pack up and head south of the equator and spend the winter months in New Zealand. Sort of an endless summer, they said.
While wandering through the towns, by all means you should stop at Scoopers in Long Beach for an ice cream cone. They’ve been scooping up huge cones in downtown Long Beach for decades. Boyle laughs when she describes a phone call from a New York lawyer, fondly remembering the summers he spent on the peninsula as a child, who was only interested in knowing if Scoopers was still there and if the store still sold licorice ice cream. When Boyle confirmed that the store was still there and the licorice ice cream was still available, the lawyer booked his vacation on the peninsula.
Boyle figures catering to retirees is the second-largest business on the Long Beach Peninsula. One reason for this, she says, is that " ... it used to be the cheapest damn place in the world to buy property." Those days may be ending as the recent real estate boom seems to have reached the Long Beach Peninsula along with the rest of the country.
Tourism and retirees aside, the other industries are oysters and cranberries.
Fresh, succulent oysters were a major impetus in settling the peninsula in the mid-1800s. Oysterville, toward the north end of the peninsula on the Willapa Bay side, came into being because of the immense quantities of oysters found in the waters to its front. With no existing conservation ethic in those years, the oysters were pretty well fished out by late in the 19th century. Now, however, thanks to aquaculture—oyster farming, to be specific—oysters are once again booming in Willapa Bay. Drive north to Oysterville and you can buy fresh oysters just minutes out of the water. There are none better.
A commonly offered statement about Oysterville, made only halfway in jest, is that every building in the town is on the National Historic Register. Certainly a lot of the buildings in the community are historical structures, but probably not quite every one qualifies for the listing.
As you drive north on the peninsula to Oysterville, you’ll pass acres and acres of cranberry bogs. That’s the final industry of significance on this spit of sand. There’s even a free cranberry museum with a self-guided walking tour through the cranberry fields. There’s a pretty good chance that a small part of your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners came from the fields on the Long Beach Peninsula.
A sense of history
To walk the beach near Seaview and Long Beach or to hike the trails in Cape Disappointment State Park is to tread in the footsteps of history. Though they ended up spending the winter on the Oregon side, Captains Meriweather Lewis and William Clark and the Corps of Discovery made their first landfalls in sight of the Pacific Ocean on what is now the Washington side of the Columbia River. According to his journal, Clark hiked some four miles up the beach after working his way overland from Cape Disappointment. This would place his turnaround point somewhat north of the existing community of Long Beach.
Today the cape and several other sites on both sides of the river are part of the Lewis and Clark National and State Historic Park. Cape Disappointment State Park on the western edge of Ilwaco is probably the most spectacular part of the park on the Washington side with two lighthouses, a large campground, an extensive system of hiking trails, and a Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center on a promontory overlooking one of the lighthouses. To walk these trails and to study the exhibits in the interpretive center is to begin to get a sense of where we have come from in the last 200 years.
Some would call this two-century journey progress, others would argue the point. However you feel about this issue, Cape Disappointment and the Long Beach Peninsula are worth your time. You can relax on the beach or you can delve into the rich history of the region. This destination adds up to the perfect vacation—a chance to learn something and to have fun while doing it.
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