Cape Perpetua

The cape got its name from a passing ship. On March 7, 1778, Captain James Cook sighted this stretch of coast from the sea, too rough and stormy to land, and named the headland for Saint Perpetua, whose feast day it was. Cook never set foot ashore. The name stuck anyway.

Long before that, this was the southern country of the Alsea people, who camped by the creek mouth below the cape. They left behind great shell middens, mounds of clam and mussel shells built up over centuries of gathering, that you can still walk past along the trails today.

The cape holds a harder history as well. Amanda’s Trail, which climbs the headland, is named for Amanda De-Cuys, a blind Coos woman who in 1864 was force-marched some eighty miles up the coast to the reservation at Yachats. A soldier who was there, Corporal Royal Bensell, wrote in his diary that on the last day her bare feet dragged over the sharp volcanic rock of Cape Perpetua, leaving “blood sufficient to track her by.” The trail was built in the 1990s to remember her and the many Native people displaced in those years.

In 1933 a Civilian Conservation Corps camp opened at Cape Creek, and the crews built much of what visitors use today: the picnic areas, the first trails, and the sturdy stone West Shelter at the summit, perched about 800 feet above the sea. They also helped push the Roosevelt Highway, now Highway 101, along this wild edge of coast.

The whole headland began as fire. More than 30 million years ago an undersea volcano laid down thick beds of basalt here, and slow uplift and endless waves have been shaping them ever since into the cape and its rocky shelf. The sea does the fine carving.

Thor’s Well began as a sea cave whose roof collapsed, leaving a hole perhaps twenty feet deep that fills and drains with every surge, so that at the right stage of the tide it looks for all the world like a drain emptying the Pacific. Nearby, Devils Churn is a long, narrow slot where incoming waves compress and burst upward, and the Spouting Horn shoots spray through a hole in the rock like a geyser.

All three are at their most dramatic on an incoming tide with a good swell, and all three demand respect. Sneaker waves here have swept people off the rocks, so it is a place to watch from a safe distance, not to climb down to.

The rocky benches below the cape hold some of the best tidepools on the coast, protected within a marine reserve. At low tide they brim with life: orange and purple ochre sea stars, fat green anemones, clusters of purple urchins, mussels, and hermit crabs. Along the shore, watch for black oystercatchers working the rocks and murres on the offshore stacks.

From the headland this is a prime whale-watching perch. Gray whales pass offshore on their long migration in winter and spring, and a group of them lingers to feed off this coast through the summer, often close enough to spot their spouts from the overlook.

Inland, a short walk up Cape Creek leads to the Giant Spruce, a Sitka spruce roughly 500 years old, more than 185 feet tall and some 40 feet around. It stood taller still until the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 tore the top thirty-odd feet off in winds above 160 miles an hour. It grew from a fallen nurse log, so its base now arches on root legs over the gap where the old log rotted away.

Winter is storm-watching season, when big swells turn Thor’s Well and Devils Churn into thundering spectacles and gray whales begin moving south past the cape. Dress for wind and rain, and keep well back from the water.

Spring brings the northbound whale migration and the first calm, clear days, with wildflowers out on the headland.

Summer is best for the tidepools and the trails, with the calmest seas and a resident group of gray whales feeding just offshore. Time a tidepool visit to a low tide.

Fall quiets the crowds and brings the storms back, a fine season to have the overlooks nearly to yourself.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.