Haystack Rock

Haystack Rock is far older than the beach it stands on. Around seventeen million years ago, enormous floods of lava poured westward across what is now the inland Northwest, some of it reaching all the way to the coast. There the molten rock cooled into hard basalt, and over the long ages that followed the softer sediments around it wore away while the tough basalt held on. What is left is a sea stack: a lone pillar of ancient rock the ocean has not yet been able to grind down.

The rock's shape, a broad cone with a rounded top, gave it the name Haystack, a name shared by a few other rocks along the coast but claimed most famously by this one. At 235 feet it is one of the tallest sea stacks in the world you can reach on foot, and it anchors the long crescent of Cannon Beach like a natural monument.

When the tide pulls back, the base of Haystack Rock becomes one of the best tide-pool grounds on the Oregon coast. In the shallow pools and on the rock's wet lower flanks you can find ochre and purple sea stars, green sea anemones that close around your fingertip, hermit crabs, chitons, limpets, snails, and the occasional nudibranch, all living packed together in the narrow band the tide covers and uncovers twice a day.

Because it is so easy to reach, the area is protected as one of Oregon's Marine Gardens, a place where the animals may be watched but not collected or disturbed. On many low tides, volunteer interpreters from the Haystack Rock Awareness Program set up on the sand to help visitors find creatures, name what they are seeing, and understand how fragile the little world at the rock's feet really is.

Look up from the tide pools in spring or early summer and you may catch the bright orange bill of a tufted puffin among the grass and burrows on the rock's upper shoulders. Haystack Rock is one of the very few places on the West Coast where these comical, hard-to-see seabirds nest close enough to shore to watch from the beach, and it draws birders from far away in the puffin months, roughly April into July.

The puffins share the rock with gulls, cormorants, black oystercatchers, and other seabirds, and above the high-tide line the whole stack is part of the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge. Climbing the rock is forbidden, which protects both the nesting birds and the climbers, and keeps this one crowded ledge of wild coast as busy with life as it has been for ages.

The rock sits toward the south end of Cannon Beach's main strand, an easy walk from the town's shops and from several beach accesses off Hemlock Street. There is no charge to walk the beach, but the tide rules the visit: the tide pools and the base of the rock are only reachable at low water, so look up a tide table before you go and time your walk for the lowest tide of the day.

Dress for wind and wet feet, keep an eye on children near the returning water, and step carefully among the pools, staying on bare sand and rock rather than on the animals. Give yourself a slow hour or two to walk out, meet the tide-pool creatures, watch for puffins, and simply stand at the foot of a rock that has weathered the Pacific for millions of years. It is the kind of place that makes the drive to the coast worth it on its own.

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