Pacific Beach State Park

The stretch of coast from Grays Harbor north to the Moclips River is known as the North Beach, and it has a character all its own. The land is low and open, the wind comes off the water almost constantly, and the beach is broad and firm enough that people have long treated it as a road, driving the sand at low tide. Behind the dunes lie small towns and shore-pine forest; ahead is nothing but the Pacific.

For the Coast Salish peoples this was travel and gathering country long before it was a park, and the mouth of Joe Creek within the park was a waypoint on journeys up and down the coast. The land was later homesteaded in the 1890s, and the coming of a Northern Pacific rail spur in the early 1900s briefly turned Pacific Beach into a seaside resort, drawing city families out to the ocean by train.

Where the park stands today once rose the Pacific Beach Hotel, a grand rail-era resort rebuilt as a modern year-round destination after fire took the first one in 1914. Then the world turned. During World War II the Navy took over the hotel and grounds and ran an anti-aircraft gunnery school here, with trainees firing at targets towed by planes flying the coastline offshore.

The military never fully left. After a brief Air Force radar station, the Navy returned in the late 1950s to build something secret: a station in the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, wired to hydrophones on the seafloor that listened for the propellers of Soviet submarines far out in the Pacific. It ran quietly through the Cold War until it was decommissioned in 1987, an unlikely history for so peaceful a beach.

The state parks commission had begun assembling the public beach next door in 1972, buying the old Ross campground and adding homestead land through the 1980s, so that today the recreation and the quiet have replaced the guns and the listening gear.

The great draw here is the razor clam, a fast-digging bivalve that lives in the surf-swept sand of only a handful of beaches on the planet, most of them on this Washington coast. On the days the state opens the season, diggers gather at low tide, watch for the tell-tale dimple a clam leaves in the wet sand, and race their shovels or clam guns down before the animal digs itself away. It is equal parts skill, timing, and good humor, and a limit of fat six-inch razors is a prize worth the cold hands.

Even off the clam days there is plenty to do on the tideline. The beach here is a beachcomber's shore, giving up agates, sand dollars, driftwood, and the occasional glass float, and the wind makes it fine kite country. In spring the gray whales pass offshore on their way north, and the birdlife along the dunes and creek mouths rewards a slow, watchful walk.

The park itself keeps things simple: campsites and picnic tables behind the dunes, restrooms, and a short path to the sand. That plainness is the point. You come here for the beach and the weather and the tide, not for attractions, and the low-key park just gives you a comfortable place to stand at the edge of the ocean.

The park sits right in the town of Pacific Beach, reached by State Route 109 up the coast from Ocean Shores and Hoquiam, with the neighboring beach towns of Moclips just north and Copalis Beach and Seabrook to the south. A Discover Pass is required to park, and camping is popular enough on clam-tide weekends and in summer that a reservation is wise.

This is real open-Pacific coast, which means it can be cold, gray, and windy even in July, and the ocean is genuinely dangerous: the water is frigid, sneaker waves come without warning, and rip currents run strong, so wade cautiously and always keep an eye on the incoming tide. Come dressed for weather, bring a windbreak and a thermos, and give yourself time to simply walk. It is the kind of honest, uncrowded beach that the popular resort coasts lost long ago, still here for anyone who drives out to the end of the North Beach road.

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