Willapa Bay
US-101 along Willapa Bay
South Bend, WA
A vast, tide-swept estuary sheltered behind the Long Beach Peninsula, so clean and productive that it grows a large share of the nation's oysters and draws birds by the tens of thousands.
Willapa Bay is one of the quiet giants of the Washington coast. Sheltered behind the long sandbar of the Long Beach Peninsula, it is the second largest estuary on the Pacific coast of the United States, spreading across more than 260 square miles of water, mudflat, marsh, and eelgrass meadow. It is also, by wide agreement, one of the cleanest and least developed estuaries of its size left in the country, fed by clear rivers off a lightly settled watershed.
That cleanliness is not just scenery. It is the reason Willapa Bay is one of the great oyster grounds of North America, and the reason it teems with life. Twice a day the tide floods in from the ocean and drains back out, and each turn of the water sets a huge, patient engine of mud, shellfish, salmon, and birds back into motion.
What Guests Love
- Watching the enormous tides pour in and out across miles of mudflat and eelgrass
- Fresh oysters, raised in the bay and served just up the road from where they grow
- Huge flocks of shorebirds and waterfowl stopping over on the Pacific Flyway
- The quiet, unhurried feel of the working oyster towns around the bay
Worth Knowing
- The bay's mood changes completely with the tide; check a tide table, because low tide reveals vast flats and high tide fills them
- Much of the productive tideland is privately farmed for oysters, so look for public access points and refuge trails rather than wandering the flats
- This is a wet, misty corner of the coast most of the year, so come dressed for it
- The mudflats are soft and the channels deep and fast; do not wade out onto the flats without local knowledge
Details
South Bend, WA
Learn about Willapa Bay
An oyster capital
People and oysters have been bound together on this bay for a very long time. The native Olympia oyster grew here in beds so rich that they drew settlers early, and the little town of Oysterville, on the peninsula side of the bay, was founded in 1852 as the center of a booming trade that shipped shellfish as far as San Francisco. Overharvesting eventually exhausted the native beds.
In the 1920s growers introduced the larger Pacific oyster, which took to Willapa Bay so well that it now spawns and settles naturally on its own. Today the bay produces a large share of the oysters grown in the United States, farmed on tideland leases and sorted in weathered plants along the shore. To eat an oyster in one of the bay towns is to taste the water itself.
A crossroads for birds
Willapa Bay sits squarely on the Pacific Flyway, the great north-south highway of migrating birds, and its miles of exposed mudflat are one of the richest feeding stops along it. In spring and fall the flats fill with shorebirds, dunlin, sandpipers, plovers, and dowitchers probing the mud, sometimes rising all at once in shimmering clouds.
Through the colder months the bay hosts huge numbers of ducks, geese, and swans, and its edges shelter herons, eagles, and the occasional peregrine falcon hunting the flocks. For anyone who loves birds, a rising or falling tide here is a spectacle, the whole bay alive with wings.
Reading the tides
More than almost any other place on the coast, Willapa Bay rewards paying attention to the tide. At low water the bay pulls back to reveal a glistening world of mudflats and channels, oyster ground and eelgrass, stranded and shining. A few hours later the same view is a broad sheet of water lapping at the grass, with only the channel markers to hint at what lies beneath.
The safest and most rewarding way to experience it is from the edges, at public accesses, boat launches, and the trails of the nearby national wildlife refuge, with a tide table in hand. The flats themselves are soft and cut by deep, fast channels, and they are best admired rather than walked.
A working shore
For all its wildness, Willapa Bay is a working place, and its human life is as much a part of the draw as its birds. The towns around the bay, South Bend and Bay Center and the peninsula villages, run on oysters and fishing, and their weathered plants, tide-stranded boats, and shell-paved lots give the shore an honest, unpolished character.
That working culture reaches back generations, to the native Olympia oyster beds that first drew settlers and the schooners that once carried shellfish south to San Francisco. To buy oysters at a shop beside the water, or eat them at a bayside table, is to take part in a trade that has shaped this quiet corner of Washington for well over a century.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near South Bend
Oysterville
Across the bay on the peninsula
A tiny, beautifully preserved 1850s oystering village on the National Register of Historic Places, with a white clapboard church and quiet lanes.
Willapa National Wildlife Refuge
South end of the bay
A refuge of salt marsh, tideflats, and old-growth forest protecting the bay's wildlife, including an ancient cedar grove on Long Island.
South Bend
On the northeast shore
A small working town that calls itself the Oyster Capital of the World, with a handsome county courthouse and oyster plants along the waterfront.