A landscape photographer's tour
Crescent City, CA to Bandon, OR

Keith's travels in California and the Pacific Northwest - April-May 2007

This photo-diary covers a driving trip up the coast from San Francisco in April/May 2007 along the Pacific highway. Now I've returned, I've included some of my travel photography from this trip in the main Gallery, and updated any info that may be of help to people who come across these pages as part of their planning for driving tours of the California and Oregon coasts, looking for places to stay or sites to visit. It's a great place for a vacation, or just a road trip up the Pacific coast to photograph some of the scenery. If you've any questions about the hotels/inns/motels where I stayed, then please do feel free to drop me a line.

Early morning in Crescent City and the weather is fine.

Driving round the parts without trees anymore give a feel for when the entire area was covered in huge forests.

I'm now heading up highway 101 towards Oregon.

So, on into Oregon...

And the first nice beach of the day

Almost entirely devoid of other people too...

Some of the beaches are a bit trickier to get to, but you can rest assured I didn't have to walk very far.

I also stopped of at Port Orford for a coffee - this is as far south as I got on my last visit to the Oregon coast in 2004

As you can see the weather was starting to get a bit less pleasant.

Excellent coffee :-)

Heading north I cross a bridge, where the designer obviously knew there was some spare money in the budget, or just had too much spare time.

Today I'm staying in Bandon.

A very nice room at the Bandon Inn, with a view over the harbour and old town

The view is clearer in this shot

or from below

or even from my room (arrowed above) at night

At the harbour

One of the things worth knowing about the Oregon coast, is that there is an active subduction zone just off out in the ocean.

If you are visiting, then do make a mental note of these signs if you see them...

Here's a convenient sign near the beach, explaining things (note excellent chip shop to left ;-)

A very nice beach too...

Meanwhile, back in Bandon I spotted this shop window, illustrating my point about lime green from the other day in Point Reyes Station

So many presents for people back home...

I'd forgot, I'm in the land of cranberries - what else can we make with them?

More presents taken care of ;-)

Then I headed off to the lighthouse at the other side of the harbour entrance.

The view is from the entrance jetty and shows some of the rather large driftwood they get on this coast.

Here's a few more bits thrown together by the waves

While I was standing on the jetty, I suddenly realised I was being watched

And another one

To the north, it looked a bit rough...

heading back into Bandon, there's a bridge where the centre section lifts for boats to get through

You can see the counterweights in this view

Tomorrow, I think I may go up to Florence...

NEXT DAY