Highway 101: Brookings to Florence Oregon

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Brookings

   Brookings is the first Oregon town you meet coming up Highway 101 from California, and it greets you with unusual warmth. A quirk of the terrain and the warm winds that come down the Chetco River valley make it the mildest spot on the Oregon coast, nicknamed the banana belt, with winter temperatures that are several degrees above anywhere nearby. That climate suits flowers. More than ninety per cent of the Easter lily bulbs grown in the country come from fields around here, and in early summer the farms along the road are a sea of white trumpets.

   Read the complete Brookings write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Brookings is where the day begins. Next is Gold Beach.

2. 2. Gold Beach

   Gold Beach sits at the mouth of the Rogue River on Oregon's southern coast, a small town of about two and a half thousand people strung along Highway 101 and the harbour. The name comes from the gold that miners found in the black beach sands in the 1850s, and the town has spent the years since selling something less glittering but more lasting, the river itself. Jet boats run up the Rogue into the wilderness from here, carrying visitors past bald eagles, ospreys and black bears, and the river is one of the original eight in the national Wild and Scenic Rivers system.

   Read the complete Gold Beach write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Gold Beach comes up about 104 km into the recorded legs. Next is Coos Bay.

3. 3. Coos Bay

   Coos Bay is a working harbour on the Oregon coast, and the working is visible. Stacks of timber and wood chips wait on the docks, ships load cargo, and the town's main street faces the water, with a mixture of old brick buildings and low modern shops. About sixteen thousand people live here, making it the largest city on the Oregon coast, and the bay itself is the largest natural harbour between San Francisco and the Columbia river, a fact that drove the logging and shipping industries for more than a century. A slow decline in timber has pushed the town to find other ways to earn a living.

   Read the complete Coos Bay write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 378 km into the recorded legs you reach Coos Bay. Next is Florence Oregon.

4. 4. Florence Oregon

   Florence sits at the mouth of the Siuslaw River, where the water meets the Pacific among tall dunes and spruce forest, and it is both a handsome old river port and the doorway to the largest expanse of coastal sand dunes in North America. The Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area runs for about eighty kilometres along the coast to the south, an extraordinary landscape of sand ridges up to sixty metres high, interspersed with forest islands, lakes and wetlands. Some dunes are used by dune buggies and others are quiet, protected zones where you can walk for hours and see no one.

   Read the complete Florence Oregon write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Florence Oregon closes the day.