Highway 101: Cannon Beach to Olympia

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Cannon Beach

   Cannon Beach is known for a rock. Haystack Rock, a sea stack of basalt, rises 235 feet from the sand just off the shoreline, and at low tide you can walk right up to it and look into the pools at its base, where starfish, anemones and crabs cling to the stone. In spring and summer, tufted puffins nest on the upper ledges, along with gulls and cormorants, and volunteers set up scopes so that visitors can see the birds. The rock is a protected refuge, so climbing is forbidden, and giving the nesting birds a wide berth is part of the rules. It also played a starring role in the 1985 film The Goonies, which brings its own crowd each summer.

   Read the complete Cannon Beach write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Cannon Beach is where the day begins. Next is Astoria.

2. 2. Astoria

   Astoria sits at the very mouth of the Columbia River, the last town of Oregon before the water spreads out into the Pacific, and it has the weathered, salt-cured look of a place that has spent two centuries facing wind. About ten thousand people live here, on steep streets of Victorian houses that climb a hill above the docks. It is the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies, founded in 1811 as a fur-trading post by John Jacob Astor's company, and Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1805 to 1806 camped nearby at Fort Clatsop, where a replica now stands.

   Read the complete Astoria write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Astoria comes up about 41 km into the recorded legs. Next is Aberdeen Washington.

3. 3. Aberdeen Washington

   Aberdeen, Washington, is a gritty harbour town on the grey, rain-soaked edge of the continent, and it is not trying to impress anyone. It sits at the head of Grays Harbor, where the Chehalis and Wishkah rivers empty into a broad, shallow bay, and its fortunes have always followed the timber. In the early twentieth century this was one of the biggest lumber ports in the world, with dozens of mills, and the old waterfront still shows traces of that heyday: wooden pilings, rusty gantries and brick storefronts that have seen better decades. Rain falls here for much of the year, more than two metres of it, and everything wears a coat of moss.

   Read the complete Aberdeen Washington write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   about 165 km into the recorded legs you reach Aberdeen Washington. Next is Olympia.

4. 4. Olympia

   Washington's capital is a small, rather relaxed city at the very southern tip of Puget Sound, and it is where Highway 101 makes its last stand. The road, which begins its long loop of the Olympic Peninsula here, runs up the coast of the continent from California, and anyone arriving from Newport in Oregon will have been riding beside the Pacific for much of the way. Olympia itself sits on the shore of Budd Inlet, with the white Capitol dome on the hill above and the ferry-scarred waters of the sound just below.

   Read the complete Olympia write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Olympia closes the day.