Highway 101: Coos Bay to Cannon Beach

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. 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

   Coos Bay is where the day begins. Next is Florence Oregon.

2. 2. 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 comes up about 176 km into the recorded legs. Next is Newport Oregon.

3. 3. Newport Oregon

   Newport is a working harbour first and a tourist town second, which is what makes it so likeable. The town sits on Yaquina Bay, where a long, graceful bridge swings across the water on a series of arches, one of the last great works of the engineer Conde McCullough, who designed many of the bridges along the Oregon coast and finished this one in 1936. Underneath, the bay front is crowded with fishing boats, crab pots and processing plants, and the barking of sea lions floats up from the docks, where they sprawl on the pontoons and ignore the visitors.

   Read the complete Newport Oregon write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   about 362 km into the recorded legs you reach Newport Oregon. Next is Cannon Beach.

4. 4. 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 closes the day.