Ecola State Park: The Whale, the Word, and the Corps of Discovery
Near Cannon Beach, Oregon
Tillamook Head rises about twelve hundred feet above the Pacific just north of Cannon Beach, and this dramatic headland marks the southernmost point reached by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Most people think the Corps of Discovery's western limit was the mouth of the Columbia River, but in early January of eighteen oh six, William Clark led a party of twelve men, including York, Clark's enslaved manservant, and Sacagawea, south over this very ridge in search of a beached whale.
News had reached Fort Clatsop, the expedition's winter camp, that a dead whale lay on the beach south of Tillamook Head. Clark recognized the opportunity immediately. The Corps was short on food and had few trade goods left. Whale blubber and oil meant calories, and the bones could yield usable grease. Clark set off on January eighth, eighteen oh six. When his party crested Tillamook Head and looked south, Clark recorded in his journal what was in his view, and it remains one of the finest pieces of writing in the expedition record. He called it the grandest and most pleasing prospect which my eyes ever surveyed.
They descended to the beach and found the Clatsop people had already claimed the carcass. Clark traded for about three hundred pounds of blubber and several gallons of oil. The expedition called the inlet where the whale lay Ecola Creek, after the Chinook Jargon word for whale, ekoli. The name stuck. The area became Oregon State Park land in nineteen thirty-two, when the original four hundred fifty acres were deeded to the state.
The park today preserves some of the most spectacular coastal scenery in Oregon: old-growth Sitka spruce forest, sweeping views of Haystack Rock and the Oregon coast, and the trail over Tillamook Head that still traces the exact route Clark walked more than two centuries ago. You can stand where he stood and look at nearly the same view he described.
