The Oregon Coast: Three Hundred Sixty Miles of Common Ground

Stand anywhere on the Oregon coast and you are standing on public land. All of it. From the Columbia River mouth in the north to the California border at Brookings in the south, the beaches of Oregon belong to the public by law, and the law has been successfully defended every time someone has tried to change it.

This is not how most American coastlines work. In most coastal states, the beach below the high-tide line is public but the dry sand above it is not. Private resort development can legally fence the upper beach, charge for access, or simply post signs. Oregon resolved that question in nineteen sixty-seven with the Beach Bill, which recognized public easements across the dry sand up to the line of vegetation. It built on a nineteen thirteen law that had declared the ocean shore a state highway, a categorization that made it difficult to privatize.

The coast itself is one of the most geologically active and ecologically rich shorelines in North America. The Oregon Coast Range, which runs the length of the state just inland from the shore, is young by geological standards, still being lifted by the subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath the North American Plate. That same subduction zone is responsible for some of the largest earthquakes on Earth, including the magnitude nine event of January twenty-sixth, seventeen hundred, which sent a tsunami across the Pacific that flooded and damaged coastal towns in Japan the next day.

The Indigenous people who lived on this coast for thousands of years, the Tillamook, the Coos, the Siletz, the Lower Umpqua, the Siuslaw, the Coquille, were primarily coastal and estuarine peoples. They fished the estuaries and the tidal zones, gathered shellfish and sea mammals, and built communities that depended on the interface between land and sea. The Siletz Reservation, established in eighteen fifty-five and dramatically reduced in subsequent decades, is the surviving home of many of these peoples' descendants. The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians today occupy a much-reduced sliver of their original territory, with a reservation centered near Lincoln City.

The economy of the Oregon coast has shifted across the centuries from Indigenous trade to fur trade to logging to fishing to, today, a mix of fishing, shellfish aquaculture, recreation, and retirement communities. The Dungeness crab fishery, centered on the ports of Newport, Astoria, and Coos Bay, is the most valuable commercial fishery on the Oregon coast and one of the most economically important in the Pacific Northwest. It opens each December and fills freezers across the western United States.

Driving the coast road, Oregon Route one-oh-one, from Astoria to Brookings is one of the classic American road trips. It takes a full day if you stop at the viewpoints. You will want to stop at the viewpoints.