Dune grass greening up

Winter wind has deposited new sand on the dune top and fore dune. The buried European Beach Grass is responding by quickly greening up and soon the grass will be lush and growing thick. As noted before, the dune top/peak is 3-4 feet higher than last year and quite noticeable. If your walking on Discovery Trail from the Seaview Beach Approach to Beard's Hollow, you can see the back side of the new dune height from the trail.

The height addition and slope of the fore dune make it pretty steep to ascend as the sand is still loose and soft so be careful!

Cleveland Rockwell: Fisherman Driven Ashore

Another great Cleveland Rockwell painting. I'm pretty convinced that this painting is of the old Chinookville/Chinook Point/McGowan village sand bar area just upriver from Fort Columbia. That dark headland in the distance is a dead ringer for Cape Disappointment. Squalls would rise quickly in the Columbia River and Ocean area, putting fisherman at risk of loss of boat or life. The Book "Chinook by the Sea" (available in Ilwaco TRL library) tells tales of many fisherman lost at sea due to brutal storms. The fisherman were usually buried along Baker's Bay where they were found. The Cleveland Rockwell exhibit will be from May (20th) through September of this year (2011) at the Columbia River Maritime Museum. Here's the CRMM link:   http://www.crmm.org/maritimemuseum_exhibits_upcoming.html

Cleveland Rockwell

Cleveland Rockwell was a US Coastal surveyor out of Portland in the late 1800's. He did some fabulous surveys in the Pacific and Clatsop county area, particularly along the Columbia River.

He also painted landscapes. This painting was titled "Weather Beach". When I first saw it I was amazed, there's North Head without a lighthouse and there's Beard's Hollow looking pretty in the afternoon sun. The ship on the horizon is crossing the bar on a following wind perhaps. That big landslide is also visible above the stagecoach and is still visible today. The perspective also got me interested, perhaps he was on a large piece of driftwood, shipwreck or large rock? above the beach? I've checked out this picture from the beach many times, trying to find the right spot where I think he painted the coast from and I'm pretty sure that it is North Head. He also did another great painting of another local area that I'll post as soon as I find it.

I always liked the name "Weather Beach", as in "Oysterville-Weather Beach Road" or "Tarlett-Weather Beach Road". The beach we live on is where the weather hit first and thus it was the beach of storms, wrecks, stranded men, brutal winter winds and rains. Shipwrecked men, cast on to the beach, to struggle to find anyone at all to save them from exposure, starvation, thirst.

Yet by the time Rockwell painted the above image, the beach was changing fast, becoming a rural area with stage coaches, docks, wharves, soon a train, then roads. In a 3 generations from Robert Gray (1792) and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1805-06), the beach would change forever.

The Columbia River Maritime Museum is going to have a showing of Rockwell's paintings sometime this year. Stay posted!