Tourists can't resist beauty of Cannon Beach

CANNON BEACH, Ore. — Cannon Beach is never going to make it into one of those sunny summer songs by someone like the Beach Boys or Jan & Dean.

No "Warmth of the Sun" on this windswept strand. No "Surf City" and "two girls for every boy." Not with everyone so bundled up it's impossible to make gender judgments.

Most of the year, the sandy spot near the northern end of the Oregon coast is a beach like many in the Northwest, with cold, fog, wind and not a little rain.

For its pink-cheeked fans, Cannon Beach is the best. A long, deep beach filled with strolling families, teens playing Frisbee, frolicking dogs off leash, guys riding those funky, low-slung rental tricycles that look like scuttling crabs, kids exploring tide pools.

Dads struggle to get kites into the sky, moms slather sunscreen on cheeks while pulling sweaters over little heads, couples share bottles of Chardonnay by fires behind wind breaks of driftwood logs.

All the action takes place in front of the impossibly high, steep, massive presence of Haystack Rock. Towering 235 feet up from the sand, it seems twice that height when you're standing just a few feet away.

Twice a day, the tide rolls back, exposing thick colonies of orange and purple starfish on the rocks. The starfish are so thick in places that it's impossible to see the stone underneath.

Seagulls soar through the gray sky, alighting on sheer cliffs of the rock to scan the ocean for treats to swoop down upon. Bright green sea anemones wave their hair-like tentacles just below the water's surface.

Out on the offshore rocks are the tufted puffins, which look like stubby penguins preening; their cuteness makes their likenesses big sellers among stuffed animals at local stores.

It's all so blissful that it makes it easier to forget that you are hardly alone on Cannon Beach, even during an off-season weekday.

The parking lots are full. The two-lane roads through town are jammed.

Visitors with grumbling stomachs put up with the half-hour wait for lunch at the Lazy Susan Café, the popular place on Hemlock Street that passes for Cannon Beach's main drag.

The sad price of popularity

The tide of tourism has been held in check better than in Seaside, up the road, where high-rises and tacky T-shirt shops have filled in the space close to the ocean.

In Cannon Beach, it's all been planned in a pretty orderly fashion, but the place is filled to overflowing much of the time. More than a few publications have compared the town to Carmel in California or Provincetown on Cape Cod.

Old-timers decry the crowds, saying that things are better down the coast in Manzanita or Gleneden Beach. But they don't have Haystack Rock. Such is the price of beauty and popularity.

The churning waters and rocky coast are what gave Cannon Beach its name. The Stark, a 19th-century American frigate, sank during an ill-fated attempt to enforce international-property claims against interloping British warships. The waves threw one of the ship's cannons on the beach, and the name stuck.

Fishermen in the 19th century were followed by farmers coming west across the Oregon Trail. By the early 20th century, the place was popular with artists, and the first trickle of tourists began to venture south from Seaside, already a popular oceanfront-vacation spot by the 1890s.

Resting in peace

Cannon Beach is hard to leave. Some never do. The nearby Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, known as "Terrible Tilly," closed in 1957 and is now used as a vault for the ashes of sea lovers who want to be close to the waves for eternity.

Ecola State Park, at the north end of town, is the southernmost spot reached by the Corps of Discovery led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1806. The views through the forest from the picnic area are still striking, stretching down the coast past Haystack Rock.

Man has changed the view over the past nearly 200 years. But a lot of Cannon Beach fans would agree with Clark's original assessment.

"A butifull Sand Shore," he wrote in his diary.

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