Oregon Coast: Part the 2d

More of the Oregon Coast: us. It's always pretty coolish, and blowy here. If you want to live on a bluff, you need a lot of stairs.
Horses on the beach. Question: If you're walking your dog, you carry a pooper-scooper and a small bag. What do these people carry (if anything)?
Port Orford: Launching a crab trap
Some other people caught a whole mess of crabs, and are cleaning them.
...and throwing the scraps over to the side for the gulls to fight over:

Posters about a middle-school art project: What we did this summer:Fourth of July
Running on the beach
Further along; Lots of evergreens are sort of prickly - but the Port Orford Cedar is kitty-soft...

Murals on walls, yes - but these - very fine - murals on a sewage treatment plant?

Puget Sound King Crab - rare -nothing like the Alaska King Crab, but even uglier...
They're big on coffee out here, being near to Seattle (where Starbucks started) and all
This is a gorsebush. Characters in Winnie the Pooh are always falling into a gorse-bush and having to pull out the prickers one by one. I always sort of thought they made up the name...

The Shore Acres Botanical Gardens: A Monkey-puzzle Tree

Pods of the Yucca plant - a staple of Indian diet.

The Oregon Dunes. The Federal govt protects dunes and things; this is the State's and they let people recreate on it. The dunes are quite high, and move around a bit. This is ATV heaven, so we had to do it:

The tricky thing is climbing hills: If you roar all the way up, you could find a very sudden and steep downhill on the other side. If you slow down too much near the top, it is very easy to get bogged down ten feet from the summit; then you have to back all the way down to a flat place. You don't dare go slow anyplace - you sink in.

The campground nearby was ATV City - also late-night-celebration city...

Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden (Barb is a botanist by education, so we did not miss any botanical gardens): Heather garden
Ice plant - an introduced species. Its good for kintting loose sandy soil together with its dense root system. Unfortunately, we're told, down in California it also absorbs all available water - and it's very good at spreading to places where it wasn't invited - so that if there's a very heavy rain it keeps on absorbing water until it's so heavy that, if on the edge of a cliff, it brings plants, root, soil and houses tumbling down.

More beach

A Grey Whale skeleton. They are mostly mouth, it looks like.

There were elk all over
It was rutting season. One of the things bull elk do, do intimidate other bulls, is enlarge the apparent size of their horns by adding plant matter...
Another thing they do is but things. This bull butted a tree so hard he got stuck in it and couodn't get out. So he died; when this tree wasdiscovered, years later, all the elk except the horns was gone, and the tree trunkhad grown up around the horns. You can see the horns sticking out of both sides of the trunk: Abalone cookoff.
The Oregon Caves: We've al seen limestone caves; this one is billed as one of the world's few marble caves. Marble, of course, is just limestone that's been squeezed and heated more...

These look like regular stalactites that have been partially melted

Low bridge...
A tree root that has penetrated the cave, 50 feet underground.

The lodge - quite old. Once there was a humoungous flood in the river, which half covered the house and threatened to wash it away. The rangers saved it by breaking all the windows on the downstream side, so that the water and trees could exit through the lodge. Messed the building up some, but saved it.
Face jugs - sold in the store. We couldn't resist this one.

Oregon Coast, Part the 1st

Off down the Pacific coast: Neat fallen tree next to our campsite - found art. The oregon coast - the mountails come right down to the sea; lots of windey roads...
And wind: they call these flag trees. The wind is always blowing.
Beautiful.
Sea anemone. Sitting there, looking all pretty and innocent, until some little critter gets close enough for it to grab and digest.

Kelp heads: The kelp are anchored to the bottom - where there are rocks - and the tops float like this. All sorts of fish and animals live in these beds: fish, shellfish, sea otters. etc. Sun worshippers: Pelicans mostly, but at the bottom, Harbor Seals

Never seen so many vertical rocks sticking straight up; They call them Sea Stacks

The seastacks are rocks of something called the Franciscan Melange - very hard rocks that remain standing after all the softer rock has been washed away.
Tillamook, Oregon -the Air Museum. This is a really big bird - adapted from a Boeing 707 especially to carry around parts of the Apollo Moonshot vehicles.

The museum is in a Blimp hangar. They built a bunch of these around the country, to house blimps that were used for antisubmarine patrols in World War II. As blimps are giant bags of gas with an engine and a cabin attached, you can guess the hangars would have to be big:
Picture when they were building them. Of the 17 blimp bases built around the country, there are only a couple of hangars left. There were two here, but one was used, after the war, to store 143,000 bales of hay, and it spontaneously combusted. Pretty spectacular fire, they say.

This is said to be the lrgest all wood building in the world (well, it does have 100 tons of steel in it, but the largest mostly-wood building).
There is a permanent colony of owls living in the hangar.
A blimp somebody built for fun --- wonder how many UFO reports this one generated

A target drone

Catalina flying boat. These were great for rescuing downed flyers,, and for supplying places where there was no runway.
A smaller amphibian, the Grumman Duck. Used a lot after the War.
World War I SPAD fighter - French made, but a lot of the Americans flew it. This has the 'Hat in a Ring' logo of Capt Eddie Rickenbacher's squadron.
Japanese Oscar fighter plane. There are very few of them left, since they used them for kamikaze missions toward the end of the War.

DC-3: perhaps the most successful airplane ever built. A workhorse way back before World War II; there are still some of them flying commercially, around the world.

Then, the Tillamook creamery. A cooperative.
The production floor. They gave us a lot of detail. There's a good deal to making cheese just right. One poster told us of an early farmer who made his own; occasionally the cheeses would explode.
Watch out, it might get you!
Now, that's a lot of cheese.
The mascot, or something.