Perpetual Chaos
Exif Data
Canon 5D MK II, F/22, ISO 50, 1/4 second, 2 stop soft grad.
The central Oregon coast is a special place to me. The sheer beauty alone brings thousands of visitors a year during all kinds of weather conditions. My personal favorite time to visit is during a good storm. Granted the light is usually not the best and the lack of definition in the clouds will take away some interest in the image for some. It’s what comes after the storm, the time when the clouds start to break and the light show beings. Sometimes this includes rainbows, big thunderheads, and even lightning.
I actually car camped here the night before and the rain poured and poured. I thought I was crazy for staying here but I wanted a shot of Thor’s Well in the sunrise light and I knew the storm was supposed to break up around daybreak. At first light I could see nothing but solid gray skies over the ocean the air was a muggy and warm as walked down onto the rocks. The tide was a little too low to get the shot I wanted of Thor’s Well so I continued exploring the various channels and inlets that form Cape Perpetua. One thing that amazes me about Cape Perpetua and the Cooks Chasm area is that there are no fences or signs telling you to stay back or not to walk on the rocks, in fact there is a paved trail that leads down to the rocks where your exploration begins. So now you are totally free to walk where you please depending on how brave you are. Make sure you know the tides well because one wrong move could end your life. I’ll touch more on this later in another post.
This shot here is the result of waiting out the storm and watching the clouds to the north start to break up. I could see the sky behind me was already clear so I knew that once the sun came up all the way over the horizon the light would be too harsh and contrasty to pull off a decent shot. This channel is the largest in the area and when the waves are rocking you better take cover or an umbrella. I have video of this where the waves are hitting and shooting up at least 30ft. With the wind that blast through there at times even someone a 100ft away can get wet. In my color version the water is a beautiful aqua green color. While the light was really nice here I still wanted to capture that stormy feel with this image and the aqua green water and pinkish red sky really did not convey that feeling to me. After converting it to black and white the mood and feeling stood out very well to me and I knew this was the feeling I was going after.
A little history about Cape Perpetua taken from Wikipedia
For at least 6,000 years Native Americans hunted for mussels, crabs, sea urchins, and clams along the coast near Cape Perpetua. Evidence of their lives can still be found in the huge piles of discarded mussel shells that lay along the shore near the Cape Perpetua Visitor Center.[1][3]
Several early explorers sailed past the cape. The first recorded passage was by Bartolomé Ferrelo in 1543; then came Sir Frances Drake in 1575 and Martin d’Aguilar in 1605. The cape was named by Captain James Cook on March 7, 1778 as he searched for the Pacific entrance to a Northwest Passage. Cook named the cape Perpetua because it was sighted on St. Perpetua‘s Day.[4][5]
The area became part of the Siuslaw National Forest in 1908. In 1914, the United States Forest Service cut a narrow road into the cliff around Cape Perpetua and constructed a wooden bridge across the Yachats River, opening travel between the small community of Yachats and Florence, Oregon to the south. The wooden bridge was replaced in 1926 with a steel structure. The Cape Perpetua section of the Roosevelt Memorial Highway (now Highway 101) was built in the 1930s.[3][4]
In 1933, a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp was built at the foot of the cape just north of Cape Creek near where the Cape Perpetua Visitor Center is located today. The CCC constructed Cape Perpetua campground, a network of trails, and the West Shelter observation point near the top of cape. During World War II, the West Shelter observation point was used as a coastal watch station and a large coastal defense gun was temporarily installed.[1][4][6] An SCR-270B radar was installed at an undetermined location to take advantage of the height of the promontory.[7]
The Cape Perpetua Shelter and Parapet were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.[2]
