Winter, Water, and Whales

Maybe I should have included this part of my trip in my last post because there was an awful lot of sand. I didn't, so here it is...


GREY

After our adventures in Death Valley my family and I drove up the coast into Oregon.  We rented a beach house in a place called Brookings. It was beautiful because the house was on the corner of a river and the ocean.

The front porch of our house

Since it is winter, most of the time we were there the landscape was quite grey and cold. When we walked down to the beach, the water was grey. When you looked at the sky, it was grey.

One day we were on a beach that was a short drive from our house. As I was looking out at the ocean I saw a large spray of water far off in the distance. For a second I thought I was going crazy, but then I saw another one. When another one came up I pointed it out to my family. Soon we realized that these were whale spouts.

This was totally worth the cold and windy walk.  We were soon off, looking for a better place to see the spouts more clearly. When we reached a parking lot on top of a cliff we stopped, only to find that it was already occupied with several people armed with binoculars and very heavy duty cameras. They told us that the whales that we were seeing were grey whales.

Watching Whales at Harris Beach State Park

We sat up there with them for hours. Whenever a whale came up everyone would cheer a little. I wish I could have taken a picture of them, but they were too far away for our camera.  However, I can describe what I saw through binoculars, because it was really incredible.

As well as a spout, the whale crests the water, so you see his back skimming the water.  If you are lucky, he jumps a little and then a tail comes flipping out of the water to splash down. This scene played out once or twice every fifteen minutes and the rest of the time we stared at the horizon, looking for more.

Breaching Whale
Photo Courtesy of Rogue River

The next day we decided to try another place that was even higher up. To get to this one you had to hike out a bit.  The whales were there again!

I received a pamphlet from one of the ladies at the first place telling me about migration patterns of whales and such.

I found that the whales can be seen on the coast of Oregon almost all year round.  They feed in Oregon and Alaska in the summer and fall. In early December the entire grey whale population goes south to Mexico and southern California.  Migration reaches its peak around the first week in January (that is when we were there).  Then around late February they start heading back up to Oregon and Alaska again.

Around another corner there seemed to be another surprise. As we were walking we heard a noise, it sounded like a strange mix of someone laughing and a dog barking.

The famous Harris Beach sea lions
Photo Courtesy of Harris Beach State Park

We looked out towards the water and couldn't see anything except for some rocks. We took out our binoculars and looked again. There was one rock that had a couple dozen things on it that looked suspiciously like logs, except they were moving. I realized that we had found the beach's famous sea lions! We walked over a hill and the sea lions were so loud that I could still hear them all of the way back to the car!

It was so cool to walk up and down the beach watching the grey whales, in the grey water, under a grey sky.

Beach at Harris State Park