Cape Perpetua and Seal Rock

This post wraps up the remainder of the places we visited while in the Newport area. If you missed the post about the lighthouses you can see it here: Yaquina and Heceta Head Lighthouses.

Cape Perpetua is best visited during high tide, while Seal Rock is best visited during low tide. I’m thankful for Trip Advisor where I find all of these useful tips!

Cape Perpetua

This park has some amazing displays of the Pacific during high tide. Sometimes pictures just do not do it justice and a video is a better representation, so I uploaded a couple of videos that I hope will display properly here.

The first one is Thor’s Well. This is a deep hole that fills and empties continuously during high tide. It’s really cool!

The second one shows the powerful surf crashing against the rocks and getting the camera operator (me!) wet. By the way, that’s not me yelling in the background; it’s some random stranger. 😉

We started the day driving up to the scenic viewpoint since we couldn’t find any parking at the Thor’s Well area. It was worth it for this view!

When we went back down to the parking lot we were able to find a spot, so we got out and explored the Thor’s Well area with all the incredible displays that happen twice a day at high tide.

Thor’s Well

The boys liked catching tadpoles in the tide pools.

Then we took the scenic walk over to the other section of the park to see the Devil’s Churn.

A little Peace and Love for the walk.

The Devil’s Churn is an area where the surf comes in and fills up this little inlet. By the time we got there the tide was not at the high point anymore so we didn’t see quite the display we saw at Thor’s Well, but still cool nonetheless.

Devil’s Churn

We even saw whales from here! It’s very hard to get a good picture of one, but can you see the spray out there? The grey spot under it is a whale and the spray was where it just spouted.

Seal Rock State Park

Seal Rock is best visited during low tide for the beautiful tide pools. Jake and I love searching all the tide pools for colorful sea creatures, while Chris and Jesse play ball on the beach.

Seal Rock

During our 3 weeks in Newport we had 9 straight days of cloudy, foggy and drizzly weather. It was also very cold for August! I can’t complain because other than those 9 days we had beautiful weather the rest of the time we spent in Oregon (a total of 10 weeks). But I can certainly understand how some people that live in dreary weather for extended periods of time can experience Seasonal Affective Disorder and depression. I was really glad when the sun finally came out when we moved on to our next stop at Cape Lookout which I will write about next time. Cheers to sunny skies!