An Unusual Sandscape...

My husband and I like to walk the beach on occasion and for the most part the sand is smooth, even and pretty easy to walk on.  Not so on one of our sunny days last week.  We drove to Agate Beach (a nice beach about 2 miles from our home) to enjoy a leisurely walk.  We had no idea what we were in for until we got there.

It was as though we just stepped off a spaceship onto the surface of the moon!  I had never seen so many dunes...hills and valleys...and really interesting patterns in the sand before.  There were little mounds perfectly sculpted by water and wind and blowing sand that from a distance looked like some of the sandstone formations I have seen in some of Southern Utah's canyons.  But these were not hardened over centuries of wear and tear from the elements; these were still just little mounds of soft sand that fell apart if you touched them.

Walking in the sand was a real work-out, too.  We tried to stay on top of the dunes, but occasionally we encountered a dead-end, requiring us to slide down the dune into the canyon (relatively damp and easier to walk on) and then up the other side of another one.  From the parking lot to the water's edge must have been about 2 blocks!  (Or, at least, it seemed like it!)  We were exhausted by the time we got to the water...and then we had to go back

 We shall never forget our outing to the beach on this particular day.  We are going to try and go back in a couple of weeks (when it stops raining) and see what has changed.  And change it will, because that is the nature or the beaches on the Oregon Coast...ever changing.





Exhausted!










Hills and Valleys!

Alien Markings?




Moonscape? or Sandscape?  It was awesome!