This hike was really cool. It was actually several hikes we did on our family vacation. We went to the Cape Perpetua Scenic area, and hiked several trails:

• Cape Cove/Captain Cook/Trail of Restless Waters trails
• Giant Spruce Trail
• St Perpetua/Whispering Spruce Trails

The only track I recorded was the last one (the toughest one since we had to hike up about 700′ to get to the top of the cape). I honestly didn’t think we were going to hike that much, but it just kind of happened. There is a LOT to see in this area and it was all really neat – we kind of just kept going and going and going.

Since we had Thor with us (his first trip to the beach) we started out wanting to go see “Thor’s Well”. We went down the Cape Cove/Captain Cook trails and shortly got to the beach. There was a neat overlook of a bunch of tide pools:

We continued down until we found the spouting horn (which wasn’t spouting too much on this day) – we thought we saw Thor’s well, so we went down and walked on the rocks out to it.

Thor’s well is a really interesting natural phenomenon – a hole in the ground that keeps taking on water. It has an underground cave from the ocean, that both fills and empties it as the tides go in and out. It was pretty cool to watch the water coming in and going out and making huge splashes sometimes.

After watching Thor’s well for a bit we headed back up the loop trail and then decided to head up the “Trail of the Restless Waters” up to Devil’s Churn. It is a beautiful trail along the coast where you get beautiful views like this (looking south):

And some of the beautiful old Spruce trees along the way:

And shortly, we got to Devil’s Churn, which although the surf was relatively calm, was still pretty “churny”:

We watched Devils Churn for a few minutes and then headed back – pretty quickly we were back at the visitor center. We decided to take off down the Giant Spruce Trail to go see a 500-600 year old Spruce tree. The trail was longer than we thought – about a mile each way. We eventually got to the big spruce tree, and it did not disappoint:

It is hard to grasp how large it was. The sign said it had a 40′ circumference, so if my math is correct, that means it was about 12 feet across!

Thor was enjoying himself while exploring around the tree:

After basking in the shade of this huge ancient tree, we headed back to the car for some lunch. We ate on a bench on the beautiful deck around the visitor center. After lunch, we decided to try and hike the St Perpetua trail, which went up to the top of Cape Perpetua. There is a road up there as well, but we thought we were up for a challenge, so we headed up. We all did really well, and make it to the ovelook area, which has a beautiful view looking south down the coast:

We had an intersting encounter with a lady on the overlook. She really liked Thor and proceeded to tell us a long story about her career as a veterinary technician and how she loved animals. She was with her father and they soon left, so we headed on around the loop trail at the top of the hill and found the “West Shelter” – it was built by the CCC back in the 30’s and was used as a lookout in WWII.

After completing the upper loop and getting one last look at the view from up top, we headed back down. We were all getting tired, but I guess Thor was getting REALLY tired (and hot), so partway down, in a cool spot of loose dirt, he just laid down to cool off:

It was actually pretty funny – he was a good sport all day and we hiked a lot farther than we had originally intended to. I think we did about 7 miles or so that day. Anyway, after a short rest, we continued down the trail. The trip down seemed to go a lot faster than the trip up, and we were soon back at the car. We were all kind of tired, so we were done hiking for the day – we had hiked most of the trails in this area. We decided to drive south to see the Heceta Head lighthouse and then we headed back to our rental house.

What a wonderful way to spend a day of vacation! Hiking in beautiful forest at the coast!