Different Colors of an Oregon Coast Landmark: Seaside Promenade

Published 10/27/2011

(Seaside, Oregon) – It's been around since the 1920's, originally a primarily wooden structure. It was actually more of a boardwalk in its early days.

Fairly quickly, the now-famed Seaside Promenade became the concrete construct we all know and love – the major landmark that so typifies Seaside along its mile and a half.

That doesn't mean it always looks the same these days, however. Different moments in time can drastically transform the colors here. Like above, when the darkness of a late sunset on a cloudy day descends on the stony behemoth, turning Tillamook Head rather blue while the city lights cast a major orange cast on much of everything else.

A similar scene erupts on a winter's day, but with an added twist this time of a hailstorm. It looks like snow, but it's not.

Sometimes the Oregon coast creates these puzzling days of dark clouds yet paradoxically bright spots of sun in some areas. Such a day happened here in Seaside, but add to that the particularly rugged look of the sand creating this long dark patch in this scene. It's mesmerizing.

The last moments of summer are still evident in this late day shot of the southern end of the Prom. The beach grass still looks robust, and the leaves on the trees are only starting to show the signs of age. A strong mist is beginning to hit the area.

Later this day, as dusk more definitively envelopes this chunk of shoreline, so does the mist. And the entire scene turns a lot more purple as the lights of the town blink on.

At the very northern end of the Prom, at the 12th Ave. access, the last rays of the sun create quite the canvass of wonderful colors. It's late winter, and you can tell the beachgrass is wind and storm-battered from the season. It's kind of scruffy looking.

This end of the Prom is one of the most interesting and yet neglected. Walk a bit farther north, towards the mouth of the Necanicum River, and you'll find more unbroken sand dollars than anywhere on the rest of the Oregon coast. The reason is various nutrients that appeal to sand dollars and phytoplankton flood this area because of the outflow from the Columbia. This causes an unusual amount of sand dollar beds to proliferate along either side of the Necanicum, including the Gearhart area.

Then, because few venture out to this end, those sand dollars often lay untouched by human hands.

Seaside sits about six miles north of Cannon Beach, and four miles from the Highway 101 and Highway 26 junction. Other neighboring hotspots include Manzanita, Nehalem and Astoria.

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