Monday June 26, 27.5mi/44.3km

Cape Perpetua Campground (190.1/140ft) to Florence town (217.0/20ft) (OR) +0.6mi trails to campground/hostel

I packed up from my campsite and hiked out at 7:30. There was a little mile-long trail that led back toward the beach, and it went through all these huge old spruce trees.

As I expected the beach was foggy, as it usually is in the early morning.

I hiked a nice trail for a couple miles that paralleled Highway 101, but high above it, so I didn’t know it was there.

Soon the trail ended and I had to walk on the highway for 6 miles. That wasn’t great, but at least it had some pretty good views.

This was a really fun row of houses to see, the beach towns up north always had colorful houses like this. As I’ve hiked further south, the houses have become more gray and boring.

More nice views from the roadwalk.

After a couple hours of roadwalking, I dropped down to the beach. There is no town near here so the beach was almost perfectly empty!

A couple miles ahead, I could see Haceta head in the distance, covered in clouds.

Slowly the clouds shifted away, and it seemed like it was going to be sunny by the time I got there.

I left the beach on this neat little path called The Hobbit Trail.

I climbed 500 ft up to the top of Haceta Head, where I had a good view back to the beach I had just hiked.

A few minutes further down the trail and I came to the Haceta Head Lighthouse, a very popular tourist attraction.

I went inside to look around, and didn’t get very far since they weren’t giving tours today.

It’s not a very tall Lighthouse but it was very well kept.

The view to the north from the lighthouse lookout point:

I walked on the tourist path to the parking lot and saw the Cape Creek Bridge, which I would soon be walking over.

The architectural style of the bridge was very unique, it looked like a double layer of bridge. I followed the access road up to the highway, where I crossed the bridge and soon came to a tunnel.

The tunnel was only 200 m long, but it was very narrow and a little scary to hike inside with the traffic. I pressed the button that makes the yellow lights flash to warn of bicyclists and pedestrians in the tunnel. Having got through that obstacle successfully, immediately after I hiked by the Sea Lion caves attraction.

In the summertime, the sea lions are not in the caves, but laying out on the rocks so I didn’t see the point in paying the admission fee. I continued on the road walk for 3 miles, frequently getting great views of the beaches ahead.

After the road walk was a blissful 6 miles of beach walking. It was pretty windy but since I’m walking with the direction of the wind so I didn’t care.

At the end of the beach was a jetty, marking the outlet of some inland river.

So I followed the jetty inland to a series of roads, which traveled along a beautiful little bay for a while.

Pretty soon I entered the town of Florence, which had a bunch of quirky little attractions.

And I believe Exploding Whale Park is a reference to the 1970 incident when the town tried to remove a dead whale with dynamite.

I ended my day at the Florence hostel, a cute little house just a block off the main strip of Florence.

The main rooms were very nice, and the kitchen seemed to have everything including a bunch of breakfast items!

I got settled into my room, went to the Safeway to buy some food, then made dinner showered, and did laundry. I spent the rest of my evening doing planning for the final week of this hike, and my travel to the next hike!