I posted a few of these photos before. These are pictures of the area where I used to live near the Pacific Ocean. They are all from the same small region. It gives you an idea of the geography and the vegetation - coastal temperate rainforest and small hills (generally around 90 to 600m elevation).
Photo thread: the central Oregon coast
Brandon Lopez
Grayson Barnes
Here's a map showing the specific area:
Isaiah Price
where do you live now? did the earthquake scare you away? cool thread
Tyler Scott
Here's the tree canopy from a closer distance. They are mostly evergreen trees, especially Douglas Firs and spruces.
Anthony Morris
can you get lost in those forest, or it isn't isolated enough?
looks really beautiful
Adam Hill
Here's a typical hillside facing the ocean. They are usually rocky and steep. Some people climb them, but with the coastal winds and fog, it's very slippery and challenging despite their short heights.
I live in the Portland area. Actually, so do a lot of people I went to school with on the coast. It's where the jobs are.
John Watson
sry to be a downer, but I've read a lot of shit about how homelessness is completely out of control. SOme dude got stabbed 17 times for asking a homeless person to get off his lawn? It sounds out of control
cool pics btw
Hudson Thomas
People do get lost. It's not THAT isolated (there are towns and farms/cabins throughout the area), but the forest is very thick, and there are a lot of small valleys and streams. But if you walk in the direction of the sunset, you will eventually reach the ocean and the main highway on the coast.
Parker Campbell
Yeah, Portland is a mess now. I don't live within city limits, so I don't have to deal with city politics as much, but it's a crisis. Local leaders are incompetent.
Pic related is from inside of the forest after a wind storm. You can see some of the broken trees. The coast gets a lot of wind.
Blake Lopez
Sometimes there are small meadows or grassy areas inside of the forest. This often happens when there is a large rock underneath the ground, where trees cannot grow proper roots.
Christian Reed
I wish it was that green all year round here. In winter, this place looks like fallout 3 with all the trees losing their leaves
Mason Brown
Here are a few views FROM a forest meadow. These are very nice places to visit, but are often remote and take some hiking to reach.
Joshua Wright
Lincoln Gonzalez
Jack Long
Snow is relatively uncommon on the Oregon coast; it's usually snowy for only a couple of weeks or so per year, sometimes less. And it usually melts once the weather system changes, and warmer rain arrives.
Luis Wright
wish i had such a pretty nature close to my home.
buenos aires is like illinois, hundred after hundred of kilometers of plains and farms.
Robert Taylor
Here's an active logging area inside of the forest. Only a limited amount of forest is available for logging, since a lot of it is protected land. In this area, you can see several stages of logging, from the newly-logged area to areas of trees replanted decades ago.
Nolan Miller
Kevin Moore
David Brown
At least you have warm beaches. The ocean is always fairly cold in this region, and the beaches are often foggy/rainy.
Owen Barnes
Oliver Peterson
Here's a trail inside of the forest. There aren't that many. People always talk about building more, but the rain and the weather makes them difficult to maintain. After a couple of years, a trail will usually turn to mud and then return to the forest.
Aaron Torres
nah, we don't. brazilians were the lucky ones.
our beaches looks more or less like that, with brown sand, and cold water.
Elijah Flores
You can see how the terrain keeps the population low. There is not enough flat land for very much farming, and the many rows of hills make roads and other facilities more expensive to build.
Alexander Jackson
Another photo of the THICC tree cover. When people from outside of the region visit the area, this is usually one of the things they notice first. Surprisingly, despite the massive amount of fuel, we don't have that many forest fires - there are usually periods of rain even during the summer due to the ocean currents.
Julian Wright
This is what the ocean usually looks like from sea-level: chilly, foggy, and full of strong currents from Pacific Ocean wind patterns. I went swimming in the ocean sometimes, but most people prefer rivers/lakes.
Mason Hughes
Here's a lumber mill from the area. The main local industries are logging, fishing, and tourism.
Angel Ramirez
Here is a rocky area on the beach with several tidepools, where ocean water fills holes in the ground and warms up, creating a habitat for various marine creatures. You can see a trail leading to the tidepools from above. These are popular areas to harvest mussels and other edible sea animals.
Brody Gomez
The PNW is the most beautiful place on Earth. Thanks for those pics, OP.
Josiah Hughes
And here's a view straight down the coast, where you can see rows of hills reaching the ocean. The combination of the rain, hills, and sea-air creates a unique biological environment.
Leo Gomez
Reminds me of Idaho
Isaac Lopez
Here are some houses near the ocean. You can see how the amount of flat land is very, very limited in many areas.
Jonathan Diaz
And here's something I thought was kind of neat - this is the shadow of a hill on the surface of the nearby ocean. People claim that the shadows create their own small marine environments, since they have different light/dark patterns from the rest of the ocean, but I haven't looked into the research on that.
Aiden Clark
Photo:
Samuel Garcia
...and, one more photo from inside of the hills, showing some different layers of trees.
Grayson Gutierrez
Here's a cheeky local farmer who burned an impression of the Mona Lisa into the hillside near a highway a few years ago. A lot of people on the coast, I tend to notice, are oddballs. They are somewhat different from redneck/rural types in other regions, probably because the environment itself is kind of odd. You have to have a certain psychology to farm near coast.
Brandon Smith
how many hippies live over there?
Adam Bennett
There are some, although in this particular area, there are no large cities. So they tend to be rural/farmer hippies rather than urban ones. And they tend to be older.
Adrian Perry
Any idea how those high banks are holding up these days? I have heard a lot of reports of erosion and landslides in the coastal area of Washington State.
Also, do people living in the Oregon coast fear of flooding and rising ocean levels?
Lucas Reed
There is constant erosion. That has always been part of the coast's geology, and no one should ever expect otherwise. Most hills are actually rather stable; there are well-known loose spots in various places that are fairly easy to identify by shape and tree growth.
Much of the coast is elevated beyond the beach itself, so flooding is not that much of a concern. It would take a massive increase in sea levels to affect much of the coast. The bigger worry is quake/tsunami, which will probably destroy low-lying areas of coastal towns. People are kind of fatalistic about that; it is expected to happen, and then the survivors will probably rebuild, and that will be that.
Brayden Diaz
One last photo I forgot to add, showing the outline of some trees against the ocean as night gets closer. On a clear day, the ocean reflects an enormous amount of light, so it looks very bright even when the forest is almost dark. If you're hiking in the evening, you can be surrounded by near-darkness, then you reach the ocean, and suddenly it's bright again for a while.