February 21, 2025

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Pasting narrative from above: It requires well over a mile across sand just to get to the beginning at the north end. I pedaled my old beach bike into a Southerly head wind down to the jetty and was rewarded with a close-up Bald Eagle sighting as I came up behind her on some drift logs wedged against the jetty. With the campground closed there’s very little traffic that far from town. From the tire tracks I can tell that the treasure hunters are riding their electric fat tire bikes out there. Theoretically that ends on March 15 but it hasn’t stopped them before. In addition to occasional gulls there were interspersed small flocks of shorebirds. Based on size and coloration perhaps three distinct species: including Plovers? The debris load is well down from previous years. High tides have cut away the bank and possibly drug a lot of it back out to sea. I picked up plastic marine debris which was mostly styrofoam chunks lodged in driftlogs adjacent to the jetty. Notable: Nehalem Bay State Park is currently closed for expansion of the campground. This has reduced the number of visitors because the nearest access is well over a mile north of Mile 296. At the southern extremity of the mile there were no footprints but tire tracks from a bicycle or two. These tracks diverged from the moist sand up into soft deep sand in places which suggests to me people using motorized fat tire bikes to look for flotsam. This a longstanding pattern for this mile. I'm not entirely clear on regulations for the various types of electric bikes on Oregon beaches. All bicycles are supposed to stay entirely off the beach near Snowy Plover nest sites beginning March 15, but I've witnessed this being violated frequently over the years. The advent of electric powered bicycles makes it possible for more people to access this stretch of coastline.