Well first of all, that’s a pretty generic name, is it not? I mean, you see a wide swath of sand looking north from somewhere, you can pretty much call it North Beach. My research suggests that wherever there are beaches (next to oceans, lakes, rivers, whatever), somebody calls at least one part of it North Beach. The best known one I’ve visited is in San Francisco. Go ahead, google North Beach and the name of a state and watch what happens. There’s even one in Nebraska! I googled North Beach Washington and discovered the state has a boatload of them: near Seattle, Port Townsend, Deception Pass, etc., in addition to the one I’m talking about here.

I started hearing the phrase “North Beach” soon after we arrived. Turns out there was a lot to learn.

So this North Beach is located in Grays Harbor County on the coast in western Washington state. You’ve probably never heard of it. Grays Harbor (no apostrophe please) is an estuarine bay that formed during the last ice age when higher sea levels flooded the lower valley of the Chehalis River. It’s named after Capt Robert Gray whose ship entered and “discovered” it in 1792 during his voyages to exploit the fur bearing animals of the western coast of the North American continent. Of course the first people here, thousands and thousands and thousands of years before the fur seeking captain, were the ones who actually discovered it. That’s how it always seems to go.

Grays Harbor is relatively shallow, with five rivers depositing sediment they pick up from the land where more than bountiful rain falls (an average 84 inches a year). The bay has a narrow opening to the Pacific Ocean, with sand spits at both the north and south entrance. The North Beach starts at the the north spit, where Ocean Shores is located, and continues some 30 plus miles north through Ocean City, Copalis Beach, Iron Springs, Seabrook, Pacific Beach, and Moclips to the community of Taholah and the Quinault Indian Nation. And yes, people call the area south of the entrance to Grays Harbor “South Beach.”

Naturally, the western border of North Beach is the Pacific Ocean. The eastern border is not as geographically clearcut. I posed the question on the Museum of the North Beach facebook page, and according to a page admin, “The Moclips by the Sea Historical Society considers the Copalis Crossing/Newton area as the furthest east. We have numerous newspaper articles going back over 100 years that refer to that area as the North Beach.” Another local person posted a map of the North Beach School District boundaries as an answer. I asked around and a group of other locals reached the unofficial consensus that the eastern boundary of North Beach could be considered Highway 101. So there you have it. Maybe there is no precise universal eastern boundary and it doesn’t even matter.

There are a few other place names known locally. Like the Hidden Coast Highway, a marketing term you see on signs along State Route 109, which runs the length of North Beach. The wonderful map above is from the Hidden Coast Scenic Byway Corridor Management Plan.

The North Beach was once a very popular tourist destination, served by the Northern Pacific Railway. For example, an article in Grays Harbor Talk announced that “From 1905 until 1913, if you were wealthy from the Pacific Northwest, you’d have visited Moclips.” An optimistic entrepreneur built a massive hotel right above high tide line, but somewhat predictably it was demolished by high surf and wild waves four years later. (This was after his first hotel on the site burned down two months after construction. Soon after, he wisely moved inland.) You can see before and after photos of the catastrophe here. And a visit to the Museum of the North Beach is in order to learn more.

The Hidden Coast is the latest attempt to increase tourism on the North Beach, where the economy is decidedly hurting and has been for decades. Tourism seems a natural and there are already a few actual vacation resorts in the area. I mean, after all, we are 30 miles from Olympic National Park, one of the absolute gems of the National Park system. Breathtaking rainforests!! Mountains. Rivers. Pretty much everything but a desert because rain.

And the North Beach beaches. Unparalleled. Trust me. Mostly empty. But the peace and serenity are largely what draw many of us here. That would be eroded if we were overrun with people.

So yeah. The “spectacular place that is still awesome but won’t be if we advertise it so much that it changes” dilemma. What are the limits? Is there a happy balance to be had? Big issue for the North Beach.

Now that we know where we are, we can talk about being and living here.

Next up: Is There a Doctor in the House?