Jon asked to pull over on Hwy 101 after a Track meet in Newport just north of Depoe Bay – at a place called Boiler Bay. We took a side gravel parking space and hiked slid / climbed down the hill.

The rock formations are incredible. The differences on the Oregon Coast are amazing. They create more questions of how and why than answers. This is a basalt cliff. In the middle is a large section of Conglomerate rock, pillow basalt and sand stone. The combinations are breathtaking. What is missing in this section of Boiler Bay? Fossils. I looked and looked at the layers and did not find any indication of fossils.

One lone footprint.
Now that we have been studying birds and mammals,
we are always on the lookout for their trails!
Hard to show perspective but this print was larger
than my hand with my fingers spread wide.

The layer above, wraps around the bay, and pours out here near the edge of the ocean. Oregon Geology – Super Interesting Read

When Jon got to the far north west side of the bay and could go further north he spotted something in the water and was crazy with shouting excitement and jumping and begging me to quit looking for fossils and come see what he found.

A Boiler. Imagine that. Boiler. Boiler Bay. Makes sense. Here’s what we found out:

“The J. Marhoffer was a 175-foot, 600-ton steam schooner built at John Lindstrom’s shipyard in Aberdeen, in Washington’s Grays Harbor, in 1907. On May 18, 1910, she was still practically brand-new and was coming back to her home port in Portland from a run to San Francisco when an assistant engineer, working on a gasoline-burning blowtorch, accidentally over pressurized it and blew the thing up.” Off Beat Oregon . Com

After we looked for a while, I was back to marveling over these crazy rocks. Looks like a lot of lava, but still mixed with sand stone and bits of basalt.

Jon was back to watching the waves.

On the walk back, we found quite a few things screwed into the rocks. Looking up the Helmuth Lab Research – it was fun to see how people on the East Coast are traveling to our tiny bay to research or sea organisms. After reading the research and field trips with school teachers to this spot – it makes me thankful to live here, and share the coastal environmental studies with the boys, naturally, every day!

As for tide pools, we only spotted the Splash Zone and High Zone organisms. The tide was out pretty far, but we didn’t spot any Low Tide or Submerged Tide wonders.

This is the cliff that one scales down. There is a path with rocks to climb on. Some people stop by a supermarket on the way home from a track meet, we stop by the ocean. Have I mentioned lately how much I love being a homeschooler on the Oregon Coast?