Visit Ruby Beach in Washington State

One of the things I enjoyed about reading some of the novels of the late James A. Michener was that the context for some of his stories involved a geological setting. That is particularly true for his Hawaii, where he takes the reader back millions of years to the formation of the area. In some of the novels, the geology would later play a critical role in the unfolding of the story.

I thought of Michener's practice when I thought back to the visit my wife and I had to Ruby Beach in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The coast of Washington is lined with a number of beaches, but Ruby Beach is regarded as one of the most beautiful of all the beaches. It is located in Olympic National Park, 27 miles south of Forks, WA.

What makes Ruby Beach visually so stunning is the presence of rocky formations known as "sea stacks." Sea stacks are formations of various sizes located near the shoreline. The prevailing theory regarding them is that they were originally part of the mainland, but because of the action of powerful waves over a long period of time, the land that connected them to the mainland was eroded away and the sea stacks now stand on their own. I was raised on a farm and often saw loose hay piled into stacks. To me, some of the sea stacks are reminiscent of the haystacks. Perhaps that is where the name of the formations originated.

Depending on the force of the waves and the height of the mainland, the sea stacks may be tall or short, large or small. For more information on sea stacks, check out the article on "Stack" on Wikipedia or do a search on Google for Sea Stacks and read through the many results that appear.

My wife and I arrived at Ruby Beach on a relatively foggy and overcast day. That did not dampen our enthusiasm for the area and our appreciation of the beauty of the beach. Before you visit Ruby Beach, be prepared to clear your mind of images of vast, clean stretches of sand. Ruby Beach, like many other areas on the coast of Washington, is littered with thousands of trees and other articles that have washed up on shore over many years. The beach is "made" not so much for running across or tossing a Frisbee or for swimming, but for slow, careful exploration and for a deeper understanding of the power of nature to alter the world in which we live. As a reminder of that power, my wife picked up 12 smooth stones from the beach to take home as her "Power Stones."

A word about the sea stacks off Ruby Beach: they are enormous! I took several pictures of the beach. When my wife and I returned home after our trip, I converted one of them to black and white and put it on our computer as the desktop picture. (That picture is attached to this article.) When our daughter saw it, she was impressed at the scenery. Then my wife asked her, "Did you see the people in the picture?" Our daughter had not. The size of the people in the picture puts the sea stacks into a perspective where we can see ourselves, at times, not as masters of the world, but as parts of a world where we can seem very insignificant. Perhaps that is not all bad.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(geology)