Samuel Boardman Corridor (Natural Bridges Cove)
— sea arches above a cove the road doesn't reach.
Not only on a wall.
“A pull-off on U.S. Highway 101 about ten miles north of Brookings, where a short trail through Sitka spruce ends at a railing above a hidden cove. Two stone arches stand where the roof of a sea cave fell in. The scenic corridor runs twelve miles up the coast and was named for Samuel Boardman, the first superintendent of Oregon's state parks. The Pacific holds the colour of cold steel most mornings.
Samuel Boardman Corridor (Natural Bridges Cove), on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Samuel H. Boardman State Scenic Corridor runs roughly twelve miles along the southern Oregon coast in Curry County, between Brookings to the south and Gold Beach to the north. It was set aside in 1950 and named for Samuel H. Boardman, who served as the state's first parks superintendent from 1929 until 1950. The corridor takes in a sequence of headlands, sea stacks, and small coves accessible from pull-offs along U.S. Highway 101. Natural Bridges Viewpoint sits near the southern end, about ten miles north of Brookings.
The Pacific reaches this stretch of coast with the long fetch of the open ocean behind it, and swell heights routinely run six to twelve feet from October through March. At Natural Bridges the water enters the cove through openings cut at the base of a former sea cave, then circulates beneath the two surviving arches. Tides at Brookings range about eight feet between low and high. The Chetco River reaches the sea four miles south of the cove and the Rogue twenty-three miles north.
The cliffs through the Boardman corridor are sandstone and conglomerate of the Otter Point Formation, laid down in the late Jurassic and folded by the same tectonics that built the Klamath Mountains inland. At Natural Bridges the sea worked a long cave into a softer band of rock; eventually the cave roof collapsed in two places and left the bridges standing. The arches will not last forever, and the railing above the cove is set back from an edge that retreats a small amount each storm season.