Thors Well at Cape Perpetua
— — the ocean's drain, an hour before sunset.
Not only on a wall.
“A round hole in the basalt shelf at the foot of Cape Perpetua, about ten feet across, that fills and empties with the swell. At high tide it pulls the sea down into itself and then throws the same water back up in a clean column. The light is best the hour before sunset. The Forest Service keeps reminding visitors how easily a sneaker wave takes someone off the rock.
Thors Well at Cape Perpetua, 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.
Thor's Well sits at the foot of Cape Perpetua on the central Oregon coast, just south of the town of Yachats in the Siuslaw National Forest. Cape Perpetua itself is a basalt headland rising about eight hundred feet above the Pacific, the highest viewpoint on the Oregon Coast accessible by car. The well is one of several sea features along the rocky shelf at Cook's Chasm, alongside the Spouting Horn and the tidepools at Devil's Churn. Highway 101 runs along the bluff above.
The well is a collapsed sea cave whose roof opened to the sky, leaving a roughly circular hole about ten feet across in the basalt shelf. Each swell pushes seawater up through the opening, then drains it back through underwater channels. The effect is most dramatic an hour either side of high tide, and during winter storms when wave heights run twenty feet or more. Photographers favour the late afternoon, when western light reaches the wet rock and spray reads gold against dark basalt.
The well is reached by a short walk from the Cook's Chasm pullout on Highway 101, about three miles south of Yachats. Tide and conditions matter more here than at almost any other Oregon coast site. The Forest Service warns that the basalt shelf is regularly washed by sneaker waves, and visitors have been swept off in calm-looking conditions. Local advice is to stay above the wet line on the rock and to watch the well from the upper bench at any tide above five feet.