Long Beach Peninsula Cranberry bogs in autumn
— — the week the bog turns red.
Not only on a wall.
“The bogs sit between the ocean and Willapa Bay, on the long sand peninsula that runs north from the Columbia mouth. Cranberries have been farmed here since the 1880s, on small family plots around Long Beach and Ilwaco. In September and October the bogs flood for the wet-harvest, and the berries lift to the surface, a few inches of bright red layered over standing water, with the firs and the pine standing dark beyond. The Cranberry Museum sits among working fields. The drive south on Pioneer Road runs past it. The colour is brief. By mid-November the bogs are drained and quiet again.
Long Beach Peninsula Cranberry bogs in autumn, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
The Long Beach Peninsula is a 28-mile sand spit on the southwest Washington coast, separating the Pacific Ocean from Willapa Bay. It sits in Pacific County, reached from the south by US-101 and the Astoria–Megler Bridge over the Columbia. Cranberry farming began on the peninsula in 1883, when Anthony Chabot planted the first commercial bogs east of Ilwaco. Today the bogs cluster around Long Beach, Seaview, and Ilwaco, on a glacial-outwash soil locally called peat-on-sand. Washington State University runs a long-running cranberry research station at 2907 Pioneer Road. The Pacific Coast Cranberry Research Foundation Museum operates a small public bog beside it.
The red on the surface during wet-harvest is not paint or stain. Cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) carry air pockets in four small chambers inside the fruit, so a ripe berry floats. To harvest the bog, growers raise the water level over the vines, then drive a reel through the field to loosen the fruit. The berries lift, the wind pushes them into a corner, and a boom corrals them to a pump. The colour holds for the few days the bog is flooded. The fields around Long Beach and Grayland in Pacific and Grays Harbor counties together account for a meaningful share of the U.S. cranberry crop. The dry-harvested bogs, drained and combed, look ordinary by comparison.
The wet-harvest window on the Long Beach Peninsula runs roughly from mid-September through October, with the peak red weeks shifting slightly each year with the weather. Cranberries grown for juice are wet-harvested; berries grown for the fresh market are dry-combed in the same window. The annual CranberryFest in Ilwaco falls on the second weekend in October and coincides with public bog tours hosted by the Cranberry Museum. The peninsula sits in the cool, maritime climate of the lower Washington coast, with annual rainfall over 80 inches, so the colour shows best on the bright, dry days between fronts. By Thanksgiving the bogs are drained, the vines covered in a thin layer of pine straw against frost, and the fields are quiet.