Ocean Shores beaches and dunes
— a beach long enough to lose the car on.
Not only on a wall.
“Six miles of straight sand at the south end of the North Beach peninsula, with the dunes running back into beach grass and shore pine. Cars are allowed on most of it. The Pacific is grey on a flat day and grey-white on a windy one. Razor-clam diggers work the low tides in spring and again in autumn. Damon Point, a sandspit curling east into Grays Harbor, holds one of the last snowy plover nesting beaches in Washington. The horizon is wider than it has any right to be.
Ocean Shores beaches and dunes, 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.
Ocean Shores sits at the southern tip of the North Beach peninsula, on the Pacific coast of Washington at the mouth of Grays Harbor. The city was incorporated in 1970 after about a decade of resort development on what had been the Minard Ranch, platted in 1960 as a planned beach community with a marina, golf course, and grid of canals. The public beach runs roughly six miles from the south jetty at the harbor entrance north toward the city limit, and Washington designates that stretch as a state highway, so passenger vehicles are allowed on most of the sand. Damon Point, a low sandspit reaching east into the harbor, is part of the state park system and a designated snowy plover nesting habitat.
The wind here builds across an unbroken Pacific fetch and lays down a steady push of marine air most of the year. Average annual rainfall on the North Beach runs around 70 inches and summer fog can sit on the sand into mid-morning. The dunes immediately behind the high-tide line hold European beachgrass, American dunegrass, and beach pea, with shore pine on the older interior ridges. Winter storms drive driftwood the size of telephone poles to the back of the beach, and combing the wrack line after a blow has been a North Beach tradition for generations.
Out of season the beach absorbs sound the way only a long flat coast can. The towns of the North Beach run light in winter, with the kite shops and the seafood houses open on weekends. Razor-clam digs draw crowds during state-announced openings, usually a handful of evenings in spring and again in autumn, and the April shorebird stopover at Bowerman Basin, a few miles inland, brings tens of thousands of dunlin, western sandpipers, and dowitchers through the Grays Harbor refuge. Most other days the loudest things are the surf, the wind across the dune grass, and a flag at the Shilo Inn snapping against its line.