Ruby Beach driftwood and sea stacks
— the pink sand at the end of the cedar trail.
Not only on a wall.
“A short trail down through Sitka spruce ends at a beach where Cedar Creek meets the Pacific and Abbey Island stands offshore. The sand carries a faint pink cast from garnet washed out of the headland. Drift logs lie piled where the storms left them. The beach belongs to the Kalaloch stretch of Olympic National Park, fourteen miles down Highway 101 from the Hoh.
Ruby Beach driftwood and sea stacks, 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.
Ruby Beach is the northernmost of the Kalaloch beaches on the Pacific coast of Olympic National Park, in Jefferson County, Washington. It sits about 27 miles south of Forks on Highway 101 and roughly 14 miles south of the Hoh River. A quarter-mile trail drops from the highway pullout through Sitka spruce and salal to the strand, where Cedar Creek crosses the sand and Abbey Island rises just offshore. The beach was named for the ruby-tinted garnet sand visible in places along the high-water line.
Abbey Island and the smaller stacks offshore are basalt remnants of the older Olympic coastline, hardened cores that survived as the softer terrace eroded behind them. The ruby color in the sand comes from fine garnet grains weathered out of the metamorphic rock of the Hoh headland and concentrated in lenses by wave sorting. Cedar Creek brings down driftwood from the inland rainforest, and the largest logs at the storm line are old-growth western redcedar and Sitka spruce washed out of the watershed upstream.
The pullout sits directly off Highway 101 with a short paved path to the trailhead. The trail down is about a quarter mile and steep in spots, with several timber stairs and a final descent through drift logs onto the sand. There is no entrance fee at this access point and no permit is required for day use. Tide pools open at the base of Abbey Island during low tide, but the back of the beach can flood at high water, so check the tide table before going far north.