Winter Camping at Umpqua Lighthouse State Park

With a few farm work weekends under our belts for the new year, we set off on another Winter yurt camping trip to enjoy some rejuvenating time in the outdoors. This time we picked a spot we had never visited before, Umpqua Lighthouse State Park near Reedsport. It tends to be a rather popular one, and the yurts and cabins fill up fast, so I had never managed to get the timing right to make a reservation before. When I made this year’s Winter camping reservations right after the holidays, there happened to be some openings. Here I owe some heartfelt thanks to my grandparents for the Oregon State Parks gift certificate they gave our family as a holiday gift. With these warm, dry yurts to sleep in, our camping season is comfortably extended by a few months every year.

We decided to be extra adventurous and take the back roads through the Coast Range on the Siuslaw River Road and Smith River Road. You can access the Siuslaw road from the town of Lorane or Wolf Creek Road outside of Crow, and head left by this giant wooden map towards the small pass that drops you down into the Smith River drainage. The road was open, clear and paved the entire way, and provided a beautiful, scenic backroads drive.

We stopped at a swimming hole we visited this past summer to eat some lunch and play by the water. We saw a lot of recent beaver activity and some big lodges exposed with the lack of vegetation. There was an old red crawdaddy  hanging around in some shallows right in the spot where we found one back in July. It very well may have been the same cantankerous crustacean!

When we arrived at the state park, we found our yurt situated in a beautiful spot on the edge of a ravine with a nature trail below. The kids wasted no time in scampering off to explore. We also discovered that the two rustic cabins at this park are perched on the edge of a hill overlooking Lake Marie. We decided we would need to come back and stay in one of them sometime. This park also is one of the few with deluxe yurts, which are 30 foot yurts that sleep about 10 people, and have small kitchens and bathrooms. For those who aren’t wholeheartedly into roughing it, or folks camping in a large group, this seems like a nice happy medium.

If this sounds like a spot you want to visit, you can visit Umpqua Lighthouse State Park’s website here: http://www.oregonstateparks.org/park_121.php

Lake Marie is a beautiful sand lake surrounded by towering trees and a nature trail wrapping all the way around with interpretive markers for some of the prominent vegetation. We saw wild cherry trees in blossom, bright yellow skunk cabbage in flower, and many other early signs of Spring. The lake was so still, the surface looked like glass. At one end of the lake where a creek flowed in, there were side trails around nurse logs, and intriguing spots where the creek dropped under ground beneath ancient tree roots and you could hear the subterranean waterfalls gurgling below.

After spending some time hiking the interpretive trail, we ventured out to find the lighthouse and the beach. Umpqua Lighthouse, it turns out, is an active Coast Guard base, surrounded by family housing. There are tours available of both the lighthouse and museum, but not until May, so we headed for the beach.

We discovered a long, flat beach near the jetty with lots of driftwood washed up and forts people had built. It was not quite the wild, rugged sort of beach we have come to enjoy farther to the North, as this portion of the Oregon Dunes Recreation Area is a popular 4-wheeler destination. I figured this must be why the state park is always so booked. While we all agreed it looked like fun for the motorsports enthusiasts, it was a little loud for beachgoers wanting some outdoor solace.

The next day we headed out to a favorite beach of ours at the end of Sparrow Park Road, just North of Gardiner. This gravel BLM road dead ends at a fairly remote stretch of beach where a little creek flows in. There is off-road sand access here, so you run into the occasional 4WD vehicle or 4-wheeler on the beach, but we haven’t seen all that many folks out there. We hiked South along the shore where there were an abundance of wild animal tracks everywhere. We saw coyote, raccoon, mouse, deer and possibly bear trails all along the shore popping in and out of the dunes. Some looked so fresh we imagined the critters had run off just ahead of us when they heard people coming.

At one point we spied some tall sand dunes that we wanted to explore, so we headed up off the beach, following game trails through the thick pine forest, until we climbed to the top of a magnificent overlook. There were still more tracks everywhere, and it looked like deer and foxes had been frolicking about just before we arrived. There were also some old 4-wheeler tracks, so we couldn’t kid ourselves that it was a total wilderness, but it still felt pretty darn wild. We sat in the sun on top of the dune and looked down at the ocean and dune ponds below while the kids rolled and slid down the sand slope. When the sun started to sink over the waves, we bushwhacked our way back to the creek where we were parked (much to the indignant protests of our children who were convinced we were lost and going around in circles.) And here we headed home from our weekend adventure. Back to the daily grind.