Okay, One More - Oregon Pt. 5

I think the last installment of my Oregon photos, I have so many though.

First up: Bastendorf beach. Right down the road from the marine station, we would spend a lot of our free time there. It was a vast, sandy beach, with a jetty, very cool.

Leaving our names on the sandstone, there were fossils around this area too. We actually went fossil hunting one day, so cool. The next one is class time, digging in the sand - though it was freezing that day.

Freezing rain on our sand digging trip, Dr. B made us have a cook out in the rain after that, it was crazy. The next one is some of the only pollution I saw in Oregon, Firestone spark plugs or something embedded in some rock.

Tsunami's are possible in the Coos Bay area, we had Tsunami drills every Tuesday - basically if there is a Tsunami run away...really fast...run uphill if you can. But the signs are so funny.

One Saturday we drove up north a little to some sand dunes, very beautiful, warm sand. We kind of spur of of moment, rented a sand board and had some fun riding down the dunes. It's pretty fun going down, but then you have to hike back up the sand - it's kind of a workout. Fun though, Kelly is totally going to eat it, I love it.

This next place was incredible. We climbed out into these rock outcrops about 150 meters on this super low tide, and this sea urchin mecca appeared, there were thousands upon thousands of sea urchins, even the relatively rare red sea urchin. I have never seen anything like this, and it was so pristine. So many sea urchins meant a lot of their predators, sea stars too, so cool. This sea star I'm holding is abnormally large.

More of daily life at the marine station, we crawled through the craziest places. I swear, I thought some days I would end up with an octopus attached to my leg. All these pictures were taken within a mile or so of the station - still have a thing for the old fishermen.

So this was our pet nudibranch, I found it at the docks, and therefore it was dubbed Lil' Kim. Yeah, that's right I had a pet nudibranch. Sunset on the other side of the bay.

Good times at Bastendorf. I'm not sure I have ever been as active as I was in Oregon (except maybe in high school, with Cross Country). We regularly went running, played sand volleyball, went hiking/exploring, and occasionally other games like football/soccer.