Road Trip: Coos Bay

Day Three: Coos Bay

Highway 101 crosses the mouth of Coos Bay and heads into the town of North Bend and then, immediately, into the town of Coos Bay. At North Bend I left the highway and headed towards the Southwest Oregon Regional Airport, which appears on my map to be more or less across the water from Jordan Cove.

The Jordan Cove LNG project is owned by Fort Chicago Energy Partners and Energy Projects Development (Pacific Gas and Electric is part owner of the affiliated 234-mile pipeline). This is the one that the San Francisco City Council voted to oppose, although it’s over 100 miles north of the California border.

I parked in the lot of a Bureau of Land Management office building (closed, it was Saturday). The road looks down on the airport runways. The site where the LNG terminal would be build is further to the northwest, across the water. I needed to get around the tip of the headland I was on, and there just happened to be a paved hiking trail going in the right direction.

I headed up and into the woods. It was a dark, wet day, and the forest was thick and dripping. The trees and ferns and shiny salal bushes seemed to have black behind them, like the bark and leaves were painted onto black velvet. I came across a huge cement archway that was the entrance to a tunnel. It was covered in graffiti, and I didn’t get too close, but it looked like the kind of place where people would go to do drugs.

The South Coast forest combines all three kinds of creepy: There’s that nervous feeling you get walking through a bad part of town at night. The feeling you get way out in the woods when you start thinking about cougars. And the feeling you get alone in a 100-year-old house. I felt like I was equally in danger of getting knifed, mauled, or haunted.

Or falling down a hole and never being found.

I got to the edge of a cliff that looked out onto the water. There was an uncovered, manhole-shaped hole in the ground, totally unmarked. It was the opening to a pipe that went down into the cliff and spilled out partway down, over the water.

I took some photos of the opposite shore, but I felt like I was still too far east so I kept going.

I came out onto the street of a raw-looking subdivision. Most of the houses were new, interspersed with vacant lots for sale. You could see from the empty lots that the whole area used to be sand dunes and marsh grass. I walked by one cul-de-sac where nothing had been erected except for some fakey-old-fashioned lampposts and a big plywood sign advertising “Paradise Island.”

Further down, on the edge of the cliff, was an abandoned, unfinished condo complex. It was set of row houses, maybe ten, painted gray and boarded up. A warning notice dated August 3 stated that the building had been deemed “substandard” according to Coos Bay municipal code.

The back decks of the condos overlooked the water, with a perfect view of where, by my best guess, the Jordan Cove LNG project would be built. I got my photo and turned around.

On my way back through the subdivision, a gang of boys, maybe 12 and 13 years old, raced by on their bicycles. I worried about them going out the trail and falling into the pipe hole.