A full moon, high tide at noon, and 5-ft wind waves riding a swell on the crest of a storm out of the southwest add up to an incredible surf. One of my favorite places to watch the storms crash in: Rialto Beach, west of Forks, just north of La Push.
I have watched the many moods of Rialto – I have stretched out on logs and basked in the sun; I have gathered multicolored stones of jasper and agate; I have guarded my campsite from marauding raccoons while watching the sun set into an orange horizon; I have watched the high tide splash between split rocks and marveled at the universe in pools on the low tide; but my favorite times to be here are during the storms of November through March, and if you catch them when they coincide with the lunar cycle, they can literally sweep you away.
And I do mean literally.
The waves pick up trees and toss them in the air like toothpicks. A sneaker wave can splash over a pile of driftwood logs and suddenly they will all be afloat. And when the tide sucks the water and gravel back into itself, preparing for its next onslaught, an unsuspecting person can easily be crushed.
This is not a beach to play on in a winter storm. It is a beach to stand back in awe of a display of unleashed power.
It is always different. I have hundreds of pictures from this beach – and every time I come, I take a hundred more. I can never quite capture the essence of this ocean – all that water, sloshing around on the planet, heaving one wave after another after another in rapid succession, thundering as it slams against the shore, raking back the gravel, spinning it around, and spitting it back out again – the way the light changes from one moment to the next, the way it can cast a silver glaze on the wave crests or glow yellow in the curl or disappear entirely – and the way the wind roars in unison. The sound is deafening.
This is a place to go to feel small — a place to put things in perspective — a place to feel the wind in your face, to listen, and to understand what is real.
On this occasion, Rialto’s moods changed from wind and rain, to a bright open sky, and then back to dark clouds that rapidly closed in to make it feel like dusk at noon. They let loose a torrent of stinging hail that sent me running back to the protection of my vehicle.
On my way back, I passed a party of 4 adults and a kid of around 8 or 10 who were hiking in to camp. They said that they had spent the previous night at Third Beach, which was “really scary.” “It is much safer here,” they said. I looked at them. One was wearing shorts, another was barefoot, all were very wet; their gear, what there was of it, looked wet and heavy. The tide was already up to the driftwood logs and it was still coming in. They would be scrambling over logs, and I knew there were not many cleared places in the trees to camp along the way. Camping on the beach would be impossible. At the very least, they would be risking hypothermia.
People. Please. Have some common sense. This is a wild place. The tide is unrelenting. It does not care about you.