Sometimes, we can’t help ourselves…just gotta get in the car and roll….

Rolled 100 miles up the coast into Oregon, to the great little town of Brookings.

We’ve stopped there twice (a bunch of arch rocks along the 12 mile long state park), and knew we needed to come back and spend much more time exploring….

Landed at Lone Ranch Beach this time long enough before sunset that we could take a nice look around….

The high vantage point helped….

I was able to find a rock in the wash of surf that had a flat top about 6 feet up…that I could stand on with my tripod…to keep the camera & me out of the water but right in the action!

Hoo boy, was there ever some action!

The sky went nuts and the waves went nuts!

The beach was quite flat, so the surf could crash waaaay out there, then roll and roll, and finally crash on smaller rocks 200 yards farther in toward shore where I was standing.

Still, as the sunset quieted down, the waves became a little more subdued. This image seems completely placid…but that’s mostly due to it being a 30-second exposure.

Right in the very middle of that image, what looks like fog behind the low wall of dark rocks is actually the spray from waves repeatedly crashing in that area during the exposure!

Yet this sunset could never be called boring. Even after the sun had dropped below the horizon, it was creating colors in the high clouds that caused soft, shimmering colors on the surf. This exposure of 6 seconds shows a more accurate image of the active water. If you click on this image to have it fill your screen, you’ll see there is a large wave coming right at you that is about to curl and crash.