In 2018, archaeologists on Calvert Island in British Columbia identified 29 human footprints pressed into a beach about 13,000 years ago. One walk across the sand, kept by pure luck. The ocean isn’t much of a curator. It’s more of an editor, and it never stops working.
Haystack Rock is 235 feet of basalt, left over from lava flows that reached the coast about 15 million years ago. At some point it was attached to the mainland. Then the sea found a weak spot, wore the connection away and left the rock standing on its own on Cannon Beach, where the Pacific pounds on it every single day. The rock will lose eventually. Everything on this coast does. It turns back into sand and washes up on some other beach.
I shot this at sunset, which is the one time of day Haystack Rock looks like it isn’t worried about any of that.
