29 min
Overview
Honeyman State Park, with its popular sandboarding dune and two picturesque lakes, is a year-round destination but is far less busy mid-fall through mid-spring. There are several short hikes here that can be combined into one longer excursion or done separately, as you wish. The hike description follows the list below. All the mileages are round-trip from the Honeyman Sand Dunes Trailhead. At the end of the last ice age, sea levels rose and river and creek valleys all up and down the coast were “drowned” (These non-glacial inlets are called rias). Sand dunes built up along behind the beaches and moved inland to dam the creeks, creating numerous multi-limbed barrage lakes behind the dunes. Cleawox Lake and Woahink Lake, both partially within Jesse M. Honeyman Memorial State Park, are the result of this process. Jesse Millar Honeyman was an activist and president of the Oregon Roadside Council who promoted the preservation of beautiful scenery along Oregon’s highways in the 1920s and 1930s. She and Samuel Boardman, then superintendent of Oregon’s state parks system, worked together to add many areas on the coast to the state park system. In 1935, Boardman got CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) crews to construct trails and structures in the state parks. Several buildings and pathways in Honeyman State Park remain from that time, some of the best examples of the CCC’s work on the Oregon Coast. The park was dedicated in Jesse M. Honeyman’s honor in 1941. The state’s second-largest campground was added in 1950. From the restrooms at the day-use area, find the trail that leads east along the shore of Cleawox Lake. You can see about half of the lake from this shore; the other half is a long narrow arm that is the drowned valley of Buck Creek. Sand dunes moving about 15 to 20 feet a year are filling in the lake little by little. In the summer, Cleawox Lake resounds with the chatter and laughter of swimmers, paddleboaters, and sandboarders sliding down the dune to the west. You’ll walk past picnic tables under shor
Trail Stats
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143 m
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