South Coast Wilderness Trail - Toleak Point — Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021

Back to the South Coast Trail for attempt #2. My first attempt at completing this route was on February 6, 2021. I had little experience with coastal routes and it showed. I tried to go around Diamond Point at too high a tide and drowned my phone. I was also doing rock hopping on a metatarsal stress fracture that wasn't completely healed and re-broke it. The trail beat me and I had to turn around just 2 miles from the Oil City TH.

Fortunately, my second attempt was a success. I have to give a lot of credit for my friends who were willing to wait for me at the Oil City TH so that I could do this route as a single trip instead of two out and backs from each end.

Not knowing exactly what to expect, I also came dressed to get wet with a waterproof sleeve for my phone and the rest of my gear in a garbage bag inside my pack.

I did this route hiking south from Third Beach, which unless you want to hike this over night, is the way to go with the current tide times. High tide was about 9ft at 12:15pm, so I started from the Third Beach TH at about 11:15am. The first 1.5 miles is an easy stroll down to the beach on a really nice trail. Despite the nearly high tide, the first beach stretch to Taylor Point was still easily walked. The trail over Taylor Point is what you would expect from reading descriptions of this hike. A few ladders. Some ropes. They are really generous with the ropes at this end of the hike and I say this despite of the recent rain leaving the trail with a lot of mud.

Coming down off Taylor Point, you reach a small "beach-let" and then climb over a mini-headland before reaching a stretch of proper beach. Once again, fairly easy going here despite being close to high tide. This beach ends in another headland, which I believe was about 0.5 miles across. You then come down to a flat area behind the beach with a privy and unfortunately lots of piled up beach garbage. You have to climb over some logs to get out to the beach. You reach Scott's Creek soon after. You made be able to wade across at a lower tide, but when I was there my options seemed to be swimming through a pool of not super attractive looking water (clear but with a brown tinge and very difficult to determine the depth) or climb over the creek on one of several different possible piled log routes. I chose the log route. This worked fine though climbing/walking around on slippery, piled up logs is slow-going. 

There's a long stretch of beach after Scott's Creek. Again easy-going even within an hour of high tide. I'd read that somewhere around Strawberry Point, which is south of Scott's Creek that there is a spot where the tide has to be 4ft or lower. I believe the spot they were referring to is a bit north of Scott's Creek. A rocky cliff base occupies the space where the beach should be, at least when I went through. I was able to climb along the rock over the surf though I got splashed a number of times. For any rock climber this would have been a very easy route, but might be challenging with a large backpack. 

After this, I reached Strawberry Point and Toleak Point without any issues. I passed Toleak Point about 3 hours from when I started at the Third Beach trailhead. I found the stretch of beach between Toleak Point and Goodman Head to be particularly beautiful. I'm not sure why exactly as the whole route was so beautiful, but it stands out in my mind. Goodman Head was next with the Falls and Goodman Creek crossings. Out of the whole route I was most concerned about this part, given the recent heavy rains. However, I don't think that either creek was above my knee and perhaps more important neither is particularly fast flowing, so while I think it would be hard to avoid getting at least your feet and legs wet, the crossings were physically quite easy. Goodman Head is about 1.5 miles across and then there's another long beach stretch. At this point, the sun was setting, so it was quite spectacularly beautiful and again easy walking as the falling tide exposed more and more flat, sandy beach. Mosquito Creek is at the end of the beach. It seemed to me to be a bit more fast flowing than the others, but again only up to about my calf. Also, by this time the tide was getting pretty low so there were a lot of options of where to cross.

So, by this time I was feeling really good about myself, having made fairly quick work of all the creek crossings. I even thought I might be finished earlier than I expected. But then came the trail over Hoh Head. I started this trail just after 5 and somehow didn't finish it until about 7:30 even though it's only supposed to be 3.5 miles long. It was dark by the time I started and this is definitely the roughest trail on the whole root. There were quite a lot of down trees, including some new and some ones that were large enough to be difficult to get around and re-find the trail. The crowning experience was the place where a part of the trail does seem to have slipped away down the hill. As I started to bushwack up the hill to get around this, I worried about how much of the trail was missing. Fortunately, it took me less than 5 minutes to pick up the trail on the other side. After sending me down a series of ladders, the Hoh head trail finally let me go down onto the beach. I'm not sure how long it really was. Somewhere between 3.5 and a million miles.

I thought I was home-free on the beach, but going around Diamond Head there was a good stretch of climbing over boulders, even though it was now low tide (about -0.5ft). In the process of this, I came across the first non-bird wildlife of the day - a seafood loving racoon searing for his nocturnal breakfast. We exchanged looks that said "What are you doing here?" and then went on with our business. A few minutes later I was swinging my flashlight around and spotted a group of his friends, several pairs of eyes glowing back at me. Like the Hoh Head Trail, the boulders were slow to let me go though they got a bit smaller and slightly easier to traverse after a bit. The finale of the day was having to do a little log traversing, just where the beach turns inward at the river though fortunately most of this last beach part is easy sand at low tide. The last bit to Oil City is a trail through the woods along the river bank. 

A great long fall/winter hike with lots of amazing, unique scenery and solitude (I didn't see anyone after I left Third Beach). The logistics are difficult but made for an interesting facet to the hike. Finally, I think the weather really helped to make this a great outing - not cold at all for fall, no rain, cloudy with some sun and the ocean as calm as it probably gets here.