Captain Cook Trailhead

The Captain Cook Trail #1364.2 leaves the Cape Perpetua Visitor Center on Highway 101 and drops toward the Pacific. The Siuslaw National Forest describes it as a paved trail running “from forest to tidepools, and back again.” The route passes an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp, goes through wind-sculpted vegetation, circles Native American shell middens, and descends to the rocks. The Forest Service page gives the distance two ways: a one-mile round trip in its description and a 0.8-mile round trip in its trail data. The trail is rated easy, and its accessibility is listed as moderate to difficult. For the shorter way, the Forest Service advises starting at Cook’s Chasm, from a parking area on the west side of the highway immediately north of Cook’s Chasm Bridge.

The path to Cook’s Chasm

Cook’s Chasm is the lower end of the trail. The Forest Service says that at high tide Spouting Horn and Thor’s Well can be seen from there, though its printed brochure names only Spouting Horn. Both features, along with Devil’s Churn a short way north, are eroded fissures in the intertidal basalt flows at the foot of the cape. In the words of the Oregon Encyclopedia, this is where “waves churn, seethe, and collide, often spectacularly.” The headland above them rises 800 feet. It is a basaltic formation left by ancient shield volcanoes.

The tidepools lie at the base of the trail. The Forest Service warns of sneaker waves, large and sudden, that can sweep a person off the rocky shore. It asks visitors to know the tide schedule, to stay away from logs in the surf or on wet sand, and to watch for deep water and strong currents. There is no potable water at the trailhead.

The Oregon Coast Trail also begins on the Captain Cook Trail and runs 2.6 miles round trip above the rocky shoreline. A Forest Service notice dated 8/3/26 reports that a 300-foot section of Cape Cove Trail #1364.1 is temporarily closed because of erosion and dangerous conditions. That section runs beside Highway 101 and links the Captain Cook Trail with the Trail of the Restless Waters. Cape Cove Beach can still be reached from Devils Churn or from the small parking area near the beach.

All of this lies within the Cape Perpetua Scenic Area, which covers 2,700 acres and holds a 26-mile trail system. At the head of the trail, the visitor center has natural history and cultural exhibits, a theater, a bookstore, and a deck facing the ocean. Sources disagree on how far it sits from Yachats. The Forest Service’s trailhead directions and brochure say three miles, while its visitor center listing and the Oregon Encyclopedia say two.

Shell middens and Halaqaik

The Forest Service dates the human presence on this landscape to at least 6,000 years ago, and the middens beside the path are part of that record. The Alsea people called the area Halaqaik. According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, the word possibly suggests an “uncovered place, open place or exposed place.” The encyclopedia notes that open coastal prairies covered the headland until Native burning ceased, after which Sitka spruce spread in from older stands nearby. Alsea families hunted and fished, and they dug for clams and mussels in the intertidal zone. An Alsea village stood near the base of the cape.

On March 7, 1778, Captain James Cook saw the headland from the sea. He noted that it would “shoot[s] out into a point” and named it for Saint Perpetua on her name day. He never set foot on it.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, smallpox and other diseases struck the Alsea of the Cape Perpetua area. In 1856 the surviving communities became nominally part of the Coast Reservation, which included the cape. By 1861 many Alseas were compelled to live at the Alsea Subagency, along with the forcibly removed Coos and Lower Umpqua peoples. The Subagency had been created in 1859 and was known for its prisonlike conditions. Many people held there died of starvation, disease, and exposure. In 1875 Congress eliminated a short-lived Alsea Reservation to open the region to homesteading, and many of the reported 118 survivors were removed to the Siletz Reservation. A few continued to live independently near the cape, and tribal members returned at intervals for traditional purposes.

Camp Cape Creek, 1933

In 1908 the cape became part of the newly created Siuslaw National Forest. By 1914 the Forest Service had blasted and chiseled a narrow wagon road into the outer cliff. The Cape Perpetua section of Highway 101, carved from the cliffs along the same route, was completed in the early 1930s.

The Civilian Conservation Corps came in 1933. According to the Yachats chamber of commerce, plans for a major camp near Cape Perpetua were under way by April, and 25 local recruits did the first construction. In June, Company 963 pitched a tent camp on the cape’s south side near Cape Creek. The National Register nomination for the cape’s stone shelter, citing the Waldport Tribune of June 8, 1933, says the camp would employ local men as contractors or “local experienced men.” The same nomination reports the permanent camp finished by the end of that month.

The sources place the camp differently:

• The chamber puts it west of today’s visitor center, and in the same article just east of Highway 101.
• The Oregon Encyclopedia puts it north of Cape Creek near the visitor center.
• The Forest Service says it occupied the area where the visitor center stands today.

Enrollees were unmarried, unemployed men between 18 and 25. They were paid $30 a month, and $25 of it was sent home to their families. Camp Cape Creek housed 200 to 250 of them. It had four bunkhouses, a mess hall, a recreation room, an infirmary, and equipment buildings, and it stayed active until the CCC was dissolved during World War II.

In that first summer, the crews built a picnic ground at the base of the cape and a road climbing to the crest. In October, as the weather turned toward the stormy season, they finished a stone shelter and parapet on the crest trail. Fenton Starr was construction superintendent, the plans came from the Siuslaw National Forest Supervisor’s Office, and the stone was quarried at Round Mountain, northeast of Yachats. On October 19, 1933, the Waldport Tribune pronounced the cape “wonderfully improved.” Over the following years the crews built the campground, the trail network, and parking at Devil’s Churn. At the end of the 1936 season, the Tribune estimated that more than 4,000 motorists had visited. In 1937 the paper wrote of the “rustic shelter and vista house” on the crest trail.

That shelter, called West Shelter, served as a coastal watch station during World War II. The National Register form gives its listing date as 11/3/88, while the Oregon Encyclopedia gives 1989. In the 1960s the Forest Service designated the Scenic Area and built the visitor center where the Captain Cook Trail now begins. None of the camp’s buildings still stand. Below the visitor center, where the trail passes the old camp, its foundation slabs, steps, and retaining walls remain.