Oregon Coast: Nature is the star at Manzanita

MANZANITA, Ore. — If your idea of a weekend at the beach includes riding the bumper cars and bringing home bags of saltwater taffy, head to Seaside, the Oregon Coast's answer to Coney Island.

Gallery hopping, chic boutiques and classy restaurants? You'll find them a few miles farther south in artsy Cannon Beach.

The perfect spot for a Japanese hot stone facial, a cup of espresso made from shade-grown coffee beans, and hikes along sand dunes and through old-growth rain forests? Keep driving.

Fourteen miles south of Cannon Beach, just off a little-traveled stretch of Highway 101, New Age beach community meets small-town Oregon in Manzanita. Laneda Avenue is the walkable nine-block main street that dead-ends at the oceanfront. Along the street you'll find a holisti-copia of businesses that hint at the tastes of this town's 600 year-round residents and 2,000-plus Portlanders and others who keep weekend and summer homes here.

Howell's Third Street Square, a weathered building that passes for an office complex, houses a natural-foods store, a natural-health clinic, an acupuncturist and a Mexican restaurant called the "Left Coast Siesta."

Tibetan prayer flags hang above the porch at Manzanita News & Espresso, and across the street, The Light Spirit Center advertises sand-tray therapy and Reiki energy works.

Nightlife centers around live music at the non-smoking San-Dune tavern, but the big social event of the year is something called the Trash Art Bash held in May at the town dump. Citizens come together to drink beer and cider out of mayonnaise bottles and jars dug out of recycle bins, and artists display work created from materials culled from the scrap heaps.

Hidden coastline

If you're looking at a map by now, you're not alone. Manzanita lies along a patch of coastline most visitors miss. Many travelers find little reason to drive this part of Highway 101, either because their destination is Seaside or Cannon Beach, or because they're headed to Tillamook, Lincoln City or Newport, towns to the south usually reached via routes from Portland.

My husband, Tom, and I left Seattle and detoured away from Interstate 5 at Longview/Kelso, crossing into Oregon over the Rainier bridge at Longview and picking up Highway 101 out of Astoria.

Just north of Manzanita is the Neahkahnie Mountain turnout, a historic highway site dedicated to Oswald West, the Oregon governor responsible for opening the state's beaches to public access.

Looking out over a cliff-hugging stone wall at the plunging surf below, we caught our first glimpse of what makes Manzanita special: an unbroken seven-mile swath of sandy beach that ends in a spit stretching into the bay where the ocean meets the Nehalem River.

Kati Griffin, who moved to Manzanita with her family from Bainbridge Island via Connecticut a few years ago, describes the scene this way:

"People ask me, 'How will we know when we get there?' I say, 'Turn the corner and look for a beach that makes you say 'Ah!' "

Small-town flavor

Manzanita has no high-rise hotels, but there are plenty of vacation rentals, a B&B, two inns and a few inexpensive motels, all within walking distance of the water and the restaurants and shops on Laneda.

The classiest place to stay is the Inn at Manzanita, a 13-room hideaway tucked among pine and spruce trees a block from the beach.

New innkeepers, Nancy and Mark Mansfield, took over last January and have been steadily adding improvements to create a quiet, adult retreat. All the rooms have gas fireplaces, cozy two-person spas and small, private balconies.

Low tides bring out experienced beach explorers (our own find was a 12-inch purple starfish), kids, dogs and families carting picnic hampers and armloads of firewood.

Bob Matthews, 83, a Portlander who's been spending summers here for 14 years, likes to get his exercise by building giant sand castles for kids. When I bumped into him, he was putting finishing touches on a huge dome surrounded by a moat, Matthews' interpretation of Mount Mazama, which erupted and collapsed some 8,000 years ago to create Oregon's Crater Lake.

"Manzanita is quiet," he said. "The locals are very friendly and it's protected by that mountain (1,600-foot Neahkahnie), which keeps the fog back."

Legend has it that when an 18th-century Spanish ship wrecked near Manzanita, the survivors buried their treasure at the base of Neahkahnie. It was never found.

Today, the mountain shelters the town, and according to the locals, keeps it sunnier than other coastal areas.

Parks and pocket incense

"No cellphones, blueprints or contracts," reads a note on the bottom of the menu at the Blue Sky Cafe, the most popular restaurant in town.

The rumor mill has been buzzing ever since founder Julie Barker decided to leave the business and open a gourmet bakery across the street, but locals say that so far, the quality continues to justify the cafe's cash-only policy and pricey menu.

We called ahead for reservations, mandatory even on a Thursday night, and settled in for a sampling of an assortment of eclectic dishes: grilled Ahi tuna served with Vietnamese cabbage, coconut rice and a ginger fruit salad; a quinoa salad topped with slices of beef tenderloin and dressed in a mango-mint vinaigrette; and a huge mound of pork ribs served with herb garlic grits.

The meal was one of the best I've had anywhere. Still, the $90 bill, with drinks, dessert and tip, put Blue Sky in the try-this-once category. The next evening, we ate just as happily lounging on the beach with a picnic we assembled for $18 from nearby Mother Nature's Natural Foods.

Our innkeepers pointed us in the direction of other local finds: Wanda's, two miles away in Nehalem, for breakfast in a kitschy beach cabin decorated with antique toasters and old radios; the Malt Shop on Manzanita Avenue for strawberry sodas; and Marzano's for gourmet pizza we could smell from our balcony.

It was clear that working off all of this eating was going to call for more than lazy walks on the beach. A shop called Fun Merchants rents bikes but has limited hours, and we would have been smart to bring our own and take advantage of miles of flat, paved roads and bike trails. There were kayaks for rent in Nehalem and nearby Wheeler, but we ended up spending most of our time hiking through the two state parks that flank Manzanita.

Three miles north of town, a network of maintained mountain trails wends through old-growth rain forest in Oswald West State Park.

A swinging foot bridge suspended by cables leads across a creek to a beach popular with surfers. Two trails — the easy 2.5-mile Cape Falcon trail and the steeper two-mile Neahkahnie Mountain trail — reward hikers with panoramic vistas.

A mile and a half from Manzanita in the opposite direction is Nehalem Bay State Park, with windswept beach trails and a paved bike path that circles the park. You can rent horses for rides along the beach, or simply walk, as we did, over dunes covered with waist-high grass to a wide, sandy spit that leads to the jetty at the mouth of the Nehalem River.

Back in town, we spent a relaxing couple of hours browsing the handful of shops along Laneda that carry a mix of work by local artists and New Age accessories.

Mystic Moon sells tarot cards, medicine wheels, drums and pocket incense; Baraka, a shop in a new complex owned by a former Seattle couple, stocks African masks and jewelry; and Bad Woman, owned by Lee Burrow, another former Seattleite, specializes in hand-knitted scarves, hats and sweaters made by Burrow and her buyer, Jayne Hinson.

The quirkiest retail outlet lies just outside Nehalem Bay State Park at the Manzanita Transfer Station.

It's a resale store operated by Cart'm Recycling, a non-profit organization whose motto is "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

"All the stuff you see here would normally end up in a landfill," a staffer told us as we walked amid piles of sinks, toilets, computers and rusted lawnmowers.

The canning jars at $1 for a dozen were tempting, but it was the hat crocheted from plastic grocery bags that reminded me of why I like Manzanita.

The beaches, the food, the hikes will lure me back, but I'll time my next visit to spring and the date of the next Trash Art Bash. I'm already thinking about what I could do with some of those aluminum skate runners and rusty stove parts.

Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com