Darlingtonia californica, also known as the pitcher plant, traps and digests insects in a bog north of Florence. The Darlingtonia State Wayside provides a sanctuary for this prolific plant.

FLORENCE — The youngsters careened through the powdery sand like snowboarders, climbing to the tops of the dunes and finding air on the edges of grassy tussocks. At least 50 of them had gathered on this particular Sunday, the vast majority high school age or younger. Despite more face plants and rump stutters than I see on the Marshmallow run at Mount Bachelor, they kept broad smiles on their faces all afternoon.

The scene on the big dune above Cleawox Lake, in Jessie M. Honeyman State Park, was a clear signal that a new sport — sandboarding — is capturing the imagination of the younger generation on the Oregon Coast. And it’s just one of many reasons to consider a weekend trip from the Bend area to the Oregon Dunes, a four-hour drive west.

At Sand Master Park, just north of Florence, owner Lon Beale has placed a snowboard-style rail in the dunes behind his shop. He offers lessons and sells and rents all manner of equipment, drawing wannabe sandboarders from the Willamette Valley as well as up and down the coast.

Last weekend, I asked Beale if he’d be willing to take me up and show me the rail. “I’d be glad to,” he said, “but I don’t think you’d find anyone there. I understand they’re all down at Honeyman Park.”

Recreation in the dunes

Honeyman State Park is two miles south of Florence, where U.S. Highway 101 runs between Woahink and Cleawox lakes. Cleawox is by far the smaller of the two lakes, but it’s got campsites, picnic areas and a Girl Scout camp on its shores, as well as a huge sand dune that drops directly into the lake on its south side.

I parked in a day-use area beside the dune and walked a few steps to where a family group was holding a birthday picnic among shore pines on the sand. People of all ages were sitting at various levels on the dune, many of them watching the young sandboarders. I spoke to one mother toting a sandboard. “I’ve never done this before,” she said, “but I can’t just sit here watching! I have to try!”

Honeyman Park borders Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, which runs along the oceanfront from the mouth of the Siuslaw River at Florence to the Coos River at North Bend. It’s a 50-mile stretch of shifting sands: a magnet for beach lovers, hikers, enthusiasts of all-terrain vehicles and off-highway vehicles, and others who simply seek a different sort of environment from city streets.

According to geologists, these dunes have been 55 million years in the making, the product of the slow but inexorable erosion of the Cascade Range. Tiny grains of rock, carried to the sea by wind, rain and rivers, are thrown ashore by ocean currents, picked up by strong prevailing winds and sculpted into dunes.

Here, between Heceta Head and Cape Arago, they have evolved into the highest coastal dunes in North America. Constantly moving, they often change shape dramatically with the seasons.

There is a particular pattern to these dunes. Just inland from and parallel to the ocean is a low hill known as a foredune. It’s typically 20 to 30 feet high and covered with prolific European beach grass, planted in estuary areas a century ago to stabilize encroaching sand. Inside the foredune, winds blow away the lighter sand, creating a “deflation plain” where small lakes and water-loving vegetation thrive. The impressive oblique dunes rise inland from the plain, reaching as high as 180 feet and moving constantly, so that no vegetation can grow upon them.

Six miles south of Honeyman, a mile and a half off U.S. Highway 101, I ventured to Siltcoos Beach, at the south end of an area treasured by ATV and OHV riders and dirt bikers. The parking lot here is filled with rigs that hauled their machines across the Coast Range from the valley for an opportunity to ride through the hummocks (knob-like mounds of sand and grass) and the wind-scoured deflation plain.

A volunteer host, patrolling the dunes areas with his two yellow Labradors, told me this area north of the Siltcoos River estuary is a particularly sensitive area for the native Western snowy plover, listed under the Endangered Species Act as threatened. His main duty, he said, was protecting their nests — which unfortunately are made in open sand between March and September — from people, dogs and motorized vehicles.

“It’s not easy,” the man told me. “Crows and ravens come after the eggs, and coyotes will take the chicks after they’re hatched.” But the population of plovers has doubled to 150 breeding adults in recent years, so someone is doing something right.

Reedsport and Winchester Bay

The little town of Reedsport is the midway point on a drive through the dunes. Here, where the Umpqua River splits the dunes, the recreation area has its headquarters and interpretive center. I found this visitor center disappointing. Manned by very young people who were unable to answer my particular questions, it has only a few exhibits and relies mostly on handout literature to tell the story of the fascinating dunes.

A far more instructive local destination is the Umpqua Discovery Center. A museum that in its own way rivals Bend’s High Desert Museum, the facility overlooks the river on a waterfront strip that at one time was a cannery row. Today, this is a centerpiece of a still-fledgling renovation effort.

There are two main sections to the museum. “Pathways to Discovery” is a child-oriented time collage that re-creates 50 million years of geological and natural history along the estuaries of the Umpqua River basin. “Tidewaters and Time” recalls the people and lifestyles that shaped the modern coastal community, from American Indians to sailing ships to 20th-century industry, complete with video interviews with retired loggers. It’s worth a visit of a solid hour or two.

But there is little else to recommend Reedsport. Surrounding the town, coastal forests have been heavily clear-cut with no apparent provision for sustainable logging, leaving ugly brown hillsides with no tree roots to prevent flooding and soil loss during the rainy winter months. No matter what direction I looked from Reedsport, I had a similar view.

I preferred the old fishing village of Winchester Bay, four miles southwest near the mouth of the Umpqua. Numerous seafood restaurants and a handful of gift shops share the Salmon Harbor area with fishing vessels, angling and crabbing shops, and a major Coast Guard station. Nearby are Umpqua Lighthouse State Park and more dunes.

For hikers, the best jaunt through the dunes is the three-mile (one-way) John Dellenback Trail, which begins about 6 1/2 miles south of Winchester Bay. Named for a former Oregon representative and conservationist, it begins from a trailhead at the Eel Creek campground in Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, then crosses through the various divisions of dunes to the oceanfront. The dunes here — the largest on the coast — push inland between 3 and 16 feet per year.

Florence to Heceta Head

But Florence is the most sensible hub for exploration of the Oregon Dunes by visitors from Central Oregon. Located just 60 miles west of Eugene where state Highway 126 meets U.S. Highway 101, it has weathered many of the growing pains associated with a changing economic base. As its logging and fishing industries have dwindled, it has redefined itself as a retirement and tourism community. The best example of this is the Historic Old Town neighborhood, concentrated in about eight square blocks on the old Siuslaw River waterfront.

In the mid 1970s, the riverfront was a seedy area of working-class bars and boarded-up buildings. Civic activists saw an opportunity for revitalization; they succeeded in grand fashion. Today this is the place to stay and eat in coastal Lane and Douglas counties.

Lining Bay Street and intersecting avenues east of U.S. Highway 101 are fine motels and bed-and-breakfast inns, art galleries, bookstores, boutiques, gift shops and more. Activities? You can visit the Siuslaw Pioneer Museum or take a river run on the “Spirit of the Siuslaw,” an authentic sternwheeler. Dine at a choice of a dozen restaurants, including Mo’s, sitting high on pilings above the Siuslaw River, and the Waterfront Depot, with dishes like a Spanish-style seafood stew and a half-rack of New Zealand lamb for no more than $12.50.

The dunes don’t extend far north of Florence. They peter out where headlands again rise above the ocean waters. But you shouldn’t ignore a visit to this stretch of coast. Heceta Head Lighthouse, built 12 miles north of Florence in 1894 and the most photographed lighthouse on the Oregon Coast, has an impressive position on rocks jutting into the sea. A half-mile uphill hike through salal bushes and Himalayan blackberry vines will take you there. Last weekend, as I visited Heceta Head and gazed down upon cormorant and pelican rookeries that stung my nostrils with the smell of guano, I sighted a gray whale rolling in the surf less than 100 yards offshore.

A half-mile nearer to Florence are the famed Sea Lion Caves, heavily commercialized but worth a visit nonetheless. An elevator descends 12 stories into what is claimed to be the world’s largest sea cave, inhabited by hundreds of California sea lions. Large windows afford an amazing view of this raucously loud colony of fur-bearing marine mammals. If you don’t want to pay the $9 admission fee, you can sand at a fence beside the bluff-top parking area and watch at a distance as sea lions come and go from the cave in the surf.