Ruby Beach

Ruby Beach is on the Pacific coast of Washington State, inside Olympic National Park, reached by a short path down from Highway 101. It takes its name from ruby-coloured garnet crystals in the sand, which are present and which nobody notices, because everything else is more conspicuous.

It is the classic image of this coastline: sea stacks standing offshore, Abbey Island in the middle distance, and Cedar Creek running out across the beach into the Pacific. Olympic is one of the few national parks holding mountain, temperate rainforest and coast within one boundary, and this stretch of shore is where the rainforest reaches the sea.

The beach is grey sand and rounded pebble, strewn with driftwood — whole trees, bleached and stacked by winter storms into piles that are genuinely large and genuinely unstable. The Pacific here is cold, around ten degrees, with strong surf and a substantial tidal range; the tide pools at low water hold anemones, sea stars and urchins.

Nothing is built. A car park, a path, a sign. The park requires bear canisters for overnight coastal hiking further north, and the beach hiking routes are timed around tide tables because headlands become impassable at high water. Kalaloch, a few kilometres south, has the Tree of Life — a spruce suspended over a washed-out gully by its own roots — and the beaches between them are numbered rather than named, which tells you how many there are.

Sea stacks, drift logs and a creek running out through the shingle, on a coast where the rainforest reaches the tide line. The logs are the hazard — they weigh tonnes and move in the surf, and people have been killed by them. Nine degrees of water. This is Olympic National Park and the tide table decides how far you get.