Shoreline Highway, Newport, Mendocino County, CA, 5/24/2014
Late one beautiful spring morning I spotted these three sea stacks while driving along Shoreline Highway just south of the town of Newport in Mendocino County, CA. Here's the view from bluffs 100 feet above the Pacific Ocean. While the leftmost stack is over 50 feet tall, these were not the largest sea stacks I saw that day, but I found them to be attractively arranged. They were once part of the shore! A sea stack is a steep or vertical column of rock in the sea near the coast, formed by erosion. The formation process usually begins when the sea attacks small cracks in a headland and opens them. The cracks gradually widen and turn into a small cave. When the cave wears through the headland, an arch forms. Further erosion causes the arch to collapse, leaving a pillar of hard rock standing away from the coast. Stacks provide important nesting locations for seabirds. During the second half of the 19th century there were 160 shipwrecks off the rocky Mendocino Coast. The vessels that sailed in and out of the area’s doghole ports bringing machinery and supplies and taking lumber had to contend with frequent foul weather and rock strewn approaches at a time when navigation was accomplished largely by human observation.
