Hidden Coast Scenic Byway History and Folklore

Over the summer, I was chatting with Boaz Backus, the chainsaw carver guy who built Ocean City Marketplace in 1995, and son of woodcarving pioneer (and my friend) Judy McVay. Boaz doesn’t live along the Washington Coast anymore but his legacy lives on in stories; about saving Dorothy Anderson’s cabin,...

My dad, Jim Mason (1943 – 2014)  was a self-taught cartoonist who practiced drawing Mickey Mouse and other characters in the margins of his homework starting in Kindergarten. Later, he put himself through graduate school as a sign painter and eventually he became one of only a handful of Art...

All sorts of people wander into the shop on any given day and many of them ask interesting questions and we get into conversations about history, pickin‘ and the North Beach. But recently I was asked an odd question and surprisingly — I knew the answer! A couple came, shopped...

Beachcombing on the Hidden Coast; a favorite pastime for locals and tourists alike, has been going on for as long as things have been washing up! On the Washington Coast we have some great examples of salvaging items from the beach such as Dorothy Anderson’s Tourist Harbor. Crafted from reclaimed...

A little backstory on the historic Dorothy Anderson cabin at Seabrook. Dorothy Antonnette Anderson In 1926, at the age of 19, Dorothy Antonnette Anderson, an immigrant from Nessa, Norway, along with the thousands of other city dwellers, poured into towns along the Hidden Coast Scenic Byway to take a break...

Clam Digging on the Hidden Coast Scenic Byway in the 1930’s; a Personal Story In April 1990, Harriet Baller, a 48-year resident of Moclips wrote about the trials and tribulations of clamming digging on the coast. Upon her death at the age of 90, her stories were donated to the...

We live at the end of the USA, on the Washington Coast, where things have always been drastically different than city life on the I-5 corridor. Born out of a desire for fun, just a few decades ago, Ocean Shores was a party town complete with a resident shipwreck (the...

To say that pulling a 16-foot wood carved sign from the attic of an old service station in Copalis Beach took the top spot on my ‘best of’ list, is an understatement. It did so much more; fed my obsession with Washington State history, my love of forestry, brought new...