True Lies and Fiction About Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Oregon--Yes It Is True That It Came From Brazil, The Aliens Dropped it, The Moon Keeps An Eye on it.

True Lies and Fiction About Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Oregon Rated as a "Monolith" It is Not Even One of the Top Ten Lex Loeb Contributor Network . No other rock in Oregon has as many crazy theories explaining it's existence as does Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach. Every evening at sunset hundreds of photographers are down on the beach and around the town of Cannon beach taking the exact same picture: the sun setting to the west of Haystack Rock and the other smaller sea stacks in the surf. You see one camera set on a tripod taking the same picture, night after night and sometimes during the day too. Haystack rock is like the focal point of all existence in Cannon Beach. Tourists flock to Cannon Beach which is one of the closest on the Pacific Ocean to Portland , Oregon. They come up and down the pacific coastal highway from Seattle and California. At 235 feet high in the tidal area of the beach , Haystack Rock is visible from much of the town a couple of miles in both directions. The rock is a natural bird sanctuary. Hard to climb and forbidden to climbers, the birds find it a safe zone very close to the popular beach town. The formation is called a sea stack because it is at times surrounded by water at high tide. As a sea stack it is considered to be the third tallest in the world. Taller sea stacks rate as follows: Ball Pyramid , Australia, at 1726 feet or 562 meters Old Man of Hoy, Britain, at 449 feet or 147 meters Haystack Rock, Oregon, at 235 feet or 71 meters Haystack rock is not that tall in comparison but in the context of Cannon Beach it is the central focal point. Many stories are told about how haystack rock came to be where it is. The best ones are the craziest. The real non tourist locals can be found in the local dingy taverns in off season where there is a quiet consensus that the rock was whisked off the sea floor near Brazil's Rio De Janeiro and deposited by mysterious alien forces in Cannon Beach Oregon. It might as well have been with the $500 fine for those who illegally climb it to find out. The sea birds don't want any human company up there but it is worth the climb if you can afford the fine. Problem is it is not a safe nor an easy climb. Occasionally there is some rescue operation to get people off of the rock, even near the base who get stuck there when the tides quickly come in and surround the rock. The Oregon coast is no swimming beach. The waves are unpredictable, the water cold and the currents love nothing more than to rip tide. Huge drifting logs from the nearby forests compound the danger of the local surf there. Fairly frequently some kid is trapped by the tide on Haystack rock. The local paper probably has a scrap book of all the incidences going back 100 and some years? Another theory of where Haystack rock came from is that it is just all that is left of a lot of erosion as it is a somewhat harder rock than all that is already lost but that theory is not absurd enough unless you realize that everything eroded away might have been eroded away in one huge geological catastrophe. Yes there may have been a major land collapse all around in in a major subduction earthquake directly off the coast with in 200 miles and subsequent tidal waves to wash debris away. Over Cannon beach are to the south are some of the most beautiful coastal mountain peaks found anywhere and curiously they look similar to haystack rock. Is it possible that one of those monolithic looking rocks over the town rolled down in a 9.0 magnitude earth quake? Just south of Cannon Beach Oregon has some of the tallest sea cliffs found on any continent or island where the mountains do seem to meet the sea. Cannon beach looks as if it is sunken compared to the mass of basalt and other harder rocks hitting the sea just south of town. Of course in the taverns around last call the theory goes that the birds had something to do with the creation of Haystack Rock. Yes the sea gulls got together , a long time ago, and flew the rock in from Rio. Beacon Rock as a "monolith" if it is mostly one solid rock or connected strata of rocks is a mere mound compared to Beacon Rock in The Columbia River Gorge in Washington State. Beacon Rock is 848 ft tall 848 ft tall. There is a trail including switchbacks stares and ramps where anyone can climb to the top of Beacon Rock. Some think Beacon Rock is the second tallest monolith on earth , second only to the Rock of Gibraltar at 1396 ft tall. Size and scale are confusing comparing one monolith to another. Some are larger and others are taller. Beacon Rock is much more massive than Haystack rock and it is composed mostly of the same rock that once was a volcanic core or plug. Even that rock breaks apart in rock falls. The similarity between Beacon Rock and Haystack rock is the proximity to water and a similar shape. Beacon Rock was almost destroyed by the army corp of engineers at one point to make easy to load on boats dynamited rocks to build the jetties at the mouth of the Columbia River near Astoria. It was only a private land owner that did what he could do to fight off big government and save Beacon Rock as a tourist attraction and yet another wonder that environmentalists seem to think that putting land in the hand of government for protection is necessarily the only way to "save" the environment. They don't know their history very well since no where was more polluted and destroyed in government ownership than the old soviet union and Maoist communist china. Now Beacon Rock is part of the Washington State park system but instead of allowing public access to publicly owned land the state of Washington uses the rock to extort money from climbers who need to park their car near by. It was better off being a privately owned rock all along since nothing about it is public now. The ancient Indians had their own mythic tales about both rocks but they believed that tall peaks were gods so these being shorter than surrounding mountains were mere children of the gods. Here is a list of some of the monoliths of the world and how they compare in height: Haystack rock 235 ft tall (71.6 meters) Beacon rock 848 ft tall Gibraltar 1396 ft tall (426 meters) Penade Boral Mexico 1148 ft tall (350 meters) Sigiriya, 1214 ft tall (370 meters) Sugar Loaf Mountain , Brazil, 1299 ft tall (396 meters) Zoma Rock , Nigeria 2378 ft tall ( 7 meteters) El Capitan , Yosemite 3000 ft tall (910 ters) Ayers Rock, Australia 1142 ft tall (384 meters) Torres de Paine , Patagonia Chile, 8200 ft tall252500 meters) Ben Amera Rock , Mauritania,1640 ft tall (499 mers) ) Devil's tower, Wyoming , 1267 ft tall (386 Meters) Haystack Rock maybe the center of gravity in Cannon beach but it is not one of the world's greatest monoliths. One other bar room theory has a meteor hitting the earth near Rio and sending Haystack rock flying to Oregon but if it did that it would have shattered itself and the local environment. Haystack Rock is an impressive sight along with its neighboring sea stacks. Out at sea further is a light house on one of these rock outcroppings just off of Ecola State Park which can be one of the most aming p pacific coast scenery that anyone ever encounters. .