Leadbetter Point occupies the northernmost tip of the Long Beach Peninsula, a windswept finger of land where two ecosystems collide. On the ocean side, gray surf pounds a broad beach littered with driftwood logs the size of telephone poles. Walk east through shore pine and salal, and you emerge onto the calm mud flats of Willapa Bay, where herons stalk the shallows and harbor seals haul out on sandbars at low tide.
“One of the few beaches in Washington where you can walk from ocean surf to bay shallows in fifteen minutes, crossing between two entirely different marine worlds.”
Credit: FlickrKing Tides 2012 - Leadbetter Beach
The state park here exists as much for the birds as for you. During spring and fall migrations, the flats teem with dunlins, black-bellied plovers, and marbled godwits probing the sand for ghost shrimp and marine worms. Bald eagles perch in the snags. The dunes shelter one of the last nesting populations of the threatened snowy plover on the Washington coast—sections close seasonally to protect their scrapes in the sand.
You won't find lifeguards, restrooms past the trailhead, or cell service. What you will find: four miles of solitude, the rhythmic crash of breakers, and the kind of raw coastal beauty that reminds you the beach belongs to the gulls and godwits first, and to you only as a grateful guest.
