FLORENCE, Ore. — The grassy bluff over the Pacific offers stunning ocean views of crystalline water, smashing waves, swooping gulls and cormorants and distant Coast Range peaks.
It’s a panoramic splendor. But the real crowd-pleaser on this pullout off Highway 101 in southern Oregon is underground — a dim, foul-smelling cavern called Sea Lion Caves.
Visitors enter through a gift shop, and pay $7 to take an elevator 200 feet underground.
The stadium-sized, natural cavern is partly flooded with water that flows in through a tunnel to the open ocean. It’s a subterranean lagoon, serving as a preserve for two species of sea lion at their only known West Coast "rookery" that is not on an island.
It offers an afternoon of close-range gawking at what biologists describe as marine relatives to terrestrial bears. Some of the sausage-shaped, 12-foot long bull Steller sea lions lounged about 30 feet from the viewing platform.
A private company runs the site as a roadside attraction and a conservation area. It was opened in 1932 by a trio of Oregon families who saw commercial potential in the natural wonder as coast-hugging Highway 101 was paved and road traffic picked up.
The tourist-friendly approach, building an elevator into a sensitive habitat, recalls such draws as the drive-through giant sequoia redwoods also found along Highway 101. Owners say the sea lions don’t mind the crowds.
I wheeled my Toyota into the parking lot of Sea Lion Caves on a trip up from southern Oregon to Portland.
I stopped because I hoped to learn more about the sea mammals that had kept me awake at night in college at Santa Cruz, Calif., with their barking chatter from Monterey Bay. Their howls, which sound vaguely like car horns, form a ubiquitous background noise for many West Coast port cities.
Sea lions are visitors in Monterey; in the cave, the people are the strangers in a sea lion world.
The cave formed when a layer of hard, basalt lava flowed from an ancient volcano into the ocean, covering a softer layer of rock that later eroded from underneath to form a giant bubble at about sea level.
From a gift shop on the bluff above, visitors walk a precarious trail carved into the cliff to the elevator, which descends onto a ledge inside the cave about 30 feet above sea level. A powerful fishy stench wafts up from the boulders below, carpeted with dozens of 500- to 1,500-pound sea lions.
An Oregon ship captain, William Cox, claimed to discover the cave by rowing a small boat through the tunnel in 1880. On a later visit, Cox became stranded by a storm and spent days in the cave. He reportedly survived by shooting and eating a sea lion pup.
Bull Steller, or northern sea lions, live year-round in the cave. As with many species of seal, the males are about twice as large as the females.
Through a powerful set of field binoculars, I watched a bull sit grandly on the island in the lagoon, his neck arched back and mouth snapping open and shut as he barks at the ceiling, dripping with condensation.
He alternately flashed his teeth at us tourists and snarled at other bulls approaching his perch.
Steller sea lions breed from June through August, with the males assembling harems of 15 to 20 females. The bulls pull themselves ashore in early summer, and won’t feed for a month or so as they guard a patch of rock that their temporary family occupies.
Sparring is rare, and only during the summer months. I saw only a few timid lunges and nips. Most appeared asleep on a warm afternoon.
Sea lions were in decline until recently, and remain locked in a fierce rivalry with West Coast fishermen because they have learned to follow boats and pluck meals of fresh salmon from tangle nets.
Until 1972, when killing sea lions became a federal crime, fishermen carried rifles in their boats and routinely vented their anger with a hail of bullets. The mammals are now making a comeback, although it’s not uncommon for sea lions with bullet wounds to wash ashore in remote coves of the Oregon coast.
Sea lion diet is still a contentious issue between conservationists and fishermen, but studies indicate they eat mostly squid and rockfish. Swimming a breast stroke with their powerful front flippers, they dive for about five minutes to depths of up to 300 feet to grab squid or fish, return to the surface and scarf it down. Sea lions cannot eat underwater.
California sea lions, a smaller species seen more often than Steller sea lions at harbors along the Pacific coast, use the cave as a rest stop while migrating vast distances along the coast. They visit mostly during the winter.
Researchers observed one tagged individual hanging out on Pier 39 in San Francisco this spring — where platforms float for sea lions to sit on as a tourist attraction — only to show up munching salmon in the Columbia River several hundred miles to the north a few weeks later.
As it did for me on a trip up Highway 101, the cave serves as a rest stop along the way.
Copyright ©2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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