On April 1, 1905, a keeper lit a lamp at Slip Point for the first time. There was no tower to put it in. Congress had funded a light and a fog signal for this corner of the Strait of Juan de Fuca but not the structure to hold them, so a lantern bolted to the front of a plain wooden building did the job for the next decade. April Fool's Day is an odd date to begin warning ships off a rocky point, and sailors on the strait might have appreciated the joke. They also understood the need. Sixty miles of unlit water lay between the lights at Cape Flattery and Ediz Hook, and Clallam Bay sat almost exactly in the middle of the gap.
Congress appropriated $12,500 in June 1900 for the light and fog signal, and the wooden station building went up in 1904. The keeper's residence followed in 1905, the same year the lamp was first lit, and a proper light tower did not arrive until 1916. A simpler tower replaced the original structure in 1951. What survives now is the house rather than the light: the 1905 keeper's residence still stands above the beach, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with local volunteers working to keep the roof over it. Slip Point itself is an unglamorous hook of land, low and dark, the kind of feature that looks harmless from shore and lethal from a pilothouse in fog. Generations of families raised children there, listening to a fog signal that never quite let them forget why they had been posted to the edge of the continent.
Clallam Bay began in the 1880s as a steamboat stop, a place where a vessel could take on freight and passengers between somewhere and somewhere else. It became a mill town in 1890. Two years later the mill burned, and the community pivoted to making barrels, because barrels were what the neighbors needed. Across the bay at West Clallam, the Pacific Tanning Extract Company had been rendering hemlock bark into leather-tanning extract since 1887, and the boom was real while it lasted. Then, in 1893, demand for the extract simply stopped. Hundreds of men were suddenly out of work in a place with no second employer, no road out, and winter coming on. They did what people in that position have always done on this coast: they went fishing. Later they went logging. The town that had been built on bark learned to live on salmon and timber instead.
Between 1902 and 1907, the logger D.A. Robinson worked the hills behind Clallam Bay and built a railroad to move what he cut. To cross Charlie Creek he raised a timber trestle 808 feet long and 202 feet high, which at the time was reckoned the longest railroad bridge in the world. Picture it: a lattice of hand-framed Douglas fir twenty stories above a creek bed on the far northwest corner of the country, built by men working with axes, cables, and steam donkeys, so that logs could reach tidewater a few miles away. Nothing of it remains. The forest closed over the grade, and the record it briefly held passed to steel structures in places with far better publicity. It is a peculiarly Pacific Northwest kind of monument, world-beating and temporary, built entirely out of the thing it was built to harvest.
Sekiu Point, the western cape of the bay, was first charted by Captain Henry Kellett in 1847. The town behind it was founded as West Clallam in 1870 by A.J. Martin, who put up a salmon cannery to be nearer the fishing grounds, and it is now called Sekiu -- pronounced "See'-kew," as visitors learn quickly and often. Clallam Bay and Sekiu are two miles apart and function as a single community, twin towns strung along State Route 112 where the highway finally meets the water. The 2020 census counted 386 people in Clallam Bay, up from 363 a decade earlier. From here, Route 112 runs twenty miles west to Neah Bay and Makah country, or sixteen miles south by Route 113 to reach US 101. Fishing boats still work out of the bay. Hunters and anglers still fill the motels in season. The mill is a century gone, but the water it was built beside has not changed at all.
Clallam Bay lies at 48.255N, 124.258W on the south shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, roughly twenty miles east of Cape Flattery. From the air the bay reads as a shallow crescent bite in an otherwise straight, heavily forested coastline, with Slip Point forming the eastern hook and Sekiu Point the western one; the Clallam River enters at the southeastern corner. State Route 112 traces the shore as a thin gray line, often the only break in the timber. Vancouver Island fills the horizon fifteen miles north across the strait. Best viewed at 2,000-4,000 feet, which keeps both twin towns and the mouth of the river in one frame. Nearest airports: Sekiu Airport (WA 11S) immediately west of town, William R. Fairchild International at Port Angeles (KCLM) about 40nm east, and Quillayute Airport (KUIL) about 30nm south. Marine fog and low stratus are common here from late spring through summer, and the strait can be clear while the shoreline is buried.