Tillamook Head rises like a wall between Seaside and Cannon Beach, its flanks thick with Sitka spruce and salal. The Tillamook people lived along this coast for thousands of years before Clark's party arrived, leaving behind shell middens and house pits that archaeologists have studied since 1976. Several of these sites within the park's boundaries were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, though coastal erosion has already claimed parts of what once existed. At Bald Point, a shell midden and possible house pit associated with the Tillamook people holds information about settlement patterns, subsistence strategies, and environmental change stretching back centuries - a record written in discarded shells and fire-cracked rock rather than ink.

The park exists because of stubborn people. Samuel Boardman, Oregon's first state parks superintendent, and Henry Van Duzer spent the 1930s and 1940s acquiring land that loggers and developers had their eyes on. Some parcels came from Crown Zellerbach Corporation after the trees had already been cut. The Civilian Conservation Corps built trails and picnic facilities during the Depression, and the park was dedicated in 1932. After World War II, a decommissioned Army radar station on Tillamook Head was folded into the property. By 1978, the last private parcels had been purchased, and the park reached its current size - nine miles of coastline encompassing old-growth forest, sea cliffs, and the kind of views that made Clark reach for his journal.

Indian Beach sits in a cove at the park's southern end, a crescent of sand hemmed in by basalt cliffs and pounded by waves that roll in from the open Pacific. The setting has drawn filmmakers for decades. The time-jumping final sequence of Point Break was shot here, Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze framed against the same surf that has shaped this shore for millennia. Scenes from Twilight used the beach's moody atmosphere to match the story's Pacific Northwest gothic. The cove's appeal is obvious: fog threads through the sea stacks, the light shifts constantly, and the scale of the cliffs dwarfs anyone standing below them. On days without a film crew, surfers paddle out into the break, and tidepoolers pick their way across rocks slick with algae.

The Tillamook Head Trail runs six miles from Seaside to Indian Beach, approximating the route Clark and Sacagawea took in 1806. Designated a National Recreation Trail in 1972, it climbs through second-growth forest thick with ferns and moss, crosses streams where salmon still spawn, and emerges at viewpoints where the Pacific stretches to the horizon. On clear days, Tillamook Rock Lighthouse - the decommissioned sentinel locals call "Terrible Tilly" - is visible a mile offshore, perched on a rock so exposed that waves once threw boulders through its lantern room. The trail is part of the Oregon Coast Trail, and hikers who make the full crossing arrive at Indian Beach muddy, winded, and certain that Clark chose the right word: grandest.