Claude Alexander Conlin was no ordinary homeowner. Born in 1880, he became one of the most successful stage magicians and mentalists of his era, touring the vaudeville circuit and building a reputation for mind-reading acts that packed theaters across the country. His Rialto-chain connection was personal -- these were the venues where he made his name. When he built his home at Mora in the 1920s, overlooking the beach and the open Pacific, he brought the name with him. The house is gone now, consumed by fire and reclaimed by the coastal forest, but the name endures on maps and park signs, a small monument to a performer who understood that naming a thing is its own kind of magic. The beach itself -- north of the Quillayute River, opposite La Push Beach to the south -- was already spectacular. It just needed a showman to give it a billing.

Winter storms on the Olympic coast are events of genuine violence. Waves driven by Pacific gales slam into the shore, and the rivers running off the Olympic Mountains carry entire trees -- root balls and all -- into the ocean. Many of these trees wash back onto Rialto Beach, where they accumulate in enormous piles of bleached driftwood. Hundreds of trunks, some massive enough to have taken centuries to grow, lie tumbled and interlocked along the high-tide line like the bones of something ancient. Walking among them, you move through a landscape that is both cemetery and sculpture garden, where the trees have been stripped of bark and smoothed by salt and sand into shapes that suggest vertebrae, ribs, cathedral arches. The driftwood shifts with each major storm, the beach remaking itself in a cycle that has no beginning and no end.

About a mile and a half north along the beach from the parking area, the coastline meets a rock headland that the Pacific has not been content to merely erode. Over centuries of surf and wave action, the ocean punched a hole clean through the rock, creating a natural arch wide enough to walk through at low tide. Hole-in-the-Wall is the beach's most famous feature, a destination that requires timing -- the passage is only accessible when the tide is out, and getting caught on the wrong side of a rising tide against a rock wall is a real hazard. The arch frames the continuation of the coastal wilderness trail beyond, where tide pools cluster at the base of sea stacks and the beach stretches north toward the Quileute tribal lands and the wild, roadless coast of Olympic National Park.

Rialto Beach sits within Olympic National Park's coastal strip, accessible by road from the Mora area west of Forks. It is one of the most visited beaches on the Olympic Peninsula, yet it retains a quality of wildness that more accessible beaches surrender. There are no boardwalks, no lifeguard towers, no concession stands. The parking area gives way to a cobblestone shore that shifts underfoot, and beyond the driftwood line the forest presses close -- a wall of Sitka spruce and western red cedar draped in moss. The Quillayute River separates Rialto from La Push Beach and the Quileute Indian Reservation to the south. Eagles patrol the tree line. Harbor seals haul out on rocks offshore. In clear weather, the sea stacks -- some topped with twisted trees, some bare as monuments -- march south along the coast in a procession that suggests the ruins of a drowned city.