Neskowin Ghost Forest

Neskowin Ghost Forest is the woods that died standing and waited two thousand years to come back. The Sitka spruce forest south of Proposal Rock was buried — whether by the Cascadia earthquake's subsidence or the slower encroachment of the dunes, the geologists still argue — and the salt water preserved the stumps where lignin-eating fungus couldn't reach them. The winter storms of 1997–98 stripped the sand and the forest came back: a hundred barnacled stumps in the surf, the trees' roots still in their two-thousand-year-old soil.

The science is the ghost story — the trees stood 150 to 200 feet, a coastal rainforest at the tide line, and their burial is the Pacific Northwest's seismic history made visible: the ghost forests up and down the coast that told the geologists the Cascadia fault existed. The Neskowin stumps may be the dune-buried kind rather than the earthquake kind; either way, the dead forest on the beach is the evidence of a coast that has changed catastrophically before.

The sight is the file's own — the low tide exposing the stumps in the surf line, the spruce ghosts in the wash where the forest was before Rome fell. The file keeps the honest strangeness: not a legend but a real ghost forest, the trees that died before recorded history on the coast and emerged from the sand to prove the land itself had moved.

Neskowin Ghost Forest is the archive's drowned-forest file — the two-thousand-year-old Sitka spruce stumps on the Oregon beach, buried by earthquake or dunes and exposed by the 1998 storms, the Cascadia coast's own ghost made visible.