Qualla: Ruby Beach

Ruby Beach: Introduction

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sapphire Hamblin, CC0. Pick up a handful of sand at Ruby Beach and look closely. Mixed among the grays and blacks are flecks of deep red -- almandine garnet, weathered out of Olympic Mountain rock and carried to the coast by rivers that have been grinding stone into jewels for millennia. That mineral gave the beach its name, and on a late afternoon when the sun drops low enough to catch those crystals, the entire shoreline glows with a faint crimson warmth that no other beach on the Washington coast can match. Ruby Beach sits at the northern edge of Olympic National Park's southern coastal strip, twenty-seven miles south of Forks on Highway 101, and it is one of the most photographed landscapes in the Pacific Northwest for reasons that become obvious within seconds of stepping onto the sand.

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Image: Sapphire Hamblin | CC0

Ruby Beach: Sentinels in the Surf

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheFirstMotion, CC BY-SA 4.0. The sea stacks are what stop you first. These towers of resistant rock, left standing as the ocean eroded the softer stone around them, rise from the surf like the ruins of some drowned cathedral. Abbey Island, the largest, anchors the southern end of the beach and serves double ...

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Image: TheFirstMotion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ruby Beach: The Driftwood Labyrinth

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adbar, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before you reach the sea stacks, you have to navigate the driftwood. Entire old-growth trees, stripped of bark and bleached silver by salt and sun, pile against the upper beach in tangled ramparts that can stand ten feet high. Every winter storm rearranges them. The logs come fro...

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Image: Adbar | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ruby Beach: An Island Called Sorrow

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. Four miles offshore, Destruction Island rises from the Pacific like a low green table. The island earned its grim name in 1775, when Spanish explorer Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra sent seven men ashore near Point Grenville to gather wood and water. They were killed by loca...

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Image: Richie Diesterheft from Chicago, IL, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ruby Beach: Where Forest Becomes Shore

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA, CC BY 2.0. The trail down to Ruby Beach begins in the temperate rainforest that blankets the Olympic coast. You descend through a corridor of Sitka spruce and western hemlock draped in club moss, the air thick with the smell of wet earth and decomposing wood. Within a few hundred yards, the...

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Image: John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA | CC BY 2.0