20 Best Beaches in the World

Cannon Beach, Oregon

Rover is welcome on most of Oregon’s 400 miles of public beaches, including this wide ribbon of hard-packed sand that has the added eye candy of Haystack Rock looming offshore. An annual dog show unfurls in front of the Surfsand Resort each October.

Cannon Beach is a city in Clatsop County, Oregon, United States. The population was 1,690 at the 2010 census.

The first recorded journey by an American to what is now Cannon Beach was made by William Clark, one of the leaders of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in early 1805. The expedition was wintering at Fort Clatsop, roughly 20 miles (32 km) to the north near the mouth of the Columbia River. In December 1805, two members of the expedition returned to camp with blubber from a whale that had beached several miles south, near the mouth of Ecola Creek. Clark later explored the region himself. From a spot near the western cliffs of the headland he saw “…the grandest and most pleasing prospects which my eyes ever surveyed, in front of a boundless Ocean…” That viewpoint, later dubbed “Clark’s Point of View,” can be accessed by a hiking trail from Indian Beach in Ecola State Park.