Coordinates: 42°50′15″N 124°33′50″W / 42.8376089°N 124.5639997°W / 42.8376089; -124.5639997
Cape Blanco is a prominent headland on the Pacific Ocean coast of southwestern Oregon in the United States, forming the westernmost point in the state. It contests with Cape Alava in Washington for the title of westernmost point in the contiguous United States. This contention is due to land shifts and measurement anomalies as well as whether to measure at high or low tide.
It is located in northern Curry County, approximately 5 mi (8 km) north of Port Orford, along a mountainous and isolated stretch of the coast bounded to the east by the Coast Range. The cape is part of Cape Blanco State Park. The cape is the location of the Cape Blanco Light, first lit in 1870.
In Jules Verne's early science fiction book The Begum's Millions, a Utopian community named Ville-France is established in 1872 on the South Oregon beach. Verne gives the location of this fictitious community as "eighty kilometres north of Cape Blanco".
At Cape Blanco, geologists have found that the land is rising at a rate of several millimeters each year.
Famous quotes containing the word cape:
“A solitary traveler whom we saw perambulating in the distance loomed like a giant. He appeared to walk slouchingly, as if held up from above by straps under his shoulders, as much as supported by the plain below. Men and boys would have appeared alike at a little distance, there being no object by which to measure them. Indeed, to an inlander, the Cape landscape is a constant mirage.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)