65|Coos Bay Waterfront — the working harbor behind a prehistoric planet

Coos Bay does not look like sixty-five million years ago. It looks like what it is: the largest deep-water harbor between San Francisco and the Columbia, a town of log decks, chip ships and a boardwalk built over the water where the Coos River meets the tide. It earned its place in this film the unglamorous way. When the production came to Oregon, Coos Bay was one of the towns it worked out of and shot around, and the money it left behind in Coos and Curry counties is still cited locally as proof that a dinosaur picture can matter to a mill town.

Walk the boardwalk in the early morning and you get the whole logic of it. Twenty minutes inland the road turns to rainforest — moss, sword fern, water everywhere — and that is the country the cameras wanted. Twenty minutes west is open ocean and the stacks.

Stand at the rail and watch a chip barge work the channel. This is the ordinary place that made an extraordinary landscape reachable, and the town knows it.