Proposal Rock sits at the mouth of Neskowin Creek, about 10 miles (16 km) north-northeast of Lincoln City and half a mile (0.8 km) south-southwest of the community of Neskowin, Oregon. Named for a local legend, the rock stands adjacent to the stumps of an ancient spruce forest buried in the beach sand.

In 1887 Alexandria L. Rock came to teach school in Oretown, a community on Nestucca Bay about four miles (6.5 km) north of present-day Neskowin. In a 1949 book on the area’s history, she recalled that in the 1880s and 1890s settlers from the Little Nestucca River area journeyed to the mouth of Neskowin Creek for picnics on the beach. During one such outing, a sea captain named Charley Gage proposed to Della Page, daughter of a local homesteading family.

Adjacent to Proposal Rock and the mouth of Neskowin Creek stand the stumps of a Sitka spruce forest, likely buried after a Cascadia subduction-zone earthquake abruptly dropped the land, allowing mud from landslides or tsunami debris to bury the trees. Many of the stumps are over 2,000 years old.  Read more here and here. Explore more of Proposal Rock and Neskowin Creek here: