Taylors Landing is a boat landing and small community near the head of the tide on the Alsea River, in the Coast Range, about 17.4 miles (28 km) west of Alsea and 6.4 miles (10 km) east-southeast of Waldport, Oregon. The landing is reputedly named after a pioneer settler. The area has historical ties to the Alsea, a Native American people who originally inhabited it. They are part of the Yakonan language group, which numbered about 6,000 in 1780 and occupied 17 villages on Alsea Bay and along the river. The Alsea River has two major tributaries: the North and South Forks. The North Fork originates in creeks flowing from the west side of Mary’s Peak, the highest point in the Coast Range, at 4,101 feet (1,250 m). The main stem begins at the confluence of the North and South Forks, near the community of Alsea, and flows about 43 miles (69 km) to Alsea Bay, passing through a series of small communities, including Tidewater, Little Albany, Westwood Village, and Taylors Landing.

The Alsea River drains a watershed of 298,240 acres (120,693 ha) containing about 950 miles (1,529 km) of streams. Major tributaries include Lobster Creek, Fall Creek, the Five Rivers system, and Drift Creek. The watershed is primarily underlain by rocks of the Alsea Formation—a gray marine sequence of tuffaceous siltstone, very fine-grained sandstone, interbedded mudstone, glauconitic sandstone, fine-grained tuff, and reworked lapilli tuff deposited during the Oligocene, about 34 million to 23 million years ago. Bedrock outcrops appear along a 40-mile (65 km) arcuate belt through the central Oregon Coast Range, between Alsea Bay in the south and Siletz Bay to the north. Formation thickness ranges from 164 to 3,609 feet (50–1,100 m), overlying the Nestucca Formation and unnamed basaltic sandstone of the late Eocene, about 56 million to 34 million years ago. Most of the watershed lies within the Siuslaw National Forest, which extends south to Coos Bay across roughly 630,000 acres (255,000 ha). The forest has two distinct vegetation zones: the Sitka spruce zone, where mild temperatures, persistent winds, and dense coastal fog limit other growth; and the western hemlock zone, which develops in the shade beneath a dense Douglas-fir canopy. Both zones encompass freshwater, upland, offshore, and estuarine habitats.

Four major rivers flow from the Siuslaw National Forest into the Pacific Ocean: the Nestucca, Alsea, Siuslaw, and Umpqua. These rivers provide excellent habitat for anadromous fish; smaller streams and tributaries extend the routes that salmon and steelhead follow to their ancestral spawning grounds. The Alsea River supports runs of Chinook and coho salmon, steelhead, and coastal cutthroat trout—four anadromous runs that have sustained a major fishery from before Euro-American settlement to the present. Water levels on this small coastal river vary widely: as shallow as one foot in late summer, and up to 18 feet in places during flood. Fish runs are typically triggered by Pacific storms and rising water. Since the decline in timber harvests in the 1990s, sport fishing has provided modest economic support for businesses along the river. The Alsea River Fish Hatchery sits about one mile north of Highway 34 on the North Fork. In 2023, all hatchery and research work was indefinitely suspended at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center following a major landslide immediately upstream. Learn more about the Alsea River here and here.  Explore more of Taylors Landing and the Alsea River here: