Growing up on the Oregon coast at our summer home in Road's End in Lincoln City, and despite living in Brookings for a time as an adult, I hadn't really explored the Central Oregon coast much, so we booked a home at Ada Station on Siltcoos Lake near Dunes City for the whole family. The fact that eldest granddaughter is named Ada was a happy coincidence.
Considering its proximity to the Oregon coast, Ada is about as as remote as many other far-flung locations in the state. Winding roads leave U.S. 101 south of Florence and weave a web of routes into estuaries and hills of the Coast Range, most of it heavily logged timber country. One false move, as we experienced, and we found ourselves in "banjo country." At the summit of the first wave of hills in the Coast Range, we turned around and headed back down the hill, taking a right instead of a left this time, and passed the Ada Grange. The community was named after Miss Ada Wilkes, the daughter of Benjamin and Jaretta Wilkes, longtime residents of the area, and was a station on the Coos Bay Rail Line.
The rental home was gorgeous. Advertised as a "tranquil lakeside living meets coastal adventure in a serene, deeply quiet pocket of Siltcoos Lake, this home offers the ultimate peaceful waterfront escape" with "the best of the Oregon Coast right at your fingertips." I spent considerable amount of time refining my summer tan on the beautifully appointed redwood deck.
Considering that Siltcoos Lake has an abundance of fish, including largemouth bass, yellow perch, bluegill and black crappie, brown bullhead catfish, coho salmon, cutthroat and rainbow trout and steelhead, we fished off the dock mornings and evenings when the water was calm. Granddaughter Ada caught both a bluegill and a yellow perch.
