NEWPORT, Ore. – Agates are extremely plentiful on the central Oregon coast right now, and the famed ghost forests are starting to show, along with some extremely ancient bedrock.

Some areas just south of Newport and Agate Beach have plentiful supplies of agates thanks to winter storms that scour out sand levels.

This weekend saw dozens of people at a spot near Seal Rock (about seven miles south of Newport) picking over the area. They’re showing up at Thiel Creek (near the Newport Airport), and at a beach access just north of Seal Rock, at Curtis Street.

Agate Beach itself – at the main access – is providing bountiful agates, as is a secret stash almost a mile north, near the bottom of Yaquina Head.

Also at that Curtis Street access is emerging bedrock more than 17 million years old, and some stumps from a forest 4,000 years old. The stumps are part of what is often called a “ghost forest” – a stand of trees that was immersed in sand millennia ago and thus preserved in time, rather than allowed to decay in the open air.

There are such stumps visible year-round at Neskowin, and winter sometimes shows others at Newport’s Moolack Beach, along with Thiel Creek and Lost Creek just south of town.

There are two main theories behind this. One says a sudden, cataclysmic quake event abruptly dropped the forest 10 to 20 feet into that material - or they were more slowly immersed over a span of decades by a changing landscape.

Guy DiTorrice, president of the Oregon Coast Agate Club, said he’s seen the full range of colors on the coast right now: blues, whites, yellows, green jaspers and the orange/reddish carnalian.

DiTorrice says the agates appear in the creek at the main Agate Beach access, but this spot is often picked clean pretty quickly.

However, Roy Emerick, manager of Starfish Point – which is near Yaquina Head – said the secret spot just below his lodging will likely stay that way because that beach is not nearly as well traveled, and so far no one has seemed to notice the growing patch of bedrock that’s revealing a treasure trove of colorful stuff.

Emerick said the patch extends about 20 feet wide from the cliff towards the ocean, and it’s getting wider. It’s been scoured not by wave action but from water runoff from the cliff.

DiTorrice provided some tips for finding agates:

• Look for exposed gravelbeds or rockbeds
• Walk down the beach at low tides, preferably as the tide is going out
• If they’re still wet from the outgoing tide, they’re easier to spot
• Look for shiny rocks
• Start about three hours before the lowest tide
• At Agate Beach, follow the creekbed, as they’re in the creek

Andre' Hagestedt is the editor of Oregon Coast Beach Connection, a travel news and entertainment Web site about the upper half of Oregon’s coast. He has been a journalist for nearly 15 years, having been employed at or written for a variety of media organizations throughout the Northwest. He lives in Portland and in Manzanita part time, and admits he is "so obsessed with the Oregon coast that it's ready to take a restraining order out on him."