Welcome to Beach Week, our annual celebration of the best place on Earth.

Minutes before the start of the 61st annual Cannon Beach Sandcastle Contest, teams in raincoats huddled together and not-so-secretly hoped the event would get called off. Heavy rain formed deep trenches in the sand they were soon expected to sculpt, and the forecast showed no signs of letting up. “This extra soggy sand is throwing a wrench into it,” said Karlen Trucke from team Wine Castlers. “Sand, when it’s this wet, will collapse under its own weight.” But if the coastal community canceled an event due to inclement weather, they would never get anything done.

The starting horn blared, and contestants in every division plunged shovels and their bare hands into the sand. A man in a wetsuit ran by towing a wagon piled high with tools and a big stick. Another man pedaled a homemade contraption to pump out water collecting on his plot. Teams had five hours to build something impressive out of nothing, or rather, out of sludge.

“Welcome to the Oregon Coast,” first-time judge Bo Ensign said.

Sandcastle building has been taken seriously in Cannon Beach since 1964, when a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.2 earthquake in Alaska swept across the Oregon Coast. The north end of the city was hit the hardest. Homes were torn from their foundations, and a bridge connecting residents to town was destroyed. That year, locals organized a sandcastle contest on the beach to lift spirits and attract visitors. Their plan worked. “One year we had thirty thousand people here,” said Robin Risley, adding that the 2025 contest was the rainiest in her 40 years of judging.

Attendance was much lower this year. Weather was a likely factor. But Cannon Beach is still one of the most visited destinations in Oregon. People come from all over for the contest and to snap photos of the iconic 235-foot-tall Haystack Rock featured in films like The Goonies and Twilight.

A few hours into building, the rain and wind didn’t seem to slow anyone down. Some mounds started to look like castles and others, castles with dragons. More plots of sand took the form of bunnies, bears, and bigfoots. One team built a city destroyed by Pugzilla, inspired by a pair of real-life pugs on leashes nearby the scene.

Judges scored teams based on attitude, teamwork, composition of the sand, height of the structures, and finally, the finishing details. One judge wasn’t sure contestants could achieve a high level of detail with the deluge, which sometimes blew sideways.

But the wet conditions worked in their favor. In previous years they’ve had to pipe in water from the ocean to keep their sculptures from drying up and crumbling. Bryan Watt of team Silly Sanders in the small group division formed his allotment of wet sand into perfectly round spheres. Here at Cannon Beach, he said, the sand is really heavy and dense. “You get a bunch of wet sand and then you just start forming it in your hands,” he said. The trick, he added, to keeping it together is rolling it in drier sand, which he found by digging into the bluff nearby. “It has to be dry enough to hold its form.”

On the other end of the beach, where three teams competed in the invitation-only masters division, complex scenes developed. Team Ozymandias created their own Mario Kart course called the Sand Prix complete with Mario and Super Stars. The Hey! Stackers prophesied Wall Street’s demise, sculpting a cast of bears and a headstone that read “RIP 401(K).” And Form Finders made Bigfoot Beach, a very Pacific Northwest–inspired scene of surf bum sasquatches.

“This is our favorite week,” said James Butler, who founded Form Finders 14 years ago. His team was awarded first place for the second year in a row. Last year’s build featured a sphinx and a tower taller than seven feet. “The weather was horrible today but we endured.”

As judges announced winners and passed out prizes, the storm cleared. Spectators who’d avoided the rain gathered around the sandcastles in awe. One contestant peeled off her sopping raincoat down to her swimsuit and jumped into the sea. “I’m already wet anyway!” she yelled.

Such heavy rain in June was unusual, even for the Oregon Coast. But be it bad weather or just a rising tide, sandcastles, of course, don’t last forever. Trucke, whose team, Wine Castlers, won first place in the large-group division for building a dragon-shaped castle, was at peace with her hard work returning to the ocean. “It’s just a natural part of how it goes,” she said. On a warmer and drier day, contestants will return again to practice for next year’s event, whatever weather it may bring.

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