Above: The sea swirls and chews at the limestone coast of Cape Flattery, slowly but inexorably eating sea caves into the rock. Right: The mood of the winter coast changes with every shift of the light. As the last light of day slices through winter clouds, the seascape north of Rialto Beach, so ominous just a moment before, suddenly feels serene.

Then comes a glimmer of low, slanting light. Winter sun in the western sky, piercing the dark cocoon of the deep forest where it opens to the sea in the full glory of its winter siege.

Waves, whipped up by a three-day blow, boom against sheer black headlands. White spray obliterates the last rocky strongholds of land at Cape Flattery, the outermost edge of the Continental U.S.

The Pacific has quarried sea caves into the limestone foot of this rocky coast. Waves flood the caves with cold, green, seething seawater roiling with white foam.

The very ground shudders as the sea hauls off and slams another big ocean roller at the coast.

It is a battle most glorious in winter. Between storms, the sun will drop out of stone-colored clouds and gild the waves with the pale, low light of the solstice.

The setting sun lights the spray that hangs over the rocks, creating shifting, phantasmic clouds of gold.

Sea birds fly in an urgent "v" low to the water, their skittering cries slicing through the booming of the waves. The last light of the day blazes orange on the windows of the lighthouse standing watch at Tatoosh Island.

Bull kelp whips in the backwash of the tide that churns and grinds at the rock, their bulbous ends bobbing in the waves like the heads of mysterious sea creatures.

A cedar boardwalk trail slick with winter rain is the perfect place to savor the velvet quiet of the moss-padded forest that meets the wild Pacific at Cape Alava.

As the sun retreats into its steel-wool winter cloak of storm clouds, the highlights dancing on the ocean vanish. The sea is suddenly dark and surly; a mean drunk about to throw a punch, a violent majesty that delivers a bracing dose of perspective on our little, human world.

COME TO Neah Bay in the spring or summer sport-fishing seasons, and the place is packed gill to gill with boat trailers, campers and tourists. It can take nearly an hour to be served in the Makah Maiden, a waterfront café on the main drag that fills with fishermen at 4 a.m.

But arrive in winter, and you'll wake the cook from hibernation; the place is deserted and so quiet you'll hear your fish dinner hit the fat. And a fine sound it is: a winter night at the Makah Maiden is one of those times and places when smoking-hot, fried halibut and buttered, toasted white bread straight from the plastic sack are just the thing.

A lullaby of rainfall and a bell buoy rocking on the storm tide are the only sounds as this remote reservation town settles into the deep quiet of a black winter's night that will last 16 hours.

For the locals in beachfront towns like this one up and down the coast, the arrival of winter means peace at last. It's as though the houseguests are finally gone, and the hosts get to have the place back to themselves.

There's a kind of rampant familiarity as small-town life returns to normal.

Sidney Bowechop, a Makah native and retired logger, keeps watch outside the town's only supermarket in his pickup, teasing and joking with the locals as they come out of the store. He gives his small, hand-carved canoes and paddles to some, serving them up from a white Tupperware container he keeps on the seat just in case.

	Glowing starfish light the dark, barnacled rocks and tide pools of Washington's Pacific beaches.

His eyes shine with happiness as he tells of waves crashing over the harbor jetty in the most recent winter storm. He relishes a good, drenching winter rain.

"Oh, I love to be out in it," Bowechop says.

The winter sea also seethes with wildlife. Gray whales, migrating south from the Bering Sea to their calving grounds off the coast of Mexico, cruise just offshore, and even approach the beach.

The wild, largely uninhabited northwest Washington coast was named the country's 14th marine sanctuary in 1994. Twice the size of Yellowstone National Park, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary runs 135 miles from Cape Flattery south to the Copalis River and stretches 35 miles out into the sea.

In winter it is a place of 25-foot waves, 50-mile-an-hour winds and sea water that numbs the bones at 48 degrees. Drilling downpours strafe the beach, stoking annual rainfall totals that routinely top 8 feet.

The cold, clean, nutrient-rich waters are home to more species of whales, dolphins and porpoises than anywhere else in the world.

The rugged headlands, cliffs, sea stacks, arches, tide pools and hundreds of offshore islands are festooned with vast colonies of seabirds, and patrolled by one of the largest populations of bald eagles in the Lower 48.

This churning water between Cape Flattery and Tatoosh Light is known as The Gut by even the hardiest Coast Guard captains, who have learned to respect its roiling winter currents.

THE WINTER COAST of northwestern Washington is some of the wildest in the state, and the country.

You can drive on some of Washington's better-behaved, southwestern beaches, congenial in their companionship with people. These are the beaches with cheery little windsocks waving from waterfront restaurants and studded with trophy beach houses multi-storied as wedding cakes.

Even some of the beaches at Olympic National Park are park-and-ride attractions easily reached by the highway, with paved lots — that favored habitat of RVs and station wagons — just beyond the waves.

But from Cape Flattery to Cape Alava, the beach is an ill-behaved, ankle-turning beast, spitting up root wads the size of Volkswagens from old-growth trees.

Streams swollen by winter rains and tea-stained with tannin cut through the sand from the forested uplands in their surge to the sea.

"From a human-shaped world you are about to step into a terrain dominated by other forces," an advisory from the National Park Service notes ominously on a sign at the trailhead to Cape Alava. "The sea makes the rules."

So true, especially in winter.

	Sea stacks, chiseled by the pounding waves, form a gap-toothed coastline back-lit by a winter sunset at Toleak Point.

A 3.3-mile hike through the forest reaches the sea here. Nobody drives on this beach, or even walks it without checking the tide tables: a high winter tide can trap unwary hikers against sheer rock cliffs. Beach logs, hurled by winter waves, become lethal weapons.

Even on a sunny day in winter it seems to rain as wind shakes the water from trees swathed in hanging gardens of ferns and moss.

The driftwood here is soft and plush as suede from the constant moisture. Lavender and pink seaweed loll on the sand, some roughly textured as pot scrubbers, some as smooth and shiny as wet plastic.

The winter beach at Cape Alava is strewn with great, stinking heaps of bronze-colored kelp, flotsam and wrack flung against the driftwood by winter waves.

It's a brawny beach, with bulwarks of driftwood, gravel and boulders strewn across gray and black sand.

On a dark and rainy morning, Brian Svel, a cook at the Makah Maiden, checks on customer Michael McCarty, a Neah Bay local. The lights had just come back on after a winter storm knocked out power — a common occurrence in this town snugged between the vast Pacific and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

An octopus, yanked rudely from the deep by the waves, lies in a heap on a mound of kelp and seaweed. Tight white suction cups march the length of its curled, pink arms. Seagulls and crows pick voraciously at the animal's white, jiggly meat.

It is loud out here with the scream of eagles, indignant squawks of herons and the high-pitched piping of sea birds knifing in tight squadrons just over the water.

Ocean rollers break on offshore islands that provide sanctuary for seabirds that at the height of their migration can number more than 1 million.

The smell is delicious: seaweed and salt water and air blown in fresh from the vast Pacific.

Cormorants are everywhere, strung in a line across the tops of sea-blasted rocks, their outstretched wings drying in the wind.

A midday pause between storms brings a sky deep blue at its dome, a band of slate storm clouds brewing at the horizon, and a fast-moving scrim of low clouds streaking to the sea.

The sun becomes a white-faced full moon behind silver rain clouds, then breaks free once more, highlighting the outline of deer tracks and cross-hatchings left by tiny bird claws on the sand.

A thousand tide pools refract the sunlight, bright mirrors of light amid dark stones.

The only buildings out here are a deserted ranger station for the Makah tribe and a cedar long house, pummeled smooth by the fists of winter storms.

Offerings to the Makah's ancestors have been left inside the long house: Bleached white whale bones tinged with green algae; the skull of a deer pronged with antlers; a necklace of purple-blue shells. A tiny birch-bark basket filled with bird bones, and a silvered plank of driftwood piled with seashells, beach stones, feathers and bits of glass tumbled smooth by the waves.

Since the time of the Pharaohs, the tribe has lived on this coast, hunting whales and seals and living from the bounty of the sea. No one has lived at Ozette, the southernmost village of the tribe near Cape Alava, since early in the last century. The feds required tribal members to send their children to school, so families moved north, to Neah Bay.

This coast is deserted now, and the beach feels a long way from anywhere, or anyone.

Winter brings solitude; days pass without the sight or sound of another person.

By day's end, the break between storms begins to falter. Rain clouds build and muscle in from the horizon.

By nightfall the trees smoke with mist and the sky is locked tight and gray, the color of the sea in winter.

Lynda V. Mapes is a Seattle Times staff reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.