About

West of the Tunnel is a website about the central Oregon Coast community.

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Travel west to the Oregon Coast on Highway 126, and you’ll drive through a short tunnel. On the other side is a coastal community of small towns, forests, dunes, and people. Florence, Mapleton, Dunes City, Deadwood, beaches, rain, fog, more rain.

Visitors to the central coast spent about a billion dollars in 2022. We have a casino, sea lions and a lighthouse. There are 15 churches listed on ChurchFinder.com for Florence, and one in Mapleton. No mosques or temples that I know of.

We’re a solid 40 minutes or longer to the nearest Walmart.

The average American is about 39 years old. The average Oregonian is 40ish, and the average person in Florence is about 61 59.7(updated in 2024, we’re getting younger 🙂 )

We split pretty evenly on the 2020 presidential election. (Florence teetered slightly for Biden, while Dunes City and Mapleton tottered a bit in favor of Trump, for example.) The great Oregon Dunes start in Florence and head south. Frank Herbert spent some time in Florence, which helped inspire him to write “Dune.”

And a tunnel, of course.

My name is Will Yurman. I moved to Florence in 2022. I live with my wife, Meg, our dogs Walker and Fezzik, and our cat Freddie. I spent many years as a daily journalist at a newspaper on the East Coast. I’ve lived and worked overseas and for more than 15 years taught journalism — first at Penn State and now at the University of Oregon.

West of the Tunnel is where I tell the stories of the people who share this remarkable place. It grows out of my own curiosity about who lives here and the stories we don’t often hear, or the reasons behind the stories we think we understand.

Thanks for visiting the site.

Mission Statement

(This is a work in progress. Please let me know if you have questions or suggestions about this or any part of West of the Tunnel.)

West of the Tunnel is driven by the core belief that factually accurate, truthful, transparent, and honest information is a fundamental necessity for a functional democratic community.

• I will always do my best to verify and confirm facts.
• I will quickly correct errors and explain how they happened.
• I will be transparent about the work and my reporting.

Maintaining high ethical standards is essential to the practice of journalism.

Stories and information are published with the hope of informing and entertaining the community. West of the Tunnel is published with the belief that shared stories and shared facts can allow for shared conversations.

I support the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics as well as the National Press Photographers Association’s