Free Explorience or Private Tour? Here’s How to Choose
People ask me what the real difference is between the free Explore Lincoln City Beachcombing Explorience and a private tour.
The short answer is focus.
The Explorience is a primer. It’s me teaching the landscape, the basics of coastal geology, how to look, what questions matter, and how to stop feeling lost when everything looks like “just a rock.” It’s a gift from Explore Lincoln City on purpose. It gives people a shared language, a foundation and understanding of our shores.
A private tour is different.
That time is about your curiosity. We slow down or go deep depending on what you actually want to understand. Agate vs jasper. Why one rock might matter and another doesn’t. What you’ve been picking up for years and never had confirmed. How to read a beach instead of wandering it. How to make sense of what you already own.
There are no guarantees and no secret locations, but I do teach you my secret sauce.
There is coaching, hands-on identification, personalized collecting advice, and space to ask the questions that don’t fit into a group setting.
It fantastic when people do an Explorience first because it makes the private time far more efficient. You don’t have to start from zero. That said I highly encourage it, but it’s not required. Curiosity is enough.
This year matters for another reason.
I’m entering my 10th year as a licensed guide. Maintaining that license, my Wilderness First Responder certification, insurance, training, and compliance costs me thousands every year. Those costs have gone up. My rates have not.
This is likely the last season I offer private tours at this price.
If you’ve ever thought,
“I’ve been collecting rocks forever but I don’t really understand them,”
or
“My grandparent did this and I want to learn it properly,”
or
“I keep watching people online and want to actually know what I’m doing,”
This is the work those moments point toward.
The beach conditions change. The sand comes and goes.
The learning is consistent.
