Arlene has always wanted to see good tide pools with things like sea annemones in ’em. We asked at the visitor center where we could find some at Point Reyes. The rangers looked at the tide tables and told us that we were probably too late that day, but that there was a chance at Sculptured Beach, which was a few miles drive and then a two mile walk down the Laguna trail. We decided to try it.
As we were starting to turn left out of the road to the visitor center I saw some birds on the road to the right. It was a group of a half-dozen California quail. We were pretty excited, because we don’t see them in the east. After that auspicious start, we continued to the trailhead. Almost as soon as we started walking I said “hold up!”. On top of a bush twenty feet away was this guy:
I walked closer and closer, trying to get the best picture I could (this was the third try) until the bird decided I was too close — and he wasn’t alone! Another dozen quail burst from cover to get away from us when that one did. We kept seeing quail along that trail, especially close to the shore, where a couple of dozen of them were having a good time around water dripping from a drinking water faucet.
We didn’t find any tide pools, but there were lots of shorebirds along the beach.
By the time we got back to the car we figured we had seen over 100 quail and put 5 miles on our shoes.
In the afternoon we drove up to the northern end of the national seashore to the tule elk refuge. Hank had warned us, “Don’t talk to the elk,” because this was elk mating season and the males were likely to be short tempered. We walked about a mile down the trail without seeing anything, rather disappointed because the rangers had indicated that the elk were pretty much a sure thing on that trail, until, in a lovely green glen on the Tomales Bay side of the trail we saw this:
The animals were pretty far away, but close enough that we had a better look at them than you may think from the picture. We didn’t mind being that far from large, possibly aggressive animals; in fact, we thought it was almost the ideal distance.
We got back to the visitor center a little before it closed. Now that I had seen the elk, I wanted to get an embroidered patch of elk to put on some future jacket. On the other side of the visitor center parking lot we walked on Earthquake trail. It’s as much right on the San Andreas fault as you’re going to get. There’s a fence there that was pulled apart when the earth opened during the 1906 earthquake. It was interesting, but by now the earth isn’t gaping open and you have to believe the signs and use your imagination.
We had made lodging reservations at the Gualala Country Inn, about a three hour drive north of Point Reyes. It didn’t look far on the map, but a lot of the road is very slow, and I mean as slow as 15 mph going around some curves where you don’t want to drop a couple of hundred feet down to the ocean.
There are no cities on the coast between San Francisco and Fort Bragg, and few towns of more than a couple of hundred people. We stopped in Tomales to look for food in a wonderful old general store, Diekmann’s:
Most of the landscape is dull green trees and dull yellow dried grass, but it’s brightened by some electric pink lilies that lots of houses have in their gardens. Arlene noticed them first in Mill Valley and asked several people about them. They’re remarkable because they have no leaves, just flower stalks. They’re huge, about the size of amaryllis. One person said they’re called Pink Ladies, and another called them Naked Ladies (take that, searchers!). I’ll put a picture in the post for Aug. 29, because I took the picture then. The other bright spot in the landscape is California poppies, growing wild all over.
We got to Gualala around 8:15 and hustled off to dinner — the innkeeper told us that everything would close at 9. We had a chunk of smoked salmon and a bucket of ribs at the Bones roadhouse, a Texas-style barbecue place that’s decorated with license plates from almost all 50 states. The waitress was pretty busy and kept saying “thanks for waiting”, but we felt we had to thank her for waiting for us to get into town.