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Published: September 29th 2009
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Thursday, May 21, 2009
Point Reyes National Seashore, California
If you leave Oakland by 7 am you can have your feet in Drake’s Bay before 9.
The traffic has to be in your favor of course. The 880/580 commute, the Richmond Bridge, and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard can throw a monkey wrench into that plan real easy. But today they didn’t, and so there I stood at 9 with wet, sandy pant legs and nobody within view for miles. The experience would be completely my own today. I was the wandering shaman.
Point Reyes National Seashore is a chunk of Southern California which was transported north by the San Andreas Fault and now juts out into the Pacific Ocean off the Northern California coast. The Fault itself is blatantly visible to this day, having gouged the almost perfectly straight bays, valleys, and lagoons that define and separate much of the peninsula from the mainland of Marin County.
If San Francisco Bay is the mouth, then Point Reyes is Northern California’s nose.
This particular day my choice of activity was a seaside adventure along Limantour Beach, a narrow two-mile long spit of sand separating the crashing Pacific
Ocean from the calm tidewaters of the Estero de Limantour.
As is frequently the case along the northern coastline, it was foggy and cold. I bundled up in a jacket against the weather, but it was not cold enough to prevent me from removing my shoes and walking through the sand properly, in my bare feet.
The Pacific Ocean is inappropriately named. It is a cold, roaring, crashing ocean. There is nothing pacific about it at all. And it is magnificently alive. We humans avoid the cold water, but the sea critters thrive in it. Out beyond the reach of my feet and lungs extended an undersea shelf as far as the Farallon Islands hosting an aquatic smorgasbord of life. Many of these critters, having met their mortal ends somewhere near the shore, had washed up onto the sand for me to examine. These included jellyfish, shell creatures of all types, and numerous large orange and dark green crabs. There was also one partial seal carcass, perhaps a reminder that out beneath these rough steel-gray waters is also the realm of the great white sharks. One of the greatest concentrations of them on earth.
The air and
sand on the other hand are the realm of the shore birds. Point Reyes National Seashore boasts the greatest diversity of birdlife of any US National Park property. I don't know if that is true or not, but they boast it. Nervous collections of sandpipers worked the edges of the waves, running constantly just out of reach of the rushing or retreating water to see what interesting morsels the waves had disturbed. Seagulls squawked like they own the place. Cool, well organized flocks of pelicans skimmed just above the tops of the rough sea waves further out, looking for their next meal.
On the spit there is only one way out, and one way back. It is still a quarter mile wide in places, so not always narrow from a human perspective. I spent a mile or so studying and playing tag with the churning waves myself, the unceasing mixing of the land and the sea. If you shut your eyes and listen for some period of time, the waves create a cool ebb and flow of beautiful white noise. About halfway up the spit I headed away from the sea, up into the dunes and the grass. I
then crossed over completely onto the mudflats of the calm estuary side.
Here on the mud, I needed my shoes. An uncountable number of holes and tiny mud mounds indicated the individual burrows of clams or crustaceans or worms. Critters love living in the mud. A large splash out in the water surprised me and I looked out to see a pelican surfacing after a hunting dive. I could not tell if he‘d been successful. He and a colleague continued to execute this process in tandem, taking turns flying, searching, and then splashing down. I called them Bob and Doug so that I would have some company. Across the calm estuary waters rose the sea-sheared cliffs of the headlands. The sight across to the dirty, grassy, dry land along their rounded tops was somehow comforting as I progressed now almost to the end of this lonely two-mile sandy spit
Near the very tip, a pod of well over 100 female and baby Harbor Seals had beached themselves on the edge of the sand and water to rest. I could not identify whether there were any males in the group. I tried one time to approach them, thinking I
was still a healthy distance away, but those closest to me splashed quickly off into the estuary. They stayed out there with their heads bobbing just above the water to watch my apparently intimidating progress.
The end of Limantour spit also marks the meeting point of the crashing Pacific Ocean and the broad calm estuary of Drake’s Estero. The turbulent push/pull of these opposing waters combined with a myriad of subsurface sandbars creates an aggressive, churning, threatening sea. Scylla & Charybdis themselves might inhabit these waters. And watching the final stretch of sand beneath my feet gradually succumb beneath the cold, gray waves left me more than just a little cautious and awestruck.
Having reached the end, I now had only one choice; two miles back down the sand to the trailhead. Long walks such as these leave plenty of time and distance for a guy to reflect on his day to day routine. It is appropriate, I think, to engage such thought processes in the midst of the natural world which is of such a massive size compared to the scale of human perception, and which goes on constantly, day by day, throughout the night, and all
through the years, completely absent of my involvement or that of any other person. Insignificance is a healthy lesson to learn.
On the way back I encountered a noisy high school field trip group was tracking my earlier footprints outward from the trailhead. Nothing brings you back to humanity quite like a gaggle of teenagers. Point Reyes is a wilderness, but still located within 30 miles of a metropolis of 7 million people. One is never completely alone here for long.
http://www.lkmac.com/SMC/limantour.html
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Andrew Bachert
non-member comment
review of Limantour Spit
I like the blog. Very good description of the area and great photographs. Look forward to future travelblogs.