April 28, 1996: Pt. Reyes National Seashore

From the Bear Valley Visitor Center to Limantour Beach

I've included a short recap of the history of the area for your edification.

On Sunday, April 28, I hiked from the Visitor Center (one of two at the Seashore) in Bear Valley to the sandy beach at Limantour, some sixteen kilometers away. My usual gang of companions preferred to visit the reconstructed Miwok village Kule Loklo, and then walk along the Earthquake Trail near the Visitor Center.

Where Sir Francis Drake Blvd. ends by the Olema Inn, turn right on State Highway 1, and then after about a block turn left again. Cross a wide grassy valley (the San Adreas Fault) and then, by a huge red barn-like building, turn left to the Bear Valley visitor center.

(You can also get here, if coming from San Francisco, by turning from Federal Highway 101 onto State Highway 1 at Mill Valley and then following it religiously the approximately twenty-five miles to Olema. This will take you through Muir Beach, Stinson Beach, and the tiny hamlet of Dogtown, as well as some remarkably scenic countryside.)

A stop in the Visitor Center is highly worthwhile.

Note: distances here are given in kilometers and meters. They should not be taken as definitive, since I don't carry a pedometer and didn't have map or guidebook with me, but they did seem to come out in my notes to just a little over sixteen kilometers, the approximate length of the trail...

The first six and a half kilometers of this trail take you to the coast near Arch Rock. This is a popular round trip, and the trail is often fairly crowded. It has had its ups and downs -- in 1980 the Trailside Killer left several bodies in this area, and the trail was closed for almost half a year after the hard winter of 1982-83. Now it's open, smooth, shallowly graded, covered with a thin layer of small gravel, suitable for the handicapped to travel in their motorized chairs; it also permits bicycles and horses, at least for the first five kilometers.

At the west end of the Visitor Center parking lot, you'll find a gate next to some signboards describing the park area. Just on the other side of the gate the Rift Zone Trail takes off to the left and the Woodpecker Trail climbs uphill through grass to the left. Both of these are essentially nature trails.

Pass a coppice with huge cypresses covered with Spanish moss on the right, not close enough to give shade on a hot day; but at about 200 meters you'll come to a shady stretch on the right, a good place to stop and take a breather when coming back to the parking lot. After another fifty meters the Mt. Wittenberg Trail takes off to the right, next to a huge California laurel, for an exhilirating climb to the top of Pt. Reyes' highest point.

The trail now enters woods with heavy undergrowth and starts uphill, with a stream flowing downhill to your left. The woods are moderately open and sunny, but still have plenty of sword ferns and bracken lining the slope to your right. At about one kilometer you'll pass a log bench to your left, just above the stream, across which you shortly pass on a culvert and then, after awhile, on another. Watch out for the horse droppings, of which there will be plenty along this trail. After a couple more culverts, you may notice salmonberries on your left, as well as horsetails. This latter relic of the age before the dinosaurs is a common plant in marshy areas of the park.

At 1.5 km. you pass a wooden bridge across the stream, currently on your right; this is the start of the Meadow Trail, with the Mt. Wittenberg Trail one of four laterals that connect Bear Valley with the Sky Trail, part of which is currently closed because of the Mt. Vision Fire. Continue your shallow climb through open woodland between slopes to both sides of the trail. Notice the tall Douglas firs around you.

As you keep on climbing, the forest opens out a bit. You pass another log bench on the left. Keep one eye open for miner's lettuce, good to eat, along the trail side; keep the other eye open for cyclists. Eventually, at a bit over two kilometers, you'll see blue skyline through a screen of Douglas first ahead. The trail zigs to the right through an open space, then up to the left through the tree screen, and you come out in Divide Meadow, the summit of the ridge, boundary between two watersheds, and approximate halfway point in the walk to the ocean. Here you can picnic on acres of open grass, visit the two restrooms placed here for your convenience, relax on a log bench while waiting for someone else to come out of the restroom, or take off up to the right on the Old Pine Trail, yet another lateral to the Sky Trail. Or, you can start downhill toward the coast, again watching out for cyclists.

The meadow continues downhill for the better part of a kilometer. Watch for the marshy area in the middle about halfway down; this is the start of the watershed that leads to the sea near Arch Rock. Notice the row of Douglas firs on the skyline of the ridge ahead and to the left. As you approach the lower end of the meadow, you'll see (in season) a carpet of poppies on the opposite slope, and, just left of the trail, a tiny tree with many white flowers -- an apple? Horsetails are common here, too. You'll see some Douglas iris to your left, and, on the other side of the lower meadow, an anomalous row of pines -- not a local tree. The wire fence that you see isn't of local origin, either

You gradually enter open, mostly deciduous, woodland as the trail levels out a bit. The slopes close in from left and right. The rill that swells out of a spring in the meadow is here joined by a fairly large stream coming in from the right and passing under you through a culvert; you'll pass several other such streamlets on your way to the ocean, and by the time you're in the last kilometer before Arch Rock, the stream will be fairly wide.

At four kilometers the valley opens out again and you get a good view up the ridge to the left. On the right, brambles flower in the spring; by summer you should be able to harvest a few berries here, if the other hikers haven't gotten to them first. A little way on you'll come to some interesting outcrops of weathered, mossy sedimentary rock and conglomerate to the right. The stratification is most apparent in the second such outcropping. Beyond this, you descend through shady forest to the stream. Notice the canyon opening out in the ridge to the left of you.

At five kilometers you come to a trail junction. The Glen Trail leads off to the left, eventually to Wildcat Camp, Alamere Falls, and the Palomarin trailhead west of Bolinas. To the right the Baldy Trail climbs up to the Sky Trail -- or would climb to the Sky Trail if it were not closed because of the Mt. Vision Fire. At this trail junction there is a bike rack for those who are willing to obey the no-bicycles-beyond-this-point sign. Some people actually do obey the rules...

The trail continues on downhill toward the stream, which is deeper, faster and louder than we've seen it before; in fact, about 100 meters on you'll see a depth gauge out in the middle. Not far from here you start feeling a cool breeze blowing through the forest, a wind off the ocean. You pass several small cataracts plunging down from your right, as well as an unusual-looking fern with fragile leaves and black stems -- this one might have been the model for Michael Barnsley's fractal fern.

At about six kilometers you pass, on the left, a very gnarly-looking tree with ferns growing up its trunk. At this point the trail starts uphill. Just past several Douglas first to your right, the forest mostly disappears and you continue up an open brushy slope, bounded high up on your right by a forest of juvenile Douglas first, with a good view of the high, steep ridge on the other side of the valley to your left. The stream is now well below you -- you won't rejoin it again.

You pass through a grove of dense, young Douglas fir and as you emerge you top out and the ocean comes in sight ahead of you. From here on you will be in open ocean-side moorland.

You have several choices here. There's a trail junction; if you follow the left- hand split downhill, you'll come in about a quarter of a mile to Arch Rock. This is a nice place to lunch, as every other hiker along this trail quickly recognizes, and its relatively small summit fills up rapidly. You can scramble down to the left into the stream valley and reach the oceanside here, getting a look through the arch. Beyond here, the trail -- the Coast Trail -- continues south to Coast Camp (5-1/2 kilometers) and the Palomarin trailhead (14 kilometers).

But we want to go north, so back at our trail junction we follow the Coast Trail along its right-hand branch, past a slope covered with sage, morning glories, more brambles with their berries already forming, scarlet pimpernel, and other flowers. In a couple of hundred meters we come to another left-hand trail down to Arch Rock. A few meters beyond this, watch for an unofficial track to the left over the moors toward the bluffs just north of Arch Rock. There is open grassland at the top of these bluffs, with occasional clumps of brush to give shelter from the wind and excellent views over the ocean -- a much better place for a lunch than Arch Rock itself.

Walk on to the north, leaving the Arch Rock area behind. From here on you'll have some beautiful views out across Drake's Bay to the Esteros and Chimney Rock. At about seven and a quarter kilometers you pass through a woody glen through which a stream flows down to the sea, and a couple of hundred meters later you'll pass, on your right, the west end of the Sky Trail (closed because of the Mt. Vision Fire). And some two hundred meters beyond this you get your first view of burned trees high on a knoll to the right and ahead.

The trail narrows down here -- after your experience on the wide, gravelled, carefully graded Bear Valley Trail you may be surprised and perhaps dismayed by this narrow, rocky trail. Relax. This is an indication of how few people actually used it compared to the Bear Valley thoroughfare.

At eight kilometers we come to the left-hand lateral to Kelham Beach. At this junction there is a single huge and very ancient eucalyptus. When the Mt. Vision Fire occurred, I read that "the solitary eucalyptus" was caught and burned up, and was very distressed at the thought that this tree might have disappeared. But it wasn't this tree, apparently; while here we see the first signs of fire along the Coast Trail -- burned greasewood brush -- the fire apparently only singed the base of the tree, leaving its crown untouched.

Despair I will not while I yet descry
That lonely tree against the western sky.

-- Matthew Arnold, The Scholar Gypsy

Having lunched, move on northwest, at times going more inland as you pass distant headlands where you might see an occasional picnic party out on the blufftops in the distance. The burned greasewood which dominates the layer three feet above the ground is ample evidence of last year's fire; but the carpet of grass and flowers that covers the ground hides any other evidence. Here, as elsewhere in the coastal region, you'll see lots of thistles; these are generally considered a nuisance, but in late spring and summer their flowering violet tops will help you understand why the people of Scotland chose this as their national flower.

At about eight and a half kilometers you'll get your first view of the parking lot at Limantour beach, far off in the distance -- don't expect to make out individual licence plates at this distance, even if you have better eyes than I do. Just beyond this point you drop into a deep canyon along what appears to be a trail of convenience; this is a remnant of a big slide in the hard winter of 1982-83. It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good; the bottom carries a small stream and is otherwise covered with purple-blue lupine. The old trail is still visible -- but not very passable -- above you.

From here on, I spent much time making notes about flowers whose names I didn't know. There were lots of little three-petal red-purple flowers here, and dandelions, which I know from my lawn. At just over nine kilometers I started seeing patches of blue-violet flowers otherwise identical with the ubiquitous scarlet pimpernel (indigo pimpernel, as my daughter Esther suggested from the description?). You could see a new type about every hundred meters, or so it seemed.

At about nine and a half kilometers the trail narrows, turning down in a shallow descent through burned greasewood into a wide valley filled with flowers of various types, horsetails, thistles, tall grass, and a small stream which you cross just above a three-meter waterfall that plunges into a tree-shaded canyon where the fire seemed not to have reached. I confess that I was more interested in the plants with the hanging clusters of purple flowers paired 5-7 to a side.

At a little over ten kilometers you round another point, noticing the many poppies growing here. The burned and skeletal trees high on the hillside above you look ominously autumnal. From this point on, watch for lizards scuttling away up the trail; I saw four or five. Also, listen for birdsong. Nature is coming back after the fire with a vengeance.

At eleven kilometers you turn inland along the south side of a very deep canyon. All the trees down in the bottom seem to be burned out, but to the right of the trail on the upward slope you can find the biggest miner's lettuce that I've ever seen -- very tasty, too. Watch for ladybugs on the thistles. Two hundred meters into the canyon you'll cross a wooden bridge that seems to have remained untouched during the fire. Turning back toward the coast on the north side of the canyon, watch the trees in the bottom. Just downstream from the bridge, the crowns are in full leaf, despite the total disappearance of leaves from the lower branches; further down, where the view from the south suggested that the trees were totally dead, you'll find a few small branches struggling to emerge and put out new foliage. I confess that I almost cried when I saw this. At the surface, the ground is green all the way down to the water with grass and ferns.

At eleven and a half kilometers the Sculptured Beach Trail turns off to the left; there is a hitching post here, in case you have a horse. From here you continue through the moorland, enjoying the flowers and the views, for another kilometer until you can see the big eucalyptus just west of Coast Camp -- apparently it was not burned, either. Just beyond you enter another canyon, similar to the one previously mentioned, with a huge 20-meter rock monolith to your right just before the stream crossing. The stream, fairly wide, is not bridged -- use small logs that other hikers have generously dumped into the water.

At thirteen kilometers you'll see a huge rock "castle" to your right (actually, you've already been seeing it for about a kilometer), and just beyond here you descent through a single zigzag about 150 meters long into Coast Camp. This campground, with restrooms and picnic tables, lies in a wide basin almost completely surrounded by low ridges. The grassy basin bottom is kept free of brush, and this seems to have protected it from the fire; neither tables nor restrooms show any damage whatsoever. Stop here to rest for a few minutes before you enter the last -- and, for some, hardest -- lap of your walk.

Head down-basin toward the hitching post -- I am told that these are for llamas as well as horses! -- but before you reach them, turn left along a narrow trail that drops toward the ocean along the left side of the stream that drains this area. When you reach the beach -- with a nod to a picnic party or two that may have found their way this far east from Limantour -- cross the stream outlet wherever you can and make your way west along the beach.

The way to do this, in my opinion, is to stay close to the water and walk on the wet sand, where incompressible water in the interstices makes walking relatively easy. If you walk further up, you'll lose half your energy in pushing sand backward rather than in pushing yourself forward. The disadvantage is that anyplace a wave has just deposited water it will be depositing water again a couple of waves later -- perhaps more often if the tide is coming in; be prepared to dodge to the right fairly often. Furthermore, the beach contours allow waves to push further up in some places than in others; and once they have summited out, the waves then tend to curl to right and left and catch the unwary from ahead or behind. A wave curling down from ahead is avoidable, but you have to be quick to dodge one coming in from behind. I was not always quick.

You follow the beach for about three kilometers, first with brown stone bluffs above the beach to your right, then with grass-capped dunes bordering the coast. The dunes are fairly featureless, and it is not easy to figure out exactly how to get to the parking lot. I used an old Indian method of finding the route; I estimated the density of tourists at any given point of the beach, and assumed that when I encountered maximum density -- with the numbers dropping off ahead of me -- I would be at the closest point to the parking lot. The system worked like a charm; when the tourist density topped out, with approximately ten people per square yard, I picked my way to the right, trying to avoid acres of human flesh -- some of it very attractive, some less so -- and came right over the dunes to the paved track that led to the rest room and parking lot at Limantour beach.

This is the end of the walk, but enjoy those hundred meters of paved walk; they lead across a narrow but long marshland with a variety of plants and birds.

Don Harlow

Drake went away and apparently Queen Elizabeth was uninterested, for the English never came back, and the name "New England" was recycled some thirty years later. One wonders what the world would have been like if Drake had been so lucky as to discover San Francisco Bay, one of the finest anchorages in the world for a wooden navy; but the summer fogs that fill the Golden Gate made this unlikely, and, indeed, neither Drake nor any of the other mariners who sailed up and down the coast over the next two hundred years ever noticed the Bay -- it was finally discovered in the 1770's by a Spanish land expedition. In fact, as far as I can tell the only thing of interest that happened in the area after Drake was Rodrigues Cermeño's shipwreck here, followed by an epic voyage by lifeboat to Acapulco, in 1596.

(Interesting historical note: bits and pieces of Ming dynasty pottery have been discovered in Miwok shell mounds in this area. When I first visited the Visitor Center at Drake's Bay, back in 1975, the Official Word was that these came from gifts given to the Miwok by Drake himself. What Drake was doing with Ming pottery on the Golden Hinde was a mystery. Later, it was decided that this pottery came from a Portuguese ship wrecked in the area. That it might have come directly from the Chinese themselves seems never to have crossed anybody's mind, though up until about 1400 the Mings had the greatest naval fleet and, under the eunuch admiral Cheng Ho, the finest exploratory program in the world.)

After the Spanish moved into the area late in the eighteenth century, this area was divided up by land grants, and after the state was taken over by Anglos after the relatively short (one human lifetime) Spanish-Mexican occupation, turned into farms, mostly of the dairy type. Much of Pt. Reyes west of Inverness Ridge remains farmland even today. Not only dairy farms -- there is, near Ten-Mile Beach, an AT&T "antenna farm" for international communications, and a little bit east of there, on a quiet inlet, there's an oyster farm, run by a family named Johnson whose patriarch, so I understand, fought in the Pacific in World War II and came home from Japan with a Japanese war bride who knew all the ins and outs of raising oysters.

A Few Additional Pictures

Looking back from entrance to forest	Tree by the trail

Ferns along the creek

Don Harlow <don@donh.vip.best.com>