setting forth: salt point

Usually I'd spend some of my winter vacation playing in the snow. But there is no snow (except what the ski resorts are making.) So what to do? Camping!

Camping in January is usually wet and cold, and the coast is usually foggy and damp, often windy too. But again, not this year (really rest of the country, we all need to share. We'll take a little cold and rain, it's only fair).

The Northern California coast is always calling. I grew up here, and it still feels like home, though I've been gone longer than I lived there. I hadn't been to this section for quite a few years, but SO and I got the truck packed and headed to Salt Point State Park. Which I had forgotten is almost too beautiful for words.

These rocks are sandstone, and the salt water reacts to them in a very cool way, creating a rock called tafoni. It looks like lunar surface, or sometimes dinosaur skin, or maybe just something magical.

There are tidepools and bluffs, hidden trails and sandy beaches. Better than anything on TV, I could watch the waves crashing on rocks for hours.

little turban snails, they were actually all hermit crabs!

stump beach and shadows

near fisk cove

evidence of sandstone quarrying, which supplied San Francisco with building materials

I could watch this for hours, exclaiming over the next wave, then the next

Of course we don't go anywhere without some rock stacking. SO was pretty determined this time. I just watch and read my book.

an awesome double rock stack

I just find rocks with lines and line them up

the trail home (and dry creek)

I was reading a great new book, The Half-Made World while I was there. It is an odd genre-defying novel: fantasy/steampunk/western/history. It took a bit to get into it, then I was hooked. The author describes the (fantasy) West in the book as a place where sky and water and cloud and elements are one and the same, where you can't tell where one begins and another ends. That exactly describes this coast.

at the edge of the world