George Ward, georgeward.com
David Wimpfheimer, calnaturalist.com
Kathy Barnhart
Point Reyes National Seashore * 50th anniversary
William Dreskin, dreskinfineart.com
Rocks, reefs, bluffs, dunes, surf. How to embrace this grand coastal zone? Point Reyes’ outer edge seems surreally long relative to the size of the land it rims. The peninsula measures 28 miles from stem to stern and, at its widest — between the lighthouse and the San Andreas Fault zone — about 12 miles. Its total area is just over 110 square miles, yet it touches oceanic waters along a span of fully 63 miles, about half-and-half rocky shore and sandy beach. A saltwater margin wraps the body of the land like a living skin. Rocky bluffs, muscular, confront the ocean head-on. Between headlands there are softer recumbent landforms, hollowed by water and shaped at their edges into sand beaches. Layers of Point Reyes geology, tilted and torqued, meet the sea in a mosaic of pocket beaches, sculpted sea stacks, an improbable waterfall, and broad shale reefs. Trace the coastline here; sample its power and diversity. Remote in the northwest, Tomales Point thrusts a granitic finger in the direction of transit for this floating island . . . toward the Aleutian Trench. Just to the south, headlands are edged with a jumble of rock ocean-battered over eons. The largest lump, guano-covered Bird Rock, holds the same critical value as many an ocean isle: isolation from terrestrial predators. Nesting seabirds and resting pinnipeds love this, need it, and likewise inaccessible crannies all along this broken shore. Journey on to the Great Beach, 11 miles of unbroken, dune-
backed, high-energy surf — an expansive spectacle of driftwood, steep sand, and crashing waves that may stir reflections upon California before so many shores were leveled, groined, built upon, raked bare of any wild debris. Playground or habitat: can beaches be both? Imagine. Abbotts Lagoon, summer solstice, midmorning. The north wind is already kicking up a white haze on the horizon. Gulls loiter near the tide line, brown pelicans oscillate along the fronts of cresting waves, and the beach appears empty. Unseen, a true denizen of this landscape hunkers in a divot, protected from predators only by its appearance and behavior. The snowy plover is a tiny shorebird whose camouflage and cryptic markings enable it to vanish against sand and scattered drift. You could walk within inches and miss this creature . . . except that this male has two chicks nearby (the third likely taken by a raven). Should a dog approach the chicks — mottled fluff on long legs, now crouching perfectly still at their parent’s signal — the adult will throw himself into a distraction display worthy of an Oscar. Wings flailing as if crippled, crying as it goes, the plover lures its enemy away, then vanishes again within its terrain. While such fine adaptations have not immunized snowy plovers on the West Coast from a century of insults to their habitat, they still cling
to home in the sands of Point Reyes Beach. This parent calls his chicks to his side, then leads them on a ploverly chase for kelp flies. Kehoe, Abbotts, North Beach, South: this is genuinely wild sandy shore, pummeled by northwesterly winds and big wave trains. Winter swells may rear up a quarter-mile offshore and collapse in thunderous, foaming waterfalls. On to the lighthouse and Chimney Rock headlands. The blunt fist of outer Point Reyes juts so far into the ocean that it actually mixes things up in the California Current. A plume of localized upwelling enriches sea life in the Gulf of the Farallones, and mobile vertebrates from herring to humpbacks congregate here for the feast that ensues. Just inside the peninsula’s bent wrist, where Drakes Bay begins, northern elephant seals are multiplying. Driven close to extinction 100 years ago, this giant pinniped has made a dramatic return; several hundred now haul out at Point Reyes each winter to squabble, bond, and breed. The Drakes Bay colony alone produced 330 weaned pups in 2012. Wildlife populations, like everything oceanic, are in flux. Also in the lee of Point Reyes, sand grains too fine to settle out on the Great Beach swash into Drakes Bay on a curving back-eddy. The same curve, writ large, has sculpted cliff walls of blond shale. These are layered remains of minute marine organisms (continued on page 44)
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