Amidst this riot of colorful lifestyles, a curiously drab blob hangs from a boulder’s underside. If you can suck and filter sea water, or prey on something that does, or scavenge upon its remains–and resist desiccation when exposed, and tolerate wave shock–success! Competition for space is intense, and the place is a jumble of resilient anemones, crusting sponges, tough sea stars, scampering arthropods, muscled gastropods, glued-down barnacles, tied-down bivalves, and holding-fast algae. Life coats every surface and has found a phenomenal range of ways to express the theme of “clinging-to-rock-in-frothing-surf.” Seawater is essentially soup, rich in ground-up, once-living matter–detritus. Beyond a stony passageway lies a wet and slippery cove where the mad-laughter calls of black oystercatchers echo off the cliffs. Boulders heaped with gleaming kelp display the year’s phenomenal crop of macroalgae (still growing). Extreme low-tide pilgrimage down to sea level (still receding). Life–such as these sea stars and sea anemones–“coats every surface” of the rocks in the tidepools at McClure’s Beach. Tides raise and lower the ocean by as much as nine feet in a span of six hours a minus tide will pull the curtain open, for just a while, on one of the greatest biodiversity shows on earth. Life zones that intersect here host a multitude of creatures: single-celled to great-whale-sized drifting or locomoting migrating or colonizing or simply coping with an accidental arrival on currents of wind and water. Onshore habitats, too, are richer for this region of upwelling, one of a handful in the world ocean. Just offshore the California Current churns north-to-south, chilling and mixing local ocean water, producing exceptional concentrations of marine life. Storm-powered surf drags six or more vertical feet of sand off beaches in winter. Weather pulses onshore as part of a flow that fills the whole North Pacific basin. Here, familiar is wedded to unprecedented, impermanent, primal.Įlemental forces hold sway. Even a favorite destination on the margin of this wild peninsula is never the same twice. Point Reyes’ outer coast is all about expecting the unexpected. Algae-covered rocks at McClures Beach at low tide. We, too, are decidedly excited and plunge into the water and the swirling clouds of microscopic life that luminesce our bodies. This is bioluminescence, visible light emitted by hordes of minute ocean creatures (such as the dinoflagellate Noctiluca) when excited by the likes of wave action. We stomp and shuffle in the wet-sand starburst. ![]() At our feet, jets of brilliance zoom left or right: water-energy meeting the shoreline’s perfect curve. Sky darkness deepens, and the oncoming surf is surely glowing brighter. Gradually, another fire begins to manifest–in the breaking waves. Friends hover near the embers of a driftwood fire. Drakes Beach, late summer, nightfall a soft overcast promises to drop down as wet fog. Will there be gigantic sea waves, born in a deep vortex a thousand miles away, exploding into frothing geysers on the sea stacks at McClures? Will a lone harbor seal commuting near the Limantour shore catch a rising wave from within and show itself, backlit, surfing–no, flying!–inside the water? Will an osprey plunge wishbone-deep into the sea near Sculptured Beach and then muscle back into flight, shuddering off spray, its talons locked on a 10-inch surf perch? Yet as surely as you may know the way there, you can never know what awaits you: What phenomena will flood your senses and deepen your sense of place in this living world. At the road’s end, the trail’s end, the far end of that last dune-trudge or bluff-scramble, it’s there: a great conjunction of land, sky, and sea. You always know essentially where to find it: just aim yourself toward the western horizon, and go.
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