I went camping with my son Rudy at Point Reyes this week. We backpacked into the Coast Camp, an easy one hour hike.
It was lovely, right by the ocean, with one giant eucalyptus tree. It felt like had a soul.
Rudy managed to dam up a stream that wandered across the beach there, great success, he dragged one log, dug some sand, and the dam was in place — at least for a few minutes.
The beach near the Coast Camp is called Sculptured Beach; the steady wind eats funny round canyons into the sandy cliffs.
And the erosion makes big patterns.
We wanted to see how far down the coast we could hike on the beach. We came to this hole in the rock that we had to go through.
It seemed feasible if you took off your clothes and carried them high overhead. I went first, and ended up getting totally soaked. My sun hat floated back through the gate which was all Rudy saw of me for a minute. He said, “In movies that’s always a bad sign.”
We made it down the beach to where there was a wall we really couldn’t get around. We found a dead fish there, maybe a salmon.
My catch.
Springs were pouring down the cliffs, making little altars to Gaia.
And the sedimentary rocks had stripes.
We had to climb up a creekbed to get to the tops of the cliffs again.
I love being in interface zones, sky meets land and earth meets ocean.
Nature is always even better than I expect. Especially the beach.
On the way back I saw a rock that reminded me of a giant duck, also of Easter Island. Did Carl Barks ever paint an Easter Island statue of a duck? Maybe I should. I'm setting a scene on Easter Island right now in my novel — not that I've been thinking about it the last few days.
There was a rock like a castle near the campsite, we walked up there near sunset.
A lot of deer roamed around our campsite, also quail.
May 11th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
Hey, nice photos. I think you should use that dead salmom (?) as a character in one of your stories.
I haven’t been to the beach in a long time. The ocean always connects me to my emotions in a very powerful way.
May 12th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Hey! That’s no duck!! As Douglass Adams would perhaps eloquently phrase it, this is obviously a giant pre-historic sacred lizard-humanoid idol from the 8th dimension!! (sorry, I couldn’t resist)
May 12th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
WHATis an insert special – loverlee pix – yu should get them published by a big heavy duty art outfit like ABRAMS if they still existent – here in KT we are taking direct action to get the Memory of Whitess reinstituitionaliZED.
G
love & good ness gracious great BALLS of fire
May 13th, 2006 at 6:26 am
be careful. doesn’t palmer eldritch haunt the interface zones of point reyes? peace.
May 13th, 2006 at 7:21 am
Some awesome pics. SF writers tend to be more outdoorsy than most for some reason that I can’t figure out. I’ve lost count of the number of SF writers who climb, hike, backpack. Mind you I’m a frustrated SF writer and a hiking fanatic and I don’t know the connection myself so go figure.
April 12th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I have a photo of a rock shaped almost identically to your ‘duck’. It’s a natural formation just of the shores of the Bolivian part of Lake Titicaca. The Incas used to get married underneath it assuming the hawk to ‘oversee’ the ceremony. It’s crazy seeing your photo; mine is almost identical.