"Bull Bleep" Trail, October 21, 2012

Hike 9, October 21, 2012. Habitat: Grasslands/Pastoral zone. Trail: Bull Point Trail (sort of). Distance hiked: 1.5 miles (estimated).

After spending the morning poking around at Abbott's Lagoon, we headed down Sir Francis Drake Blvd. to Bull Point Trail. This would help round out our "five habitats" scorecard: in the "grassland / pastoral zone" category, all we'd done was walk just far enough out Tomales Point Trail to see some tule elk. 

The attractions of Bull Point were that it was completely new to us and that, alone among the "grasslands" trails, it was short enough (1.9 miles one way) that we could do the whole thing. Though maybe not today: Alice had stubbed her toe pretty badly two weeks ago on something in her study, and it was still tender. She was feeling mild pain after the morning's walk, and Stephen's back was getting stiff. Still, we'd come all this way, and the day was young. We didn't feel ready to go home.

We found the The Bull Point trailhead easily. It's on Sir Francis Drake as you head toward Point Reyes Lighthouse, between Historic F Ranch and North Beach Road; the trail runs south alongside Creamery Bay to Drakes Estero. Looking southward from the parking lot, you see a barren-looking prospect: dry grass and brush, low hills, grazing cows, and, in the middle distance, the bay. The trailhead sign has little specific information about the area, but one bulletin in large letters caught our eyes:

"Please note that various cattle trails and tracks can obscure the Bull Point Trail."

Cattleproof gate: you need to be slim.

Forewarned, we squeezed through a cunningly angled cattleproof gate and proceeded downward on a broad double-rutted path through a spacious pasture full of cows. Several killdeer flapped up from among them, uttering their distinctive piercing cries.

Indeed, it wasn't long before the wide path vanished into hoofmarked dirt. Fortunately, Alice is good at reading maps upside down and transposing right and left, and she had consulted the map, and she remembered that the trail jogs right, then proceeds straight ahead with Creamery Bay on the left. Unfortunately, she had it backward.

Confidently, we turned right. We picked our way among the cowpats, giving a wide berth to a placid black cow. Bull Point Trail was obscured, all right. Kind of a stretch to call this a trail at all. "They should call this Bullshit Trail," Stephen suggested amiably. But before long, the ground became grassy, and a well-worn rut led southward, parallel to the bay. Mollified, we followed it, single file.

In the near end of the bay, a large flock of black and white ducks floated in strangely orderly lines. We like to think we know our ducks, but we couldn't make these out. Alice was supposed to be carrying the 10x binoculars, but had left them in the car, so we had only the 8x and they weren't enough at the distance, and besides, the ducks were all napping with their heads tucked under their wings.

Distant ducks

From somewhere nearby we heard birdsong that reminded us of meadowlarks, but not exactly. This song was simpler, but had that same liquid sweetness. Some kind of larks, surely? David Lukas in Bay Area Birds mentions only meadowlark and horned lark. We haven't been able to match the song we remember to horned lark recordings, but Lukas' description of its habits and habitat fits: "...a delightful presence in desolate wastelands such as heavily grazed areas where grass has been clipped short and there are many patches of exposed ground. They are surprisingly well camouflaged in these areas, but give themselves away with high-pitched sputtering calls...."

After maybe half a mile of this not unpleasant little path, we encountered a damp spot. In fact, a creek. We'd have needed tall boots to go through that. If at all. Huh. They give you permission to walk in somebody's cow pasture and call it a trail. Well, Alice's toe and Stephen's back were ready for a rest, anyhow. So we turned back, and eventually realized our mistake. We hadn't been on the trail at all. The trail was on the other side of Creamery Bay.

The end of the "trail"

Practical lessons for road and trail:
1. Read the map. For crying out loud.
2. Even a kind of crappy hike has its rewards. It is rarely the case that all is lost.


Total habitats visited: 5. Total miles hiked: 40.

Our fundraising page accepts donations through February 2013: Foothill Marmots in Point Reyes Trails Challenge

Abbott's Lagoon, October 21, 2012

Hike 8: Habitat: Coastal Scrub. Trail: Abbott's Lagoon Trail. Distance hiked: 2.5 miles (estimated)

The second bridge (end of maintained trail)

Coastal Scrub is the last of the five habitats on our checklist. We saved Abbott's Lagoon until October, partly because we didn't want to finish the challenge too quickly and partly in order to get the benefit of the fall migration.

The first bridge: we saw a grebe and a coot in the pond

Abbott's Lagoon, reached from Pierce Point Road, is best known as a birding spot. We wanted to be there as early as possible, when creatures are most likely to be active. By a strenuous effort, we got out of the house by 8:30 and arrived at the trailhead about 10:00 on a brisk, windy Sunday morning the day before the season's first real storm was forecast. The only car already in the lot belonged to a young couple with babies in tummy packs, who were just leaving because it was too windy for them.




The official trail is a straightforward 1.1 miles ending at the "second bridge"--we ventured a little farther through the sand. The landscape--coyote bush, grasses and dry lupine, mostly--is not easily distinguished from "grasslands/pastoral zone" at Tomales Point. Past the second bridge, it's surely "ocean shoreline." There's nothing much to say about this as a walk, so we'll just do a Jules Evens and list who we saw (of course if we'd been Jules Evens, our list would surely be five times as long):


American pelicans (flock of 6)
pied-billed grebes
coots
crows (Stephen: "Crows would be charismatic if they weren't common as sin.")
Western grebe
white-crowned sparrows
golden-crowned sparrows
American goldfinches in non-breeding plumage (identified by a fellow-hiker who spoke confidently and carried large binoculars)
hummingbird (when in doubt, guess Anna's)
marsh hawks
a bottle-green grasshopper
a small dusty-orange moth-type thing
common (great white) egret
terns (or maybe gulls) (an interpretive sign mentioned migrant Caspian terns, so we felt entitled to some)

turkey vultures (it doesn't do to disrespect the custodians: where would we be without them?)
black-tailed deer

American pelican in flight

something pretty from the mint family

bird tracks in the sand

an odd-shaped feather

silverweed cinquefoil.

Lapping water makes scalloped lagoon edge

a pair of discarded feathers

Practical lessons for road and trail:
1. On a short, slow wildlife-viewing ramble, bring the bigger camera. For crying out loud.
2. On a fall hike at Abbott's, definitely bring a windbreaker. We did and we were glad.


Total habitats visited: 5. Total miles hiked: 38.5.

Our fundraising page: Foothill Marmots in Point Reyes Trails Challenge

Ridge Trail to Teixeira, August 22, 2012

Hike 7, August 22, 2012. Habitat: Coniferous Forest. Trail: Ridge Trail past junction with Teixeira. Distance: 5 miles (estimated).

Our plan for Wednesday, the third and last day of our August campout, was to hike Teixeira Trail up Inverness Ridge onto Ridge Trail. This 2.4-mile up-and-back leaves out of Dogtown on Highway 1 nine miles south of Olema.

We were eager to hike Teixeira, a totally new trail to us, having considered it for Hike #4 but not having gotten there, and having read about it in Jules Evens's blog. We'd scoped out the trailhead on our way to and from Palomarin Trailhead for Hike #5, so we knew that there was hardly more than a highway turnout for parking and that the trailhead sign was not prominent. We'd need to be alert.

We struck camp and went for coffee at Pine Cone Cafe in Point Reyes Station, then drove south on Highway 1, happy to remember that the road improvements that had held us up on that road on Monday had been speedily completed.

Except, it turned out that today they were working on the other lane. The southbound lane. The side that the trailhead is on. We saw the trailhead as we drove by -- it seemed to be occupied by a a clump of bulldozers. We might have been able to get to it, but it was too complicated and it all happened so fast and then we'd passed it. And, with only one lane open, turning around and trying again was not an option.

What now? If we didn't want to go through the construction bottleneck again, we'd have to continue south. That limited our choices. We decided to drive around the bottom of Inverness Ridge and hike to the Teixeira-Ridge Trail junction from the other side.

Ridge Trailhead

Ridge Trailhead is on Mesa Road, a little after it turns to gravel and before you get to Point Reyes Bird Observatory. This trailhead was not new to us. Sometime in the late nineties we did a ten-mile hike with our younger, stronger friends K. and N. that came out here. The memory is dim, but we must have started at Palomarin Trailhead, gone up Lake Ranch Trail and come back by Ridge Trail. I think I remember being so wiped out that I insisted on waiting here at Ridge Trailhead while the others hiked the dusty mile along the road back to Palomarin where the car was. A tough outing! But that was the day we saw a bobcat.

Ridge Trailhead has no parking; you have to continue a quarter mile or so to a turnout, then walk back.

A steep ascent

The trail itself starts off with a steep ascent, but it made pleasant walking due to a thick coating of dry grass.

Young Douglas firs in the scrub

The first stretch is mostly open, passing slopes where young Douglas firs are encroaching on scrubland. Soon there's a drop-off on the right and the trail continues above a deep ravine.

Misty view of Bolinas Lagoon from the ridge

Our map showed a junction at 0.6 miles, so we kept expecting another trail to come in from the right. Instead, our trail reached the ridgeline and bent northward. In retrospect, it seems it should have been clear that that's where the junction should have been, and the other trail was absent or imperceptible, but we kept waiting to reach it.

After a rest stop, Stephen started trucking ferociously toward that elusive six-tenths-of-a-mile point and didn't hear Alice call out that a hummingbird had alighted at the top of a tall bush beside the trail. The hummingbird (sorry, can't tell you what kind--when in doubt guess Anna's) held cooperatively still for many minutes while Alice tried to get a good photograph. Sorry again. I was carrying the bigger, better camera, but I forgot how to turn image stabilization on. Or maybe it was just too far away.

Soon the trail led out of sunny, half-open woodland into deep, still fir forest. Alongside the path grew the tallest sword ferns I've ever seen--their tops at least head high. Unfortunately, Stephen was far ahead and couldn't be called on to provide scale for a photo.

Alice finally overtook Stephen. Shortly thereafter, still wondering how long it could possibly take to go six tenths of a mile, we reached the Teixeira trail junction--our 2.3-mile turning-around point.

At the junction looking down Teixeira Trail

It was a perfect lunch glade, shaded by tall though skinny firs and graced with a lush understory. Somewhere near here must be where we saw that bobcat in ninety-something--likely down Teixeira Trail. But that was in the evening. Now was that noonish time when nothing stirs.






We were feeling fresh, so after lunch we continued northward on Ridge Trail for a bit, snagging a few huckleberries as we went. The woods were still beautiful, but we were losing altitude, and our enjoyment of the view was limited by the necessity of looking at our feet in order to dodge poison oak. So we turned around after maybe another half mile.

Huckleberries on Ridge Trail north of the junction

On the way back, I got a photo of Stephen among the head-high ferns. You can see he's still out front.

Head-high ferns with hiker for scale

All in all. this was as lovely a coniferous forest walk as we could have asked for. And we didn't meet another human being on the entire trip.


Practical lessons for road and trail:
1. It is seldom the case that all is lost..
2. Learn to use your camera.


Total habitats visited: 4. Total miles hiked: 36.

Our fundraising page: Foothill Marmots in Point Reyes Trails Challenge

Tomales Point Trail, August 21, 2012

Hike 6, August 21, 2012. Habitat: Grasslands / Pastoral Zone. Trail: Tomales Point Trail. Distance: 4 miles (estimated).

Tule elk on Tomales Point reserve

The second of our three consecutive August hikes was to be short and easy, a rest between two longer hikes. We chose to walk on Tomales Point to see and hear tule elk in rutting season.

Tule elk, once abundant, were extirpated at Point Reyes by the turn of the last century. They were re-introduced to a reserve on Tomales Point in the 70s and have made such a comeback that at one point contraception was tried. There are now herds in the Limantour and Drakes Beach areas as well, but the main population remains on the original reserve.

This walk in the northern portion of the park made a counterpoint to yesterday's excursion out of Palomarin in the south. Tomales Point Trail runs from Historic Pierce Point Ranch to Tomales Bluff, where Tomales Bay meets the Pacific. We'd done this walk sometime in the 90s and again in '07, both times walking the entire 9.5-mile round trip to the point. We remembered a golden landscape, heavy with sunshine and yellow lupine, and a romantic cliff at the end.

This day, we drove up Pierce Point Road into a thick, damp fog. When we got out of the car at road's end, Alice had a moment of panic when she thought she'd forgotten her fleece jacket. Couldn't imagine walking in this chill without it. False alarm: jacket remembered. We'd also remembered to bring the shofar with us, and we gave a quick toot in the parking lot, the traditional daily reminder to prepare for an accounting on Rosh HaShanah. (The toot, I mean, not necessarily the toot in the parking lot.) We had forgotten one thing: that the restrooms are down at the McClure's Beach parking lot. Back into the car we piled.

Scrub jay #1

Driving back from McClure's, we photographed two different large, exotic birds sitting in the willows alongside the road. Only when we got those photos downloaded and cropped did we identify them as two scrub jays, both molting. (Note: Jules Evens in revised first edition of Natural History of Point Reyes Peninsula names this particular willow stand as a a good birding location.)

Scrub jay #2

Despite the cold and the gloom, I was wearing sunglasses. I knew that meant there was significant glare off the cloud cover, and I knew that meant we should put on some sunscreen, but I just didn't feel like it.

Our object today was to see some tule elk and to take it easy. Last time we were here, elk were easy to see. As I remembered it, we'd seen lots of them around a waterhole quite close to the trail about a mile in, just hanging out, paying no mind to the gawking tourists. So a three-mile walk should get plenty of elk seen.

Monterey cypress windbreak

When the ranch was in use, Monterey cypress were planted around it as a windbreak. Park management later decided to maintain and restore these introduced trees.






Tomales Point is narrow, basically flat, and exposed to ocean winds, limiting the types and habits of its vegetation. Here, "grasslands and pastoral zone" in the fog appeared as a windswept wasteland.

Grassland trail

yellow wildflowers

Alice went into "documentary" mode, photographing each scrubby little plant she noticed. Lots of yellow wildflowers. (Even the California poppies were a yellow variety rather than the typical orange.) Coyote bush growing low to the ground. Stephen got tired with waiting, and the photos didn't turn out as interesting as they seemed at the time.


 

Zen view of the Pacific Ocean

 

Something I'd forgotten about this trail was the frequent views of the ocean. Today in the fog, these were mostly "Zen views," but they must have been stunning on our earlier, sunny trips.





The first elk we saw were far down in a canyon that opens toward Tomales Bay. (Coming back after the fog had lifted, we could see the bay beyond the canyon's mouth.) A group of hikers with kids coming up behind us borrowed our binoculars.

We headed onward. After a bit, we looked ahead and saw a small herd standing across the trail, a couple hundred feet ahead. Good time to stop for lunch.

Tule elk blocking the trail ahead

Other groups of hikers piled up behind and around us, peering through binoculars, watching and waiting. People were nudging each other and whispering. I thought the whispering was strange: like, they don't know we're here? Please! But later, when I bothered to read some park literature, I saw that quiet voices were indeed advised. My bad.

We wondered, what if the elk don't want to leave the trail? Well, that's their prerogative. At least we'll have seen them.

But they did move, and we all proceeded. We saw numbers of handsome animals, but little of that fancy male challenging behavior that's the most fun to watch, and we didn't hear the famous bugling. (The "blocking the trail" photo looks like a pair of stags locking horns, but I believe that's an artifact of camera angle: it was one herd with one stag.)

Clear view of distinctive heart-shaped rump markings

We walked on, still looking for that waterhole. Eventually we learned from a returning group that it was "about half an hour down the trail" -- at least another mile. I'd seriously under-remembered that distance. We didn't feel that strong and decided we'd seen enough elk. Anyhow, we'd meant to take it easy today.

Canyon of the first elk sighting

On the way back, a stiff ocean breeze blew fog across the trail and into Tomales Bay, clearing the air and the views on both sides of the trail. Now we could see all the way down the canyon of the first elk sighting into Tomales Bay. From the map, I think this is probably White Gulch.



We were back at the car in midafternoon, considering our next move. We guessed we'd walked about four miles. A mile-long ramble to McClure's Beach and back would net us another habitat. But we felt strangely lackadaisical. My face felt warm; Stephen's looked slightly pink. Um, right, we didn't use sunscreen. Well, anyhow, we'd meant to take it easy today.

We indulged in a celebratory dinner at Stellina's in Point Reyes Station and headed back to Samuel P. Taylor State Park shortly after dark. Arriving at our campsite, we found it occupied. We approached the campfire with apologies and asked the campers if they'd seen any gear when they arrived. They said they hadn't.

It transpired that the park had had us registered for two nights, not the three we thought we'd signed up for. The rangers had picked up our tent and deposited it together with its contents in a nearby "overflow" campsite. They didn't charge us for the "extra" night; we never did figure out the rights and wrongs of it.

Practical lessons for road and trail:
1. When you know exactly what you're doing, consider a little research.
2. The date on the tag they give you at campground check-in is the morning you're supposed to leave, not the last night you're reserved. If that number is not what you expected, look into it.
3. Momma says wear your sunscreen.

Total habitats visited: 4. Total miles hiked: 31.

Our fundraising page: Foothill Marmots in Point Reyes Trails Challenge