Morning at Pt. Reyes

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What do you do when you wake up at 2:30 in the morning and can't get back to sleep? Usually I just lay there until I slide back into dreamland. If it's a weekend I might get up and read a book. This time I got up to drive out to Point Reyes National Seashore. 

Through the magic of photographic image capture, I have brightened the scene above by making the exposure long enough to show something besides featureless landscape. It was plenty dark out there. I'm not sure what all those lights are. Maybe that's a ranch house down there on the shore near North Beach. Maybe some of the distant lights forming a line along the San Andreas Fault are Nick's Cove and Marshall, Pierce Point Ranch, and the Coast Guard station.

The Pt. Reyes trip wasn't exactly spontaneous. My stuff was packed and ready in the living room so I wouldn't make a ruckus getting out the door. But I went to sleep without setting a mechanical alarm, and if I'd slept through my brain alarm I wouldn't have gone. To set your brain alarm, you tell yourself at bedtime that you want to get up especially early. It works surprisingly often, and when it doesn't work, that's okay too.

I left the house around 3:30. It was still full dark when I arrived, but a full moon gave at least a little form to the landscape. The timing worked out well because I never felt rushed. I even had time for a brief stop at the lighthouse parking lot where I took in basically the same view of Point Reyes Beach I could have gotten at home on the park's web cam. 

Hiking out the trail at Chimney Rock, I was glad I brought my headlamp. I needed it. Also, it was fun to look around and see a half-dozen pairs of deer eyes glowing back at me. At one point I turned around and saw the moon setting behind some cypress branches. I knew I couldn't photograph it the way I saw it, and I'm not real happy with the crude Frankenshop version above, but you kinda get the idea.

The Photographer's Ephemeris was my friend once again. I'd already figured out that the moonset and sunrise would unfold along a line transecting the length of Chimney Rock, so that was my main destination.

If you look real close, you can see Pam waving from the living room window.... I was actually a little surprised my cell phone didn't work out there, although I doubt Pam would have appreciated a phone call at that hour anyway.

This is the crack between the worlds; the moon and the sun are both just below the horizon, separated by about 180 degrees of arc.

Curvature of space.

Velvia mode at Chimney Rock. Conditions like this have been known to cause a slight philosophic breeze to spirit over the rocks. Hold on to your hats.

You can just make out the Pt. Reyes Lighthouse from Chimney Rock. I'm not sure I'd ever noticed that before. Unless the light's just right, you can't really see it, but at night its rotating light catches your eye.

I spotted another rotating light on our local islands.

Liquid waves in the jumbled jaggies.

The ocean is cool and blue on the left, warm and pink on the harbor-side right. Elephant seals are barking and belching on the beach below....

Some foraging deer stop to check out the lovely sunrise.

The surface of Chimney Rock is pretty featureless for the most part -- wildflower season is still months away -- but I couldn't let the sunrise go completely unphotographed.

Lifeboat Station at Drake's Bay.

By the time I got back to the parking lot, the light was unbelievable. It was so golden and gorgeous, even the telephone poles looked good enough to photograph. Luckily this Western Bluebird saved me from having to settle for telephone poles.

The blacktails were in fine form, their plush coats aglow in good health and beckoning to be touched.

A couple of ravens also enjoyed the fine morning. Was this a mated pair, the female on the left and male on the right? Bernd Heinrich has said that even experts have a hard time distinguishing the sex of a raven, but these two were definitely a pair, mated or otherwise. 

Super-cute deer in the lush early-winter grass.

The rut may be over, but a bull's gotta stay in shape somehow.... I'd left Chimney Rock behind and made a short elk-stop above Drake's Beach. If these were ravens, would you think one was the female? Whatever was going on here didn't last very long. 

Not sure I'd ever seen a one-antlered elk before, but it makes sense that the antlers fall off one a time. One of the coolest finds I ever made at Tennessee Valley was a pair of deer antlers stuck in the ground, pointy end first. The buck had dipped his head down, jabbed his antlers in the earth, and snap! Both came off at once.

Having practiced mating with one bull, the randy elk on the left went for a practice antler-tussle with the other bull.

It was nice to hear the clacking of antlers, about the only sound besides surf in that wide-open space. Had the elk been closer I might have stuck around a little longer. Instead I headed out for the next phase of my morning.

My next stop was Pierce Point Ranch, where I hoped to find badgers and weasels. No luck finding either one, so I guess it was a wasted trip...

...except for the exuberant birdlife, the glowing fields of mustard, the sunbathing elk, the rolling green swells and rainbow spindrift, and the generally tonic morning.

I never get tired of seeing elk, especially when the Pacific Ocean is in the background. The main herd of cow elk was down by Pierce Point, also lazing the morning away.

I walked out the Tomales Point Trail for a ways, keeping my eyes peeled for a long-tailed weasel. What kind of habitat do weasels like, I wondered. How do you look for them? I saw a photo of a weasel taken on this very same trail on Flickr last week, so I know they're out there. Badgers, too. Maybe next time.

I sat down to watch the waves coming in and soon broke my camera out of the pack to fire off a few frames. I'd think I was done shooting, but another set would roll in and tempt me to keep clicking. If only badgers and weasels were like waves.

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