True Nature Stories: Critters & King Tides

King Tide at Stinson Beach (1/20/23)

I stood perplexed, buffeted by a cold wind in the pre-dawn darkness at the Golden Gate Viewpoint along Conzelman Road. Where was the moon? It was supposed to rise at 6:41 a.m., and now it was past 7 a.m. I looked everywhere for that shining crescent but couldn't find it. I changed position several times to check behind the towers of the bridge. I scanned the sky from north to south. Nada. I eventually saw something shiny, way off in the distance, that might have been the moon, or merely the wisp of an airplane's contrail.

I knew I'd blown the moonshot, but since it was now getting close to the 7:22 a.m. sunrise I stuck around with a few other folks who were waiting to photograph it. At one point, four young women poured out of a rental Jeep to ogle the bridge and wait for the magic moment. One of them, who must have been from Maine or Minnesota or something, was in short-sleeves and didn't seem bothered by the cold. I kept expecting her to rush back into the warm Jeep, but she played it cool. I think it was her friends wearing jackets who finally begged to get out of there.

From there I headed up to Mt. Tam. As I exited the freeway I could see that Richardson Bay was getting very close to inundating the Mill Valley-Sausalito Pathway. High tide was going to be 7.1 feet in a couple of hours, and the Mill Valley offramp would soon be closed due to flooding.

Just as I was about to turn up Pantoll Road from Panoramic Highway I had to drive around some sticks in the road. One of the sticks looked suspicious, so I pulled over and checked it out, finding a very nice, recently shed deer antler. As I continued up Pantoll Road I spotted a buck, antlers intact, near the edge of the road. I parked at the next available pull-out to see if I could photograph him, and when I got out of my car and turned around, I saw a half-dozen bucks grazing and sporting on a steep hillside. I don't think I've seen more than two bucks together before on Mt. Tam.

A couple other bucks were in the woods below me. When I walked down the road a ways see where the deer cross it, I spotted a few wild turkeys in the woods on the uphill side. It looked like a good place to put a trail camera one of these days.

Despite all the rain, I found very little fungal action in the woods when I went to check on the trail cams that had been out there during all the stormy weather. Likewise, I'd noticed on my city walk that the mushroom locations I'd last seen showed no sign of ever having had fungal activity. Where the Amanita muscaria had been, a daffodil was in bloom. Along Sunset Boulevard the only mushrooms I saw were little crowds of orange-capped Leratiomyces ceres (formerly Stropharia aurantiaca) sprouting in the wood chips.

With nothing in the woods to keep me up there I drove down to Stinson Beach to photograph the king tide. This morning I submitted my photos to the California King Tides Project. Waves were washing way up the beach, and there was a pretty decent swell with an offshore wind. The only problem was, the offshore wind was blowing so hard that the handful of surfers out there seemed to find it a little too much of a good thing.