Palomarin Beach '22

Nanaimo Dorid (Acanthodoris nanaimoensis)

It's been four years since I last visited Palomarin Beach -- six since I last posted pix on the blog (I made no posts in 2018). The parking area seemed slightly different than I remembered it, and it took a second to find the trailhead. A "You Are Here" map listed only three hikes from there -- to Bass Lake, Wildcat Beach, and Alamere Falls. The map showed no trail going down to the beach. 

I drove back about a quarter-mile to a smaller parking area and found a steep, narrow trail that I suspect is maintained only by locals and other visitors, and certainly not by the National Park Service. As I descended I saw some tracks in the dirt and figured I must be in the right place, and about one second later I realized the tracks had been made by a coyote. As the trail deteriorated, I knew I'd gotten myself into a real-life coyote story. 

I kept going down despite the sketchy trail. The last fifty feet or so was completely gone, with the trail replaced by a narrow chute of rubble. To get down to the beach required lowering myself down the scree, not quite rappelling, via climbing rope and a rope ladder that had been left for the purpose. 

Google Maps still shows the Coast Trail going down to the beach, but folks on alltrails.com started saying the trail was closed as far back as November 2020.

Anyway, I made it down to the beach without incident. No surprise, I was the only person on the beach and had the whole reef to myself. Just as I was leaving, a guy with a surfboard and a woman with a camera tripod appeared out of nowhere. I think they must have walked up from Bolinas, and they continued north a ways before the guy paddled out into fairly poor surf, although he did have the break all to himself.

The reef did not disappoint. In addition to the usual suspects, I found a new-to-me species of sea anemone that I can't identify, and a couple of critters that I have no idea what they are. It was interesting to visit tidepools south of the Golden Gate one day and north of it the next.

Lined Shore Crab Skeleton

Lined Shore Crab Ready to Rumble

Kelp Crab

Red Crab

Hermit Crab

The First Bat Star I've Seen In A While

Cute Little Feller

Ochre Sea Star Strikes a Pose at Mussel Beach

Aggregating Anemones Doing Their Thing

Tidepool Garden

Preparing to See What the New Tide Will Bring

Anemone Indigestion

A Sea Anemone Species I've Never Seen Before

Surf Grass & Friends #1

Surf Grass & Friends #2

Red Feather Sea Weed
(Erythrophyllum delesserioides)

Neighborhood of Sea Sacs

Bladderwrack (Green) and Turkish Washcloth (Reddish Brown)

Fashion Slug

Leopard Dorid

Also Known As San Diego Dorid (Diaulula sandiegensis)

Orange-Peel Dorid (Acanthodoris lutea)

Mystery Meat (Seriously, What Is This Thing?!)

Close Crop of Whatever That Is At The Top

Little Red Mystery Tube-Nuggets

Going Back Up Was As Interesting As Coming Down

Definitely Not A Park Service Trail

* * *

Oranges

Spotted Dorid Nudibranch
(click images to view larger)

Stepping out onto the reef at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve early this morning I quickly spotted a tiny bright orange critter that I assumed was another of the tiny sea cucumbers I photographed at the bottom of this recent post. It was only when I viewed the magnified image in Photoshop that I was able to get a better look at the tentacles coming out of its head. But wait, what is that among the tentacles? Isn't that a rhinophore? D'oh!

Apparently this was a juvenile spotted dorid, Triopha maculata, and at no time on that reef did I ever realize it was a nudibranch. Yes, there is more than one kind of tiny orange slug-like critter with weird appendages.

For a couple of days before heading out to Fitzgerald I whet my appetite with a perusal of the hefty Intertidal Invertebrates of California by Morris, Abbott, and Haderlie, published in 1980. Morris was the sole photographer for the color plates in the back of the book, and he has a nice shot of a 40mm-long Triopha maculata (much larger than the ones in this post) from Pacific Grove. Morris shot all the pictures using Kodacolor film in a second-hand Exakta 35mm camera with 50mm and 100mm lenses fitted with bellows, extension tubes, and/or close-up lenses. He used trays, flood lights, and fresh bottled sea water to make many of the images, sometimes from the confines of a motel room. I can imagine the struggle of trying to do it all himself, and I appreciated his quip that, "The equipment seemed to function more effectively when it was supplemented by ample amounts of sweating and cursing."

It seems like it's getting increasingly difficult to find non-commercial search results with Google, and I couldn't figure out if Morris is still around. But if he is, I'll bet he'd appreciate how easy it is nowadays to photograph tidepools. I saw people getting amazingly good results with their smartphones, as well as compact cameras that can go underwater. Anyway, I thank Morris for his efforts and for showing me the incredible variety of intertidal animals it's possible to see in California, including some that look more like slime molds than anything we'd normally associate with the word "animal."

Spotted Dorid Preparing To Be Left High & Dry

Spotted Dorid Showing Its Foot

Another Orange Animal (A Sponge, I Believe)

A Turban Snail Encrusted With Coralline Algae

San Diego Dorid Nudibranch

Close Crop of One of Its Rhinophores

The Setting Moon With Remnants of Fog

A Tube Worm in Its Case

A Not-Very-Yellow Sea Lemon Nudibranch

A Beautiful Lined Chiton

A Smaller Lined Chiton In A Delicious Bowl of Coralline Algae

A Six-Rayed Sea Star
(About the Size of a Quarter)

An Even Smaller Sea Star On Iridescent Kelp

A Green-Tinged Limpet Surrounded By Barnacles

The Always Irresistible Sunburst Anemone

Reef Rug

An Even Tinier Six-Rayed Sea Star

A Keyhole Limpet on the Move

A Young Red Crab (Deceased)

Another of the Morning's Several Juvenile Spotted Dorids
Scoots Past a Periwinkle Shell

Camouflaged Sculpin

Sun Rays on the Bluffs

A Raven Snags A Morsel In The Wrack

First at the Tidepools,
Last at the Tidepools:
A Flock of Gulls

* * *

Sonora Pass II

 

Pass Panorama
(click to view larger)

I've been driving my Mazda 3 for eight years now and still have less than 45,000 miles on it, and yet I've thought about replacing it for a vehicle with higher ground clearance and 4WD. I figured places I would want to go would be off-limits to me otherwise, places like the St. Mary's Pass trailhead parking area. But with a little recon I was able to chart a route from the paved highway through the rutted, rocky entrance. I was proud to park my little Mazda next to higher-clearance pick-up trucks and SUVs, and even a brand new Jeep Wrangler that still had its temporary license plate. I even watched a guy in a Lexus SUV with plenty of clearance start to pull into the parking area, only to turn back and park across the street.

It reminded me of how I'd been sure I couldn't drive the Mazda up to the Patriarch Grove at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest because I remembered how rocky the last section of it was. But by picking my routes and driving slowly, I was able to make it. 

After all the trucks and SUVs left, my car was alone in the parking area for the night. The next morning we heard car doors being shut and went to investigate. A guy driving a Honda Fit had made it through.

I know there are places I went with my Jeep Cherokee and Ford Ranger that I wouldn't try with the Mazda, but they are not necessarily places I need to re-visit, especially given all the excellent places I can reach in a regular car. 

The one fairly new purchase I made to make camping more appealing to my old bones was a very large tent, a North Face Wawona 6. I don't use this when I camp by myself, mind you, but it's amazing to have when my wife is with me. It's actually bigger than some campsites we've stayed at, so we do have to keep that in mind. The vestibule alone is as big as many 2-person tents. But inside the main tent we have a queen-sized air mattress, with lots of room left over along the sides and in the front, and at six feet tall, I can stand up in it.

All too soon, our stay to Sonora Pass was over; we packed up the tent, crawled the Mazda out through the rocks and ruts, and were soon enjoying a beautiful drive home through the mountains, with the only concerning view being all the dead trees. They dotted the forest here and there, and we could only wonder if eventually there will be vast swathes of them. We were delayed a little due to road work on CA-108, but it was well worth a minor inconvenience to be able to enjoy all the excellent road work that had already been done.

The pleasing part of the drive usually takes a pause right around Sonora as traffic becomes an issue again, and once we've refueled in Oakdale we usually hunker down to cross the valley as quickly as possible. But this time, since we were recently in Wisconsin and had gotten some excellent farm-fresh corn on the cob, we stopped at a farm stand to get some of our own California golden nuggets. We passed a couple of stands along CA-120 before we saw one that advertised corn, called Baba Bazaar, where we loaded up. In addition to the fresh fruit, nuts and veggies we got, they also had numerous flavors of corn nuts which I used to love, plus freaky "garlic chips" which are whole cloves of garlic with a brilliant soft crunch and a surprisingly mild flavor. As we packed our loot in the cooler my wife asked me if I had seen the pies. Fortunately, I had not. But next time....

The Other Side of the Pass

Loco Fruit

Minty Fresh Landscape

Lupines Catching the Light

Painting in the Open

Bouquet of Faded Skyrocket

Fireweed on Edge of Onion Meadow

Rein Orchid in the Onion Meadow

The Orange Beast

Roadside Attractions

* * *

Sonora Pass

 

View from St. Mary's Pass (August 2022)

It seems overly romantic now that I'm back in the city--that almost religious sense of release I felt in the High Sierra. The word "moksha" came to mind as I took in the rocky landscape with its sparse meadows, steep ochre cliffs, and river of wind-blown clouds crossing a deep blue sky. I had been making photographs here and there while my wife painted a landscape over the course of a couple of hours. The passing clouds, which occasionally spilled a dash of rain, constantly changed the landscape from bright to dark and every shade in between, first over here, then over there. I can't imagine trying to paint a landscape that refuses to sit still. 

Sometimes we are the ones who have to sit still while the landscape moves into position. Such was the case for me after I hiked north up the St. Mary's Pass Trail to photograph the mountains on the south side of the valley. I'd shot a panorama from up there on August 11, 2010 (a 36x48 print hangs on our bathroom wall), and wanted to capture the scene  again these dozen years later. Since I was just recently in the area of Sonora Pass, I wasn't surprised to see so little snow compared with back then, but what is interesting is that less than half the amount of snow fell in the 2009-2010 snow year as it did this last year. More snow fell this year, but it melted faster.

When I reached my destination, the whole mountain range that I'd planned to photograph was in deep shade. That would definitely not do for a comparison since my 2010 shot was made under a virtually cloudless sky. It wouldn't even even do as a shot worth hiking up there for. The short but steep hike to get into position only took about an hour, but I had to wait another hour for the mountains to come out of the shade. I'd hiked up in shorts and t-shirt and was glad I'd brought a windbreaker.

I didn't mind the wait at all. A friend took me up St. Mary's Pass for the first time in the late 1980s, and I first went back with my camera in '91. The landscape holds good memories of both those early trips. At first I didn't see any of my favorite plants from up there, Astragalus whitneyi, a locoweed whose fruits, when I first saw them, were a joy and marvel to behold. When I finally spotted a couple of the plants it was like running into an old friend.

One thing I noticed from my panoramic vantage point was a bright yellow meadow near the base of the mountains. The next day I hiked over to check it out and discovered that the source of the color wasn't the wildflowers I'd expected, but a mass of corn lilies and other plants that had already dried out. Upon closer look I was happy to see that the central part of the meadow was still blooming with ball-shaped inflorescences of purple and magenta onion flowers which were being visited by numerous honey bees and by one strikingly odd white moth-like insect about half the size of a crane fly (which iNaturalist shows to be a plume moth).

As I moved around in the meadow I came across a trail of footprints that were much too big to have been made by deer, and too incongruous to have been made by a human. It looked  like I'd stumbled onto a bear trail, and the trail led into a nearby willow thicket. A nice little chill of fear raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and I hoped the bear trail was old. I imagined what I'd do if a bear appeared either in the nearby willows or farther away on the edge of the meadow. I would have no chance of finding safety by running since there was nowhere to go. I figured I'd have to stand my ground and hope that I could talk my way safely out of the meadow, with sincere apologies for the intrusion. Happily, I didn't have to do that. In fact, despite being in the middle of a meadow, I was bothered, and only briefly, by just one little mosquito!

View from St. Mary's Pass (August 2010)

View Along St. Mary's Pass Trail

Wide Angle View from the Pass

Whitney's Locoweed

Arnica, Sonora Peak, and Small Snow Patch (August 2022)

Snow Patch Panorama (August 2010)

Patch of Fleabane

Onion Meadow in the Sun

Onion Meadow in the Shade

Plume Moth Nectaring in the Onions

View from the Onion Meadow

* * *