The original plan was to take a weekend trip to go backpacking in Yosemite National Park. But, due to the extreme heat forecasted over the weekend, no camping reservations, and at least an eight hour round trip to and from the park, new plans were hatched. Instead, I convinced my friend, Tina, to go on an adventure to find a purple sand beach. The pictures looked amazing! See here.
Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, CA
Early Saturday morning, we packed up and headed out. Our first stop was the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Moss Beach, CA. We arrived at low tide and spent a couple hours exploring the tide pools. The rocks were slick and covered with colorful seaweed.
The tide pools were full of fluorescent sea anemones, some turning to slimy blobs without the water to bolster their tentacles. As alluring as anemones are, I'd advise to refrain from touching them. Sea anemones shoot out small poison laden harpoons when they are touched to incapacitate their prey. While most anemones are not lethal to humans, there are some that are.
Sea anemone with water
Sea anemone without water
At the edge of the shoreline, a colony of sea lions napped while little crabs scurried around the rocks. Fish, birds, and the smell of seaweed abounded. Later, I would learn that I'd pretty much been standing next to the Monterey Submarine Canyon, an underwater canyon in Monterey Bay, which rivals the depth/height of the Grand Canyon.
Can you imagine a huge underwater canyon stretching out from here?
Pfeiffer State Park, CA
The adventure continued on through Santa Cruz, Monterey, and King City. In King City, we stopped at the Los Padres National Forest ranger station. The station was closed, however, a firefighter who was doing some work in the station let us in and even showed us some maps of the area. I highly recommend going to the ranger station for any national forest you're thinking about staying in because they are the only ones with the maps of the area and the rangers can tell you about camping and the rules and regulations of the forest.
The next stop was Pfeiffer State Park back on the coast. That is where the purple sand beach was supposed to be. In order to get there, we drove through a winding road through Los Padres National Forest to get to the coast. It was a beautiful drive which took us through yellow grassy fields, forests, and even above the cloud cover.
Cloud cover
We passed by several campgrounds pf which I made a mental note of just in case we couldn't find any camping. As it turned out, many people were camped in the turnouts alongside the road. This was the first time I'd seen people camped out in turnouts with tents and everything. To this day, I still don't know if that's actually allowed or if people were just doing that since there isn't any way to drive into the forest. It was pretty sad to see the amount of litter in the turnouts. One group of campers appeared to have had quite a destructive spree as glass bottles had been shattered all over the turnout.
Driving was easy going once we hit Highway 1. The views of the ocean were spectacular as the early evening sun reflected off the water. Finding the beach was...challenging. Should you attempt to find the beach, know that the beach is at the end of Sycamore Canyon Road, a very narrow, uneven road which accommodates two-way traffic. There was a long line of people waiting to pay their $10 to get into the beach parking area as parking was full.
Once parked, we made our way to the beach. We were immediately greeted by a series of sign posts detailing "the story of a bear and a duck." The trail of sign posts ended at a platform surrounded by tiki torches and videographers. It looked like someone was going to propose on the beach.
Since there was no proposal to watch, we headed further down the beach on the lookout for the purple sand. We asked the people walking on the beach if they knew were the purple sand was, but it appeared we were the only ones on the beach looking for purple sand.
We did find some purple-ish sand, but nowhere near the amount of purple that I'd seen on the internet. According to the internet, the sand looks more purple after a rain. In any case, the beach was beautiful and we wandered around a bit until sunset before heading out. We thought we'd be able to catch a glimpse of the proposal closer to sunset, but the couple never showed.
Purple sand!
Pfeiffer State Beach
I gunned it back towards the road through Los Padres National Forest. It took us a while before finding a suitable unoccupied turnout as there were even more people staked out in turnouts. We settled in and had a couple of freeze dried meals from Alpinaire. They were pretty tasty and easy to prepare.
Pinnacles National Park, CA
The next morning, we made breakfast on the BioLite Wood Burning Stove. It was the first time I'd used the stove and absolutely loved it. The coolest thing about the stove is that it has a built in fan which is powered by a battery that is charged from the heat of the twigs you burn in the stove. Have you ever seen your fire die out because it couldn't get enough air? This stove provides a constant stream of air to the fire which in turn allows you to combust all sorts of things and makes it very easy to light the fire. On top of that, the stove is extremely fuel efficient as it requires only a couple handful of twigs to cook up a whole breakfast.
With breakfast done, we headed inland to Pinnacles National Park.
Pinnacles National Park in the summer is dry and hot. The sun beat down upon us and there was little way to escape it as Tina and I hiked up to the Bear Gulch Reservoir.
The terrain was rocky and steep. It was formed by a combination of volcanic activity, the movement of the San Andreas fault, and general erosion. We passed through small caves, narrow staircases, and eventually reached the reservoir which had dwindled down to a small pond.
My favorite part of the hike was discovering trees with curling red bark. Internet research tells me they are called madrone trees. Today, the tree is mostly used for firewood as it is a very hard and dense wood. However, indigenous people used to eat the berries and use the bark for medicinal purposes.
Madrone tree
Soon the weekend was over and it was time to return to the Bay and once again to hit the road on my own.
