Pt. Reyes

Just a few quick snapshots from a hike last Sunday to Point Reyes, a national seashore north of San Francisco.

I remember coming here as a small child, for picnics at Abbot's Lagoon or McClure's Beach. There's no other place like it -- a sense of space and nature that are purely of Northern California. Sea lions, elk, and hundreds of different birds all make their homes here. This visit we walked out on the Tule Elk trail, along a high bluff that forms a peninsula into the pacific ocean. On the way back to the car, the farm buildings, left over from the region's days as a center of dairy production, caught my eye. From the side, the whitewashed boards of the barns rose from the landscape like ocean liners, but front-on the long, low-reaching roofs, topped with lichen-encrusted shingles, seemed to melt into the tall weeds and grasses that covered the yards.