The Limantour Coast of Pt. Reyes: A Place for Any Mood
Written: Feb 17 '01 (Updated Feb 24 '01)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Scenery: |
 |
|
| Crowds: |
|
|
| Time needed for visit: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Endless diversity of microclimates, proximity to San Francisco.
Cons: Sliding inexorably toward Alaska.
The Bottom Line: Magnificent. From the Olema entrance, go straight if you're a Tourist, or left on Limantour Road if you're a Traveller.
|
|
|
| Urbanist's Full Review: Point Reyes National Seashore |
Marin County, north of San Francisco, is a land of many promontories, but the vast expanse jutting out of its west side is especially distinctive. Its enormity, odd shape, and peculiar hip-like attachment to the continent suggest it was formed by different laws than those that made the other lands nearby. Indeed, Point Reyes is more or less scotch-taped onto North America for the moment, but it is still part of the Pacific tectonic plate. It's hanging around the Bay Area for our own geological teatime, but you can tell it's headed north. Stare at the map, and you'll see it straining that way. A clean, straight line from Inverness to Bolinas marks the fault that will someday cleave Point Reyes from the continent and make it an island again.
In many ways, it feels like an island now. It has its own ranges of hills, but its connection to the mainland is at low elevation -- a tentative land bridge that obviously is not built to last. And though its vegetation and weather are typical of coastal northern California, things are different out here. An animist would readily posit that this place has its own spirits. Everything is a little bit not-what-you'd-expect, all the more so if you step off the beaten path a little.
How to explain.
First of all, let me confess that I'm the sort of traveler who is not drawn to the Great Extremes. Most tourists want to get to the furthest point of wherever they are -- the end of the Peninsula, the top of the mountain, whatever. For these folks, Point Reyes offers a main road leading over dramatic highlands down to the historic lighthouse. This main road carries most of the RVs, the people out to be impressed, the people who are here to "bag" Point Reyes and take it home with them.
I'm the other sort of traveler, the kind who knows he can't take it home and doesn't care to try. So I avoid the gaggle of tourists out of the tip of the peninsula. When I enter the park from the main gate near the town of Olema, I always turn left, south, on Limantour Road. Other times, I enter the park from the famously xenophobic little town of Bolinas, which lies at the south end. Either way, the Point Reyes I know isn't the point at all, but a bayfront land behind the curve of the point, the area known as Limantour.
Where have you heard this name? Of course, the Bay Guardian annual guide to nude beaches! Yes, Limantour Beach, at the end of Limantour road, is technically a clothing optional beach, but its natural wildness makes the whole category seem beside the point. This isn't one of those nude beaches packed with hordes of people towel-to-towel all basking in their transgression. Even in the nicest weather, the beach is simply too huge to shelter any kind of society, clothed or otherwise.
Limantour Beach is so huge that people could construct an airplane, play a football game, and write their names at a size legible from space (but please don't) while still leaving room for others to take totally isolated strolls. Alone in the fog, on the other hand, the beach can be ominous. One of my most vivid memories of Limantour is a long walk northward on the sand, as the beach extends out a seemingly endless sandspit. In this northern reach -- a literal dead-end though I never reached the end of it -- fog can completely erase the world. As I walked, I could see no headlands to my right, and could barely make out the ocean on my left. All I could see was the expanse of sand, unrolling before my feet like an endless, blank scroll. That, and the single point of white light from the Lighthouse, far to the west out across the water. I walked for an unmeasurable time, an unmeasurable distance, with absolutely no change of scenery at all, and no sound but the white noise of the waves. Even my position with respect to the lighthouse didn't seem to be changing, as though I had indeed stepped onto a giant treadmill of the gods.
Elsewhere I have described the Doctor Seuss hike. This, of course, is the Samuel Beckett hike, a walk for serious existentialists.
But now, let the sun come out! Limantour is still huge, but now you can at least see some edges. There's the ocean, good old Pacific, looking as it does pretty much everywhere in these parts. On the other side, though, things get interesting.
Walk inland from Limantour, and you pass very very rapidly through a series of micro-environments. After the primary dunes, you may cross a well-preserved wetland with designated planked walkways, then a patch of coastal meadow, then very brief chaparral, then several layers of forest, mostly oak with a little pine. Further south, stumble also on ponds of various sizes just inland from the beach, some also clothing optional. Brace yourself for massive biodiversity: whole conventions of grasses and groundcovers, and more kinds of birds that you could hope to see anywhere outside the tropics. And be prepared for that grand dialogue of sun and cloud, the sheer, sculptural shafts of light that are part of the endless delight of coastal California.
But then remember, that all this abundance belongs to small microenvironments on a virtual island, rescued from development by the good people of the Bay Area and saved, just in time, as a National Seashore. Don't take it for granted. Besides, it's on its way to Alaska.
Recommended:
Yes
Best time to go: March-May
Recommended for: Anybody
Review Topic: Overview
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
|
|
Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 72 members
About Me:
Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.