Trip Report: Pt. Reyes

Due to unforeseen delays at work I didn't leave until almost 5. Fortunately Alice had finished packing the food and gear to get us out of town as quickly as possible. Despite some traffic in Davis, we made good time.

We stopped at Moylan's Brewery for dinner. It is amazingly hard to be that close to good beer and not get some because you know it will be a bad idea.

We made it to Pt. Reyes about 9:30pm. We took a look at the map we had brought and oriented between that and the map at HQ. We wound up following my brilliant direction and taking the Horse Trail to Sky Camp, because I thought it would be more gradual. This lead us on a 3 mile detour where we found out just crappy the maps printed from the National Geographic kiosks at REI can be.

We finally stumbled upon a trail marker that showed the way to Sky Camp. From there it was a steep climb, in the dark, up to nearly the peak of Mt. Wittenberg. Alice impressed me with her perseverance in the face of adversity and my stupidity.

We finally got to Sky camp around 1:30am. We set up camp quickly and passed out.

Now, you, my dear reader, may remember from my trip report that we were going to get up around 6am, race down the mountain to HQ and try to secure a camp permit for Coast Camp. That didn't happen. We finally got out of bed after being rudely woken at the ungodly hour of 9:30 by our neighbors packing up and leaving camp. We grabbed a couple Clif bars and hit the trail to get back to HQ to (hopefully) get a permit for Saturday night at Coast Camp.

This time we took the Meadow Trail to the Bear Valley Trail. Following trails in daylight is much easier. We arrived at HQ and fortunately they still had permits available for Coast. Oddly enough, we wound up in site 7 in both camps.

We hiked back to Sky Camp via the Meadow Trail again, bemoaning that we seemed to gain more elevation than we lost the entire way. Upon returning to Sky Camp, we broke camp and had a late lunch.

From there we headed out to Coast Camp. We started North on Sky Trail, then took the Fire Lane Trail to the camp. The trail was beautiful, with several low hills providing vistas of the surrounding park and Drake's Bay. There were even these sections where the trees knitted together over the trail, like a tunnel or arbor.

The hills rolled along, seemingly taunting us will brilliant views at the peak, but another hill looming ahead. Finally after about five miles of zig-zagging elevation we reached Coast Camp. We gratefully dropped our gear, switched into swimsuits, and wandered down to the beach.

The wind whipped along the beach. There were small waves, close to shore, with a vicious curl promising undertow and riptide. We walk a ways along the beach and decided that it was too early for a fire and and too cold to swim.

Alice and I returned to camp to setup the tent and prepare dinner. We made Pad Thai from Backpacker's Pantry; I highly recommend their food now. We made a few additions of more spices and extra peanut butter, but this is minor and the food was good as is.

The sun had just started to set as we finished off dinner. We headed once more to the beach to start the evening's pyrotechnics. (Okay, so it was just a fire, but "pyrotechnics" sounds cooler.) We found a segment of what looked like a telephone pole and hauled it over to where we wanted. We foraged for some wood and were fortunate enough to stumble upon someone's cache. I dug a small pit on the lee side of the log and set up a small lean-to with some dry grass as tinder.

After burning through all of the tinder, we sacrificed a piece of reading I had brought with us: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070503/012939.shtml. We ripped the paper up into little pieces and mixed them in with some small, dry twigs. Using our bodies as windscreens we lit the paper and kept it going to get the twigs burn. We kept putting on bigger and bigger pieces until the fire was roaring.

The wind whipped along the beach so fast that the smoke from the fire stayed at ground level as far as we could see. It made the fire a bit less cozy to cough in the smoke, but it was nice to have anyway.

We met a family on the beach. It was two brothers and their families, about 10 in total. The kids were having a great time running up and down the beach. One of the brothers and his sister-in-law joined us by the fire to warm up. We talked a bit mentioned that we had worn ourselves out in the last two days of hiking and weren't looking forward to hiking back out the 10 or so miles tomorrow. Pete, the brother (though I guess you figured that, there aren't too many women named Pete), offered to give a ride the next morning out to the Pt. Reyes Headquarters.

We slept in a little the next morning, getting up around 9am. We struck camp and made breakfast and headed out a little after 10am.

We followed the Coast Trail back towards the Pt. Reyes Hostel. The trail was nice, mostly level with a good view of the beach along the way. We leap-frogged with some of Pete's family who were on bikes with the kids. Th kids kept stopping for various reasons (catching frogs in the streams, bathroom breaks, etc.) allowing us to pass them at times.

Eventually, we met up with Pete in the parking lot. They were able to cram us into an already overloaded minivan and drove us back to our car at HQ.

The pictures are at my Picasa page at http://picasaweb.google.com/jheckey/Pt_reyes#.

---

So that was it. The last trip of the year. Trinity got canceled without notice and this post has been in limbo for the better part of a month.

I do intend to continue updating this blog with future trips. I think, though, next year I will just try for one or two short trips like these and one good long trip for 6 days or so. It'll be interesting.

Thanks for reading and following along on my journey. Thanks to all of those who joined me, and I hope to see you in the next year!