Pete Tillman
Tidepools & clouds, SLO county North Coast
I'm pleased with this photo, the star from yesterday's walk. You are looking down from the sketchy, unmaintained blufftop trail. Those tidepools are just great! The green is likely Mermaid's Hair seaweed, one of our most slippery ones. Not that you are likely to be walking on it here! The pink-tinged pools adjacent are coralline algae. You can see the bedding of the steeply-dipping underlying rocks -- but as usual for the Calif coast, nothing connects! You cannot project these rocks onto the bluffs beyond. The early American geologists tried hard to map the coasts, since those are the only good exposures for much of the state. Result: total frustration! This is the notorious Franciscan melange, which is French for "Total Mess"!
GPS map will get you there, or PM me for a bit more help. The blufftop trail here is ± the extension of the mapped (but sketchy) Pt Sierra Nevada trail. Maps of that are online. I parked at the mapped north trailhead. All of this is State Park land, gloriously unsigned and undeveloped. My kind of place!
Tidepools & clouds, SLO county North Coast
I'm pleased with this photo, the star from yesterday's walk. You are looking down from the sketchy, unmaintained blufftop trail. Those tidepools are just great! The green is likely Mermaid's Hair seaweed, one of our most slippery ones. Not that you are likely to be walking on it here! The pink-tinged pools adjacent are coralline algae. You can see the bedding of the steeply-dipping underlying rocks -- but as usual for the Calif coast, nothing connects! You cannot project these rocks onto the bluffs beyond. The early American geologists tried hard to map the coasts, since those are the only good exposures for much of the state. Result: total frustration! This is the notorious Franciscan melange, which is French for "Total Mess"!
GPS map will get you there, or PM me for a bit more help. The blufftop trail here is ± the extension of the mapped (but sketchy) Pt Sierra Nevada trail. Maps of that are online. I parked at the mapped north trailhead. All of this is State Park land, gloriously unsigned and undeveloped. My kind of place!