And so the adventure continues to begin:

Onwards and up, up, upwards!

Another thing I missed on my 2023 road trip was seeing any redwoods! Most large groves of coastal redwoods in California are located north of San Francisco, and I made the decision to turn inland after spending several days in the city. The reasoning for this isn’t super important (I had a weekend flight out of Sacramento and needed to move kind of quickly up to Portland after that), but it meant that I missed all the redwood groves as I cruised up I-5.

Well, not this time!

On strong instruction recommendation from my dear friends Meredith and Sean, I went to Muir Woods, which is an old-growth redwood grove opposite from San Francisco. The forest here is absolutely Triassic; it’s cool and misty and covered in ferns. Trees higher than I’ve ever seen tower over you in every direction, yet somehow don’t block out all of the sunlight! Perfect little beams shine down all over, ignited by flecks of mist and pollen and mites:

Quaking in the wind and in awe.

One of the cooler things I learned while here is that apparently, established redwoods have interconnected root systems that distribute resources throughout the grove. Individual trees located hundreds of yards up the hill and away from the central creek have been found to contain selenium and phosphorous, the only source of which is from salmon who swim upstream from the sea and die, leaving their nutrients in the creekbed. Trees closer to the creek grow their roots specifically into the bed in a way that is more likely to catch salmon corpses (and provide pockets of still water for spawning) and absorb their nutrients.

And pardon my French, but that is metal as fuck. These trees eat fish! These trees are Episcopalians!

Thanks for the recommendation, Meredith, I can’t believe I let myself miss this in 2023 💙

Views from Mount Tamalpais, a notable peak above Muir Woods.

The Twin Peaks out beyond Oakland, from which the bar in San Francsico gets its name.

It felt so good to be exploring again. It’s hard to think that I basically encircled this entire area in 2023, yet somehow missed all these beautiful places I guess everything is a series of concentric loops. You could drive around the whole of the Bay a dozen times and still find things to zoom in on. You could walk around a city block over and over and still find a new flower to smell each trip. Hell, you might discover something new about the world in the loop from your front door to your mailbox and back! What luck we have that the world is such an interesting place!

Different fogbanks, photographed from the same spot, just in different directions.

But there was one more locale which escaped my encirclement of the nation in 2023. And this is the one the explorations I missed the most:

Point Reyes.

Point Reyes is a neck of land (well, really two necks of land) that stick out into the coast north and west of San Francisco. It’s actually formed by the San Andreas Fault cleaving the land out into the sea, and forming Tomales Bay as a result.

In 2020, back when I started the very beginnings of my plannings for 2023, this is where I first imagined myself reaching the sea. It felt so portent, this promontory jutting out into the sea. In my mind, it was a diving board sticking out into the edge of the entire world. I thought if I stuck my hand out far enough from it I would touch the firmament and be dissolved into a puddle of tears, then transform into a beam of light as I finally made the “big right turn” and started working my way home again. God, what a precipice!

And Good LORD what a sop I am. I bet most of my readers’ favorite color is orange, because they’re sick to death of my purple prose.

Anyways, all of this is to say that I really, really, really attached a lot of quasi-spiritual importance to this little peninsula, and the hike down to the lighthouse perched on its edge.

Getting ever so close now…

I’m almost there. I can see it, I can smell it, hear it, feel it, taste it. So close to this firmament, this Bablyon, this end of the world I put on top of a pedestal. And when I finally reached it:

It kind of sucked!

It’s gray. Depressingly so. It smells like birdshit. They have a reproduction foghorn that occasionally blares an insufferable, low roar. Meteorlogical data kept by the lighthouse. Indicates that this is the foggiest location in the lower 48, with something like 280+ days of fog per year.

I mean I tried to make the best of it! I really did. But I was disappointed more than anything, that the bleeding edge of all my ambitions was this lame.

I turned back to the rental car. I ate a crumbly granola bar and thought about how much of a disappointment this would have been if I had seen it in 2023. At least I was seeing it now on someone else’s dime.

I turned around and headed back out of the park. But not before I found a side road, going to that other neck of land just south of Point Reyes:

For illustrative purposes, the first peninsula (the foggy one) was the one that sticks out to the left. I next went to that longer peninsula that sticks out to the right.

The funny thing about Point Reyes, and the Bay Area at large, is that the geography is so fractuous that weather conditions vary widely over very small distances. Oakland is only a dozen miles or so from San Francisco and is universally sunnier and warmer. In the point Reyes area, the number of foggy days can reduce by half over just a quarter mile.

And that’s what I realized, as I got out of car and hiked to that other, indistinguishable peninsula just a few hundred yards from the first:

Sometimes the world isn’t as beautiful as you expect. Sometimes if fails to live up to your well-intentioned expectations.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t that beautiful somewhere else.

You just have to explore a bit to find it 💙

That’s all for now,

Stay well everyone,

Evan 💙