Day 85 – Beginning of Week 13. Frost on the old pumpkin this morning, 32 degrees, 8 a.m., sunny, not a cloud in the sky. The girls still lovin’ the sun on the dashboard. Rob took a walk to the beach, wanted to see how close to the campsite it was. Just a short trail thru some woods & there it was. Roads to the Day Use Area were still closed. He found that the parking lot area for Lake Cleone was partially underwater, and it was part mud, part ice to get on the boardwalk which circles the Lake.
We went to the Post Office in Fort Bragg to pick up our mail that we’d had forwarded there. Got gas in the car, and took a drive north on Route 1 to where the road first meets the coast, went inland a little bit into the redwoods, found a little park & walked around, then turned around & headed back to the campground, following the coast road. There was very little traffic & very few people, just a couple of tiny, isolated towns & beautiful scenery. There were places where the road was being rebuilt on the cliffs & you could see where the former road had caved in to the Ocean. Even at the campground there’s plenty of indications that the Ocean is encroaching on the land mass. Global warming? Earthquakes? Fires & landslides? We stopped at a park where there was camping and Day Use on a cliff above the Ocean. It was roped off with signs warning that people shouldn’t step close to the cliff, the land was unstable. Makes you wonder what everything will be like hundreds of years from now.
It was really beautiful, kind of rugged & isolated up here, which seemed strange because below were the fairly largely populated cities of Fort Bragg & Mendocino. Being originally from So. CA, we just expected more sprawl along the coast. (I’m sure we’ll see plenty of that later.)
Chestnut-Backed Chickadee, CA-1 North of Fort Bragg, CA
Chestnut-Backed Chickadee, CA-1 North of Fort Bragg, CA
Back at the campground, we had lunch and took a hike to the Ocean. VERY beautiful. Seals on the rocks, birds flying overhead, waves crashing below. There’s a long, multi-use, paved trail that runs on the bluffs & cliffs along the Ocean. It is accessible to the campground in several places. People were walking, riding bikes, and even horses. We hiked for a couple of miles, will ride the bikes on it tomorrow.
Came back to the campsite & sat outside until it started to get dark. The high today was 58 degrees, sunny – breezy in the afternoon. The traffic in the campground wasn’t nearly as heavy as yesterday even though the Day Use Area parking was still being re-directed there. Probably because the weekend was over. Camping-wise, there’s maybe 5 other campers here, including us & the campground hosts.