John & Anne Wiley

Coast Dairies State Park offers some cool sea caves and a great beach, plus this pyramid of sorts.

5048 Pyramid

Take a look at those people on the beach top-right for scale and you can see this thing is pretty big. There are two more people with light-colored shirts at the edge of the pyramid’s shadow, so I guess they ran across the narrow sand patch between waves and are confident the tide’s not coming in. Here’s a look from the other side offering a better view of that big cave up far enough that you can imagine how many storms have waves big enough to reach and carve it.

5044 High Sea Cave

Dividing two big sandy beaches here is this narrow rock point with a well-worn path on top.

5043 Red Point

Continuing up the coast there are of course countless more sea caves, but this is one of the larger ones and has the added feature of another spire at water’s edge where a few brave souls probably climb it at low tide.

5020 Cave & Spire

After yet more fascinating shoreline we come to the sweet little town of Davenport.

5017 Davenport, CA

That cement plant at the left is somewhat of a marker for this last pic for today, with cool sea caves. Actually I guess they’re sea tunnels since they poke right through.

5005 Sea Tunnels

Some people get tired of rock forms, sea caves, and colorful heather. Not me, as you can see. 🙂

5089 Color Cove

The sea caves and basking pinnipeds stretch along this rugged coast for miles, so maybe the fact it was all placidly passing off our wing made every little cove and cave new and fascinating. Or the fact much of it’s all but invisible from the top, and easy to miss on a casual stroll if you can even get access to that dirt road along the edge.

5086 Easily Missed

This vantage point also provides the grand scope of sea sculptures like this sprawling shape.

5078 Sprawling Shapes

There’s a contrast between hard and soft all along this shore, with caves and arches giving way to sandy beaches like this.

5075 Hard & Soft

The splash in caves demonstrates how these cliffs have been carved for millennia, by fleeting water meeting living stone.

5065 Time Portal

Each of my zoom closeups on caves and features in this next panorama sings in an eternal harmony that invites the soul to a slow dance of delight.

5057 Surf Song

The coastline from Natural Bridges to the West (North) is a complex mixture of sea caves and carved cliff faces. You can start to see this terrain at Terrace Point where the Seymour Marine Discovery Center offers a small scale tour of sea life and this rock monolith on the beach at Younger Lagoon.

5160 Younger Beach Rock

As the name Natural Bridges implies you’ll also find some rock arches like this beauty.

5151 Natural Bridge

It’s a bucolic setting with farms and ranches along the coast and up into the hills, with a foot trail meandering along the cliffs.

5148 Quiet Sea Scene

Of course the rocks tell tales of ferocious storms carving these rocks for eons making for sea caves like this.

5143 Sea Cave

Or this one, that seems to be a long tunnel completely through to the other side.

5139 Rock Tunnel?

There are several lonely monoliths like this too, some quite large with interesting shapes.

5132 Rock Standoff

In places the natural sandstone seeps nourish moss and lichen, adding color accents.

5113 Color & Texture

This rock tower on a wide flat pad reminds me of a duck’s foot, though it probably has a more interesting name known to locals.

5106 Duck Foot Rock

Sea caves of all shapes and sizes abound, and in places like this the cliffs are closer to the water and interspersed with beaches.

5096 Sea Caves

In case you’re wondering, yes that’s a gathering a pinnipeds on the beach at the left. Here’s a closer look so you can decide whether they’re seals, sea lions, or elephant seals.

5095 Seal Beach

Rounding a point popular with surfers you can’t see in this pic, here’s a last look until the next post.

5093 Pounded Point

We attended a sweet simple family wedding on the beach at Pajaro Dunes some years ago, so we always enjoy seeing it when we fly that section of coast.

5289 Pajaro Dunes Homes

Even looking at this pic evokes dream memories mingling surf sounds with deep sleep in one of these rental cottages. Up the beach a ways, swimmers were completely unaware of the dark shape of a tight school of fish huddling against the hungry gulls.

5239 School Gulls

Manresa State Beach seems to demonstrate a problem with so many of us loving these beaches, combined with current agricultural methods.

5231 Manresa Algae Bloom

Those dark shapes that look similar to an oil spill are probably algae blooms triggered by high nutrient levels in the warm water. At Seacliff in Aptos is the “cement boat”  that we found so intriguing as kids, unaware of its story way back to WWI.

5226 S.S. Palo Alto

Capitola has built up its little waterfront into quite a tourist attraction, making us want to visit again and see the changes at what claims to be the oldest beach resort on the West Coast.

5218 Capitola