A Glorious Day on The Coast (Muddy Hollow, December 9th)

Jack Frost visited most of our pumpkins during the week hours before this hike, and it was just above freezing as we drove from Lagunitas through Samuel P. Taylor State Park on our way out to Point Reyes. But when we reached the Muddy Hollow trailhead, the temperature was a balmy 52 degrees. Ten of us (about half who made the "Final Exam" hike --- now we now that it's not about hiking, it all about food!) showed up for this trek. After our pre-hike confab about the past week's events, we headed north under sunny skies (past the "Gnarly Tree") and up the Muddy Hollow Road for a little over two miles --- a far cry from the outset of our July 22nd hike when the fog dripped on us like a leaky faucet.

We then turned west on to the Glenbrook trail which, from the map, looks like a long haul across a broad mesa-like land formation, but in truth, just wanders toward the sea for less than a mile. Dick thinks he saw only one of the many bright yellow American Goldfinches we spotted here back in the summer, and the Wood Nymphs we'd seen fluttering by in July were long, long gone. Although the hawks, songbirds, and butterflies had fled, we saw two herds of Tule Elk along this stretch of the hike.

Shortly after noon, and after we had started off on the in-aptly named Estero Trail (which in July took us down to Limantour Beach, but now has been re-routed back to the Muddy Hollow trailhead), we took our lunch break at a spot overlooking the Limantour Estero and the ocean. The skies were so clear to the west, that we could make out both the South and North Farallone Islands.

Off-shore winds had turned the late morning into shirt-sleeve hiking weather, but the wind began to shift, and a breeze off the ocean cooled things down a bit preventing us from lapsing into a post-prandial lethargy as we turned eastward towards our starting point.

We crossed the creek feeding into the Estero, but the water level was higher than in July and we did not have the good fortune to spot either of the two Clapper Rails that he had seen here in the summer. (After we headed uphill from the creek, Dick and Neil saw a small bird with black and yellow markings, possibly a Goldfinch, and a larger, brownish speckled bird, maybe an Accipiter, sitting near each other on the top of a pine tree, but too far away to be easily identified. Click here for Wendy's list of critters and plants we saw on this hike).

The slow climb up from the creek brought us into a young, dense forest of tent-pole sized Bishop Pines creating a "tunnel" through which the path took us back to Muddy Hollow. A long, cork-screw descent eventually brought us back to our cars by about 2 pm. This turned out to be one of our longer treks --- 7.o miles exactly per the park map, and comparable in length to the Sky Trail to Bear Valley hike we did in mid-July and are scheduled to repeat on January 20, 2009.