Hiking Under the Clouds (Palomarin 7/20/10)

Not seeing the sun during a hike is generally a bad thing, but on the Coast trail north out of Palomarin its a blessing.  For much of the hour and a half or so it took us to walk the nearly three miles to Bass Lake we were exposed to the sky; on a warm, cloudless day, our brains would have been baked either one-way or round-trip.  Luckily for us, the sun never made an appearance, the fog stayed well above us, the wind didn’t below, and hiking was comfortable even though the temperature probably never got above 60.

Most of the Tuesday Meanderers, plus Jeff and Susan from the Monday group, joined Wendy for this outing.  And we weren’t the only ones on the trail; several other groups passed us coming and going.

Along the way we stopped for a lesson about the history of this part of Point Reyes National Seashore.  Most of the peninsula was owned by San Franciscan Andrew Randall in 1852.  After he was shot dead, his creditors battled over the property, and two of the lawyers involved in the litigation, James and Oscar Shafter and their law firm ended up owning 55,000 acres in the area.Their Lake and South End Ranches were in the area from Palomarin north.
 
The Church of The Golden Rule bought the South End Ranch in 1950’s and operated a community school and nursery business on the property.  Both ranches ultimately were purchased by the federal government for inclusion in  the Seashore.  None of the ranch buildings remain standing, and only the church’s school building (now used by Point Reyes Bird Observatory) still exists from the pre-park era. (For more information on these ranches, read Dewey Livingston's Ranching On The Point Reyes Peninsula, available on the Point Reyes National Park Website:  www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/pore/ranching.pdf).

We saw a number of flowering plants during the hike including coastal morning glory, monkey flowers, and clarkia.  A few mushrooms were holding on in the shadiest sections of the trail.
Song sparrows and jays had their thunder stolen decisively by a peregrine falcon that we saw perched on and then flying about the steep cliffs leading down to the ocean on our way back to the parking lot.