Point Reyes - Tomales Point Hike (2006.02.13)

If your trying to see this blog with the photos...myspace's technique of using others to host the images...well it blows for consistancy so if you not seeing photos you can check out the duplicate of this blog at:
http://dtighe.blogs.friendster.com/damon/

Is that truck with you guys?

No, that guy pulled in around 2am last night.

I try my to open my eye lids, but its almost as difficult as trying to open a manhole cover with just your pinky. I let the lids stay shut a while longer and just listen intently to the world outside of my trucks camper shell. I can hear the Park Rangers truck start up and there is a little relief born in my chest. However this little breath is quickly extinguished when I hear the Park Rangers truck pull up right behind my tail gate. I could have probably kept drifting in and out of consciousness for some time while he ran my plates, but a little memory of my vehicle being unregistered ran itself to the deck of my consciousness and all of a sudden all hands are on deck and Im opening the campers shell trying to get a word in edge wise to distract the Ranger. He pops out of his front seat where hes in the middle of calling my Montana
plates in and asks if I know there no camping here. Here by the way is the
McClure Beach parking lot at Point Reyes National Marine Sanctuary.

?does not =?

I used an old rhetoric trick of giving already known information instead of a direct confirmation of guilt, I pulled in last night around 2am.

Do you have any warrants out for your arrest or any felonies? Im running your ID. I gave him my

Montana

drivers license and said, No, not that Im aware, but if ones comes back I would definitely like to know about it too.

I look like hell in the morning with my hair all over the place and my face acting as a fleshy piece of clay collecting all the little twists turns and details of the section of sleeping bag it was resting on all night. A voice comes across the radio in the Rangers truck and he goes back over and picks it up and then puts it down after giving it a few words.

Looks like your clean.

Thats a relief, do you actually get many people running from warrants up here?

More than you could imagine. You from Bozeman?

Yeah, just out trying a different type of winter out here on the coast.

My tail gate is down at this point, nicely blocking the 2004 registration sticker on my license plate. C. Jones was engraved on a little goldish colored pin on his shirt and he told me that he use to work in Yellowstone
and in the Tetons. He sympathized with me about the winters. He told me he couldnt give anyone from Bozeman a ticket for sleeping in the back of their truck, because its so much part of the culture. He gave me verbal warning and then told me what a great trail I had in front of me this morning out to Tomales point. I thanked him and he got back in the truck and took off. Finally those MT plates pulled off in full force, unlike Portland, where all they got me were speeding tickets. Speeding tickets when everyone else around me with their little green tree plates are speeding right by me and who gets pulled over?

I hit the trail maybe five minutes after the Ranger takes off. The trail was fantastitc:

I walked on the spit of land between the pacific and a sea of fog that settled over

Tomales

Bay

to the East. The Tule Elk herds dodged in and out of the heavy fog and at a low point in the land the wind picked up and let the fog drain out from the bay, across arched and sloping green hills off a cliff side and into the pounding pacific. The waves were intense, because of the winter tides, Mavricks just had their annual big wave contest earlier this week. On the way out to the point I saw only one fellow, but lot of wild life. I saw Taricha granulose (rough skinned newt), gulls, cormorants, a red legged frog, douglas irisis in bloom, mustard flowers, ravens, a harbor seal, oyster-cracker birds, black tailed deer and maybe the ploom of a whale off on the horizon.

I made the small mistake of climbing down a cliff side and then trying to make my way back along the coast line. It was all good fun, running between cliff fronts between wave sets and finding little sea caves full of abalone and turban snail shells, but at one point I had to climb a cliff front whose weak constitution almost cost me a 40 foot fall into the frothing pacific. I had climbed up it, because it was the only way to continue going south, but the bulge of land that went out into the ocean was a hodge-podge of sandstone, broken pieces of basalts and loose dirt. I didnt find the loose dirt section until I was quite a ways up and so committed that I couldnt really climb back down. The southern slope of the mount also happened to go vertical unlike its northenly side that I had just ascended. My only option was to go up. Luckily there were a few plants, whose root systems I could pinch and a few holes that I could jam my fingers into just in case my footing blew out again. Once on top of the mound I was faced with the problem of where to go from there. A small bridge saddled the sea peak with the mainland and I made a go of that until I realized the composition of it was even shakier than what I was on. A pair of blacktailed deer grazing on the hill side about 50 feet away just watched, not concerned, for they unlike me knew that I couldnt make it across the saddle. After 15 minutes of propelling myself along the saddle, literally straddling it and heaving myself along as you would on a log I came to a 10 foot vertical that I knew I could not climb so I reverse straddled myself back to a point that I could crawl back down. I ended up having to back track and take a ravine cut out by a small creek back up to the top of the peninsula.

 

By this time the sun was really up and more people were on the trail, so I just blazed out back to the truck, knowing I still had a lot of work to do in
Oakland