Secret Walks: Wilder Ranch Coastal Loop yet again

I posted before about doing the Wilder Ranch Coastal Loop on March 25 and on April 10.  On Sunday 22 May I went again, this time with my wife and my sister, neither of whom had done the loop before.  We drove to the park, but parked on Highway 1, rather than driving in to the parking lot.

I usually have difficulty photographing butterflies, but this western tiger swallowtail posed nicely for me on the wild radish. I got a few photos, but this one shows the markings best.

The wild radishes themselves have nice blooms at this time of year—I like the purplish ones best.

The wood rose had just a single bloom—I don’t know whether it has more in a different season.

This is one of my better bee photo, on some sort of mustard flower.

Here is a bee on seaside wooly sunflower (it was a good day for bee photos).

The yellow bush lupine was blooming but also showing seed pods.

I zoomed way in to get this western gull on the ridge across the beach, but the quality was not all I hoped for.

The harbor seal pups have gotten quite big—the one coming out of the water here is about half the size of the adults now. A lot of the seals were out on the rocks rather than on the sandy beach.

I could not identify these black guillemots until I got the photos home and could look at them on a bigger screen—again the quality at full zoom leaves a little to be desired.

I took my sister down to fern grotto beach, but my wife did not want to make the steep descent. That was probably just as well, as I slipped and fell, and I’m usually surer-footed than my wife.

Here is proof (if any of her friends need it), that my sister was indeed at Fern Grotto Beach.

Every time I go to Fern Grotto Beach, I’m fascinated by these holes in the cliffs. The all line up horizontally, but there is not a visible difference between the rock layer with the holes and that layers immediately above and below.

The view across Fern Grotto Beach looking north is a classic northern California coastline landscape. The finger of rock jutting out in the middle is where a lot of the harbor seal colony was sleeping.

The seaside daisies were putting on a fine display.

We saw a lot of pelicans on the beach at Wilder Creek. I’ve never seen pelicans on the ground before.

I’ve also never seen so many pelicans at once (this was not even all of them, as there were another 50–100 in the creek). Usually a dozen pelicans flying in line is the biggest cluster I see.

The California buckeyes were also blooming vigorously. Pretty soon the flowers will be over and the buckeyes will drop their leaves for the summer. I don’t know of any other deciduous tree that has leaves in winter and drops them for the summer.