California Travelling

by James Allen

‘FRIDAY 11th MARCH 2011, CALIFORNIA, TSUNAMI WARNING; following an earthquake in Japan a tsunami warning has been issued this morning for Central Coast…’

It’s 5.30am local time, the TV is predicting a tsunami (or many surges) to hit the coast sometime after 8am local, following an earthquake in Japan. Do you:-

A. Head for the hills?
B. Head for the beach?

We headed for the beach – well, the beach with a cliff…

8.30am we are standing on cliffs at Shell Beach - California, just up the coast from Pismo Beach. The day is starting warm and, as we watch, the fog is quickly dispersing. The cliffs are four or five metres high, and we are standing watching the ocean with about 20 locals. Suddenly the tide comes in – quickly - not a ‘wall of water’, but more a set of waves that come up quickly after each other without the previous wave having retreated. The water comes past the high tide mark and then goes out again. Many leave the cliff top believing that they have seen the tsunami. We hang around chatting to a local man when we note that the tide has gone out way further than before – way further. This, the locals say, is not normal. Rocks that earlier were almost submerged in the ocean are suddenly uncommonly high above the water.

Suddenly the tide returns, again not as a ‘wall of water’ but as waves that don’t retreat before the next one comes – the tide is then higher than before and the locals again say it’s way above the normal high water mark. This surge is repeated twice further in the next hour.

We both felt strange watching a force that is so uncontrollable, dangerous and, yes, I admit, exhilarating too. We were unaware at the time of the effect or the scale of the devastation in Japan (and Hawaii). Writing this now seems almost callous given what we now know about what happened and the consequences. However, we were in California to visit friends and family and taking the opportunity to travel down the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH/Highway 1) and so, at the time, it was just a dramatic sight.

Sunday 6 March (the day after our flight from Heathrow to Los Angeles): The sun was shining – so we headed up to the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve. This 3500 acre reserve is a state park and is determined to stop the increasing invasive building in the area. As we walked out the kinks from our flight we saw small wildlife, lizards, birds and Native American artefacts. We were interested to note that the plateau had received 24 inches of rain over the winter. Who said Southern California was dry?

Monday: Still suffering jet lag we were up at 4am. This was a good thing as we were driving to San Francisco. So at 4.45am we left the house… and at 5.10am we were in a traffic jam. Yep, it was dark and we were at the Instate 5/Highway 91 interchange – Highway 91, proclaimed by all the US motoring groups as the busiest road in the USA. Still it was 20 minutes and we were moving north, away from the 91. So by 7am we had crossed the LA basin via Pasadena and were at a Starbucks in Santa Clarita getting coffee and working out where next, which was the I-5 north over the ‘Grapevine’. This is a section of hills/mountains that surround the LA Basin. Today it was cold, wet and windy – this is often the area shut down due to snow in the winter! However, by 8am we were in the Central Valley, the long valley that stretches from here to San Francisco, a relatively flat but very productive valley suffering from deliberate water removal. As we travelled north the production went from grapes to salad onions to potatoes and finally to almond and cherry trees: many, many trees. However, there were many signs about a ‘congress created dust bowl’. We found out that recently water in the valley for food production was switched off and diverted to LA, due to the ongoing drought that has affected region for the last seven years.

We arrived at the hotel in Santa Rosa at 2pm and booked in for two nights, having driven 450 miles in nine hours (with breaks and traffic jams). We collapsed into our room but soon headed back to the car for a small ‘pilgrimage’ a further 10 miles north. This was to the Seghesio winery. We have been fans for some time since our friend who runs a wine bar/restaurant had some of these wines. We weren’t disappointed – the tasting was great and the wines we selected wonderful.

From here we headed to a triple D recommended location. We have a Freesat TV in the UK. This gives us 100+ channels. 95% are useless or bad or both, but we do get the Food Network UK, on which there is a show where a slightly annoying presenter/celebrity chef travels around to good local diners (Triple D is Diners, Drive Ins and Dives – surprisingly he never does Dives…) Since the chef comes from Santa Rosa, we had a selection in the local area to try. We tried Willie Birds - a bar/restaurant that farms their own turkeys and smokes the meat. The food was (as is normal in the US) plentiful and very well cooked.

Tuesday: We were headed to Point Reyes National Park. The route took us west towards the coast; the area reminded us of southern Scotland’s rolling hills, lakes, heather but without haggis and kilts. The park offices were not open when we arrived, so we decided to do the ‘Earthquake Walk’. As we got out of the car we watched quail wander around.

In 1906 San Francisco was hit by an earthquake, which damaged a large area of the city, followed by a fire, which destroyed a further 500 blocks of the city. The earthquake originated in the movement of the plates at Point Reyes, where Point Reyes is heading north, while the rest of California is slowly moving south. The movement at the fault was 16 feet. As you walk along the path you notice blue blocks lining the slight incline in front; these, we were, told make the fault. Then we came across the fence, famous in its day and in text books. The fence (well, a fence that replaced the original)is split, as the two halves are separated by 16 feet either side of the fault. This demonstrates more than anything else the distance of movement in seconds.

Later on the path, we passed a stream that was diverted at the same time. It was to give us a vivid reminder of what can happen; and later we thought back to the site as the news came through from Japan. We then went into the office and, as we have always found in the National Parks, talked with the very helpful and knowledgeable staff. We were told that the lighthouse was closed on a Tuesday, but we headed out to the point. We saw elephant seals and black tailed deer. We then swung south again to Drakes Bay. This is possibly the place where Sir Francis Drake spent time repairing his ship. A group of elephant seals sunned themselves on the beach.

We left the park through more dramatic Scottish-style scenery (or northern California scenery if you are from Scotland) and headed down the San Andreas Fault rift valley towards San Francisco.

Our next stop was Muir Woods to see the California sequoia trees, the largest and tallest trees on earth. These were around 280 feet tall; the tallest have been recorded at 380 feet. Further north (about five hours) you can walk through giant sequoia.

We then headed further south to the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Here we found ourselves going over old military installations that were built for the protection of the entrance to the harbour and then the bridge (these were first built in the 1860s following the US civil war) and on up to the Nike missile systems of the 1970s, and anything and everything in between. The bridge itself strides out over the bay, in majestic lines, its colour never quite red or orange (almost rust-terracotta).

Wednesday: After a second breakfast in Santa Rosa we checked out and headed south, this time across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco, and out the other side. We were headed south to Monterey.

First we came into Gilroy, known in certain circles as Garlic Capital of the World. And, oh boy, did it smell of garlic - the smell hung over the valley…

Anyway we finally arrived at Salinas, birthplace and sometime home of the writer John Steinbeck – best known for writing Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). He wrote a total of twenty-seven books and in 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. We went around the Steinbeck Centre (sorry, Center), but were a little disappointed at the seemingly disjointed approach it took to him and his work, sometimes following on a time line or just in relation to his books.

Salinas itself is a small town that is again today suffering a depression (the descriptions by Steinbeck are not out of place today). Many stores were closed down, there were a lot of tramps and there was a feeling of decay.

Finally we left and headed to the coast and Monterey, famous for Cannery Row where Steinbeck worked and wrote about (Steinbeck used the name and the city then changed the name of the road). The Row was where thousands of people worked in the sardine industry working from 1880s to the 1950s. The canneries failed after the collapse of the fishing industry in Monterey Bay in the mid-1950s, which resulted from over-fishing. Before the collapse, the fishery was one of the most productive in the world due to the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that’s funnelled to the surface from an underwater canyon just off-shore. It’s now a tourist trap - places to eat and to buy souvenirs. Very little remains of the sardine industry.

The main building remaining from that time is now the Monterey Aquarium. This is housed in an old cannery and is now home to many different marine species with over 620 named species on display. The aquarium uses the circulation of fresh ocean water which is brought up through pipes which pump it in continuously from Monterey Bay.

Among the exhibits are the Ocean's Edge Wing is a 10 metre (33 feet) high 1.3 million litre tank for viewing California coastal marine life. In this tank, the aquarium was the first in the world to grow California giant kelp, using a wave machine at the top of the tank which is open to the air allowing sunlight to penetrate as low as possible. Also there is a 4.5 million litre tank in the Outer Bay Wing which features one of the world's largest single-paned windows; the acrylic window is actually five panes seamlessly glued together. Other sealife exhibits included stingrays, jellyfish, sea otters and numerous other species, which can be viewed above and below the waterline. As we walked around we watched a feeding of the sea otters in their tank. We were asked to touch a sea otter pelt – very smooth and silky and, we were told, with over a million hairs per square inch very warm. We also watched sea otters lying on their backs eating the food off their stomachs in the wild feeding. A diver in a tank fed the fish, and outside a pod of dolphins swam through the bay. We stayed overnight in Monterey.

Thursday: And we headed for Pebble Beach a golfing resort and home of the 17-mile drive. This is a toll road that weaves through the private Pebble Beach area of Carmel (no, we didn’t see Clint Eastwood…) The drive takes you through the many golf courses and some of the spectacular scenery (beaches, cliffs etc), as well as the multi-million dollar homes.

The drive starts by weaving down to the coast and it was early with some fog, so we missed the views, but by the time we reached the beaches (rocky coves), the fog had lifted and we watched and heard seals and elephant seals (who make a honking type of bark) frolic in the water. As we went further through the drive, we came upon bigger and, I’m guessing, better properties - huge, behind walls and high fences. Why buy here if you want privacy? Then we came to an overlook of the tree. This cypress tree stands alone on a rock promontory and is the symbol of the Pebble Beach Company. Best not to mention that what you can’t see is that the tree is now held up with wires as it’s getting old!

We then started down the ‘classic’ Pacific Coast Highway into the Big Sur. This is the rugged coastline, an often foggy area with classic 1930s style bridges – including perhaps the most famous and most photographed, the Bixby Bridge. This is an arch concrete bridge and was, when built, the largest concrete single span bridge in the world. As we drove further on down the PCH, we encountered an area where the road was being repaired following landslides. Just before we left, the road was closed following a landslip near the Bixby Bridge.

After stopping here we continued to head south, stopping to admire the views and watch the open (but empty) ocean. At one such stop we were looking at the ocean and noticed a whale! These grey whales move up the coast at this time, often quite close to where the breakers start to show – about where the water begins to get shallow at the start of the beach. The whales move at walking pace and come up for air every few minutes.

We stopped at the Big Sur Park to walk some trails, climbing to a fantastic look-out through more redwoods and looking north from the lookout for over eight miles. Back down was via the water falls, tucked away in an almost fantasy grove of redwoods. It was good to get some difficult walking done after all our driving. We then headed further down to a beach where we stopped for lunch before moving on again to Pfeiffer State Beach Park.

This is the home to the only waterfall to go straight into the Pacific in California and was a private residence in the early 1900s. On the death of the owners the house was destroyed, as per instructions in their will, and the land handed to the state. The bay in which the waterfall falls is magical: the water a turquoise, almost luminescent shade of blue. As we walked back to the car I noticed a couple of large birds gliding above the park. They were very high and were coloured differently from the normal large birds, as they had patches of white on the underside of their wings. We discovered later that these were California condors, a species that was almost wiped out in the 1970s and which became the symbol of the environmental movement very early on. There have been releases in the Pinnacles National Park about 50 miles east, but we felt very honoured to have seen these rare birds.

We carried on further past Hearst Castle (the billionaire publisher of Hearst Newspapers built a ‘home’ with bits and pieces from all over the world) and on to the Elephant Seal beach. Viewing is from a platform about 10 feet above the beach that houses over 1,000 elephant seals, who happily laid and watched the world go by with the occasional pup making a noise.

Friday: Awake at 5.30am and watching the news brought the first notice of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the fact that the central coast of California (i.e. where we are) was under a tsunami warning and the southern coast under an advisory from 8am. The extent of the earthquake was not known but the local station confirmed that all the state beaches were closed, and that a wave of up to seven feet (2.3 meters) might hit the coast – but ‘the main roads are open and no delay to traffic is expected’.

Over the next 30 minutes it became clear that the Pismo Beach dunes (our next stop) would be closed, so we had breakfast and headed to a safe vantage point. There were, for the 90 minutes, a number of locals explaining what was normal in terms of high and low tides, obviously the changes we saw really freaked them out.

After about 90 minutes we headed south again, stopping at the Santa Barbara mission. The Mission system in California was set up by the Spanish Catholic church to ‘bring the word of God to the natives’. In reality this started with the priests believing the natives to be childlike and then enslaving them to work on the church’s farms, while destroying their culture. Of the 15 or so missions many have been damaged by earthquakes etc, but Santa Barbara is the largest and is still used. The church is painted inside in cool Mediterranean (or Mexican) colours. Externally the view is fantastic down to the sea.

After this we headed again south, across LA. We travelled a little over 1100 miles in the five days. It was a condensed cross-section of California from the cooler north – along some of the most awe-inspiringly beautiful coast and into the dry southern California; we had the opportunity to see more wildlife than expected and to experience the chance to learn about the wonderful creatures.

First published in VISA 97 (June 2011)