Position Reyes’ Limantour Spit at low tide unveils its strategies

Most men and women arriving at Limantour Seaside at Stage Reyes understandably make straight for the ocean. But for these eager to make a lower-tide detour in advance of they catch sight of the Pacific, some surprises await.

The “detour” is actually the Limantour Spit Trail, which tracks powering the dunes alongside the Limantour Spit, the westward-working strip of sand that sorts Limantour Seashore. Behind the dunes, on the spit path, you won’t discover crashing waves or beach front umbrellas. On a minimal-tide working day, though, you could possibly make a route all the way to the tip of the spit, just across the h2o from Drake’s Head, and make a loop by returning together the beach front side.

On days without having this serendipitous mixture of elements, you can however take the spit trail alongside a brief mile one particular way, crowded with coyote brush and lupine that can obscure the route solely. Extended pants are a fantastic notion if you want to avoid scratchy brushes with the brush. At about the mile mark, what is remaining of the path fades, and if the tide is not quite very low, this is in which it ends. Drinking water and suctioning mud flats in the shallows of the estero will prevent your passage.

It may possibly be tempting to forge ahead as significantly as feasible for the duration of greater tides, but your only way out is again yet again or around the dunes. It’s not a fantastic plan to scramble above dunes towards the beach for heaps of causes, among them the likely that you will trample safeguarded snowy plover nesting spots, and those people very little shorebirds have ample to contend with.

We have had the very good luck to be there a number of moments when the tide was small ample to expose walkable substrate to the finish of the spit. The powering-the-dunes sightings on these fortuitous days have incorporated squadrons of snowy white pelicans assembling in the estero that stretches along the landside of the Spit.

Pinnipeds of numerous persuasions also favor these serene waters, and if you do walk throughout the mudflats, you may well locate yourself acquiring soaked by fountains of drinking water, shot up by massive, reactive clams buried underfoot. When they feeling footfall, the clams pull back again their siphons, ejecting a water spout. They also look to do this unprovoked, creating the flats a pure fountain aspect.

We’ve also encountered loss of life right here. Desiccated moon jellies, a dried-up leopard shark and the carcasses of a lot of shorebirds provide as reminders of the circle of daily life.

The submit-colonial names of numerous of the options all over us also reflect the dark–light duality of this region. Drake’s Head lies just across from the east facet of the spit, named like so a lot of other locales in our location after Sir Francis Drake, the pirate and slave trader who took a crack someplace all-around there. His 6-week stopover has led to much speculation about just precisely exactly where he stopped, and even an elaborate fraud involving a commemorative engraved brass plate “found” at Limantour itself. The plate was later exposed as getting been manufactured in the 1930s as a prank by users of a consuming society.

The beach front by itself bears the identify of a French fellow, Joseph Yves Limantour, whose ship satisfied its conclude there in 1841, despite the fact that Limantour himself survived. He proceeded to make a collection of land grabs in the area and was sooner or later experimented with and found responsible of fraud. The estero now named following Drake was also at first named after Limantour.

Once you attain the edge of the spit named right after Limantour, you can see wherever the waters of Limantour and Drakes esteros and Drakes Bay satisfy, in a roiling, boiling chaos of waves heading in seemingly each way. This is no place to enter the water, but it is wherever Limantour Beach front starts (or ends, relying on your perspective). Here’s the place you can switch around or loop around, creating your way back to exactly where you begun with the Pacific roaring in your ears.

Receiving there

Stick to the symptoms on the road at Place Reyes Nationwide Seashore, from Bear Valley Highway to Limantour Street and to Limantour Seashore. Park in the major parking whole lot. Adhere to the ordinarily chaotic path towards the ocean, and just in advance of it will become deep sand take a correct onto the trail. Canine are not authorized on the Limantour Spit Trail, but they are permitted on Limantour Beach. Walking the full spit there and back yet again together the beach is about 5 miles. There are vault bogs at Limantour.

Emily Willingham is a Marin science journalist, guide creator and biologist. You can locate her on Twitter @ejwillingham.