Año Nuevo
Started: 2023-01-03 19:08:00
Submitted: 2023-01-03 21:02:12
Visibility: World-readable
Viewing the elephant seals on the beach
On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Bethany had to go to the Federal Building in San Francisco's Civic Center to renew her passport. I led an expedition taking the rest of us (minus Kiesa, who stayed home) to Año Nuevo State Park to see the breeding colony of elephant seals hanging out on the beach. At the end of November, the only seals on the beach are year-old males, who haul out on land before the breeding adults show up in the middle of December. This meant that we could show up and walk to the beach, rather than get a reservation in advance as a crowd-control measure during the breeding period.
We drove up the coast to the park and ate lunch at the picnic area next to the parking lot under the bright midday sun. We headed to the visitor's center, in an old barn beyond the end of the parking lot, to check in for the walk to the beach, which was mostly a reminder to avoid getting too close to the elephant seals because they're dangerous and also protected by state and federal law. We looked through the exhibits in the visitor's center, set up in the old barn with low wood beams and hand-carved wooden pillars, then went next door to another barn next door for a video about the park. (In the barn where we watched the video about the park, there was a California State Parks podium, and I wanted to stand up behind it and give a press release ("Good afternoon. This morning, at around dawn, a male elephant seal ...") but there were other people in the room by the time the video ended so I resisted.)
We walked along the trail towards the overlooks above the beaches that had been claimed by the elephant seals. The trail took us west from the parking lot, along the bluffs above the ocean to our left, past a pond with several flocks of birds, and past a visitor's contact outpost at the line marking the edge of the area close enough to the elephant seals that we needed a permit to proceed. There was a table set out showing various animal specimens for us to examine, including skulls of various marine mammals and a sample of the leathery skin and scratchy fur that the elephant seals molt every year while on land.
We continued into the protected area towards the overlooks, on a series of sandy trails through fields of willow and boardwalks. Someone had suggested that the furthest overlook had the best seal viewing, so we headed there first, following the trail across the ridge line at the crest of a willow-covered dune, then looping back to a modest overlook at the top of the cliff.
At the overlook we could look down onto the beach and see the juvenile male elephant seals hauled out onto the beach, looking more like lumps of vaguely-colored fur than anything else. Most of them were quiet, sleeping on the beach; every once and a while a few of them would raise their heads and awkwardly flop themselves into a different position or head towards the surf. I saw one seal in the water, the low waves breaking over its head as it swam back and forth. The late afternoon sun shone through the haze above the beach, giving everything a backlit affect (and making photographing the seals somewhat more difficult).
To the south, across the hazy water, Año Nuevo Island sat on the horizon, the old buildings that formerly held a lighthouse and the keeper's house decaying back into the land. The island had been claimed by sea lions, and I could hear them barking at each other across the water.
There was a guide at the overlook who handed out binoculars and told us about the elephant seals, the sea lions, and the history of the land.
After about half an hour on the overlook we turned back to head to the cars. We dropped by one of the earlier overlooks we'd skipped on the way out and saw a lone juvenile elephant seal hauled out onto the beach, much closer to the overlook than the seals we'd seen at the other overlook. This seal was all alone, but he was closer and easier to see sitting by himself on the beach.
We walked back along the trail, tracking our steps back to the parking lot. Julian ran ahead until the next trail junction, where he waited for me to catch up and tell him which branch to take.
I had my camera ready at the exact moment Calvin eclipsed the sun from my perspective, and the one shot I took looked good.
We reached the car as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, then drove back down the coast to Santa Cruz.
