A good day at Black Point

Black Point is one of a series of public access beaches within the private community known as The Sea Ranch in Sonoma County. The other beaches include Pebble, Stengel, Shell, and Walk On Beach, and they are all connected by the Bluff Trail, which runs north all the way to Gualala Point Regional Park. I have passed by all of […]

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Sandstone art

The ocean views at Point Arena’s Stornetta Public Lands are so spectacular, you could be forgiven for failing to notice much of anything else — unless you happen to run into a few of the local cows (they actually seem fairly skittish of people, which is probably a good thing). But as I was loitering near the north gate, waiting […]

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A new coastal adventure

A cabin in the trees along the ridgeline near the village of Gualala was our base for a few days on the coast during September. We arrived to fog, but the sun frequently broke through. After a rather chilly night when we couldn’t quite figure out how to turn on the central heat, things improved (of course it was quite […]

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Lincoln Park Steps

I’ve written previously about my recent visit to the golf course in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park; my main purpose in going there had been to locate the Kong Chow Sojourner Tombs. But I was very happy to realize that on this outing I could also cross a second item off my list, the nearby Lincoln Park Steps. The steps themselves […]

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Buried treasure, Part 2

Going through the items in my “Treasure Box,” I can’t stop thinking about how silly and trivial many of these tiny bits of plastic are. Several are of mysterious origin, even to me, and I now have no idea why I kept them. But in among the fairly disposible stuff, I’ll find an occasional genuine treasure, like the handmade Christmas […]

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The Adventure Continues… Mammoths

I have to admit that until this morning I had no idea there was more than one type of mammoth. When I heard the word ‘mammoth’ I’ve always thought of the wooly mammoth — like the 30,000-year-old specimen discovered this past summer frozen in the Yukon’s permafrost. However, watching this episode of California’s Gold, originally aired in November 2004, I […]

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