Mountain View to Lake Mendocino

We have a number of options when it comes to driving home from the Mendocino coast, and all of them are at least somewhat winding and scenic. We’ve traveled State Route 20 from Fort Bragg east to I-5 in Colusa County; Highway 128 along the Navarro River to Cloverdale on U.S. 101; and of course the more indirect route, down […]

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The Adventure Continues… Tide Pools

The lighthouse at San Diego’s Point Loma is fairly familiar to me from visits back in the 1970s and early 1980s, but during those outings I never even realized there were tidepools nearby. Tidepools have always fascinated me. As a child I was always eager to explore the ones exposed at low tide around Fort Bragg in Mendocino County and […]

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The abandoned, Part 3

Since I’ve now visited the area near Manchester Beach State Park a couple of times, I finally decided to do a bit of digging for more information. In doing so, I learned that the region to the west of Highway 1 and north of the park entrance on Kinney Road is called Lake Davis Wetlands and Coastal Dunes Natural Preserve. […]

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Flowers of February

I didn’t expect to find flowers along the Mendocino coast in early February. But despite the rain and chilly weather, I actually encountered a few hardy blooms, both wild and domestic, growing in the areas between Manchester and Fort Bragg. I’m sure that with all the rain Northern California is getting at the moment, there will a lot more colors […]

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The abandoned, Part 2

My limited series continues with some images from what I’m calling the beach house — or perhaps houses. They appear to be two separate houses sitting side by side, but according to Google there is only one street address. I found them on what I believe is state park property, perched above Manchester Beach and roughly half a mile west […]

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Overlooking the sea

My post of last Thursday should rightly have been titled “Between the storms,” since we had one more day of steady rainfall before the sun finally managed to come out. It wasn’t until Friday morning that we were able to get out and start exploring; and while the temperatures were a bit on the chilly side — mostly thanks to […]

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After the storm

We knew we were in for some rain when we left home on Monday and headed for the Mendocino coast; but we didn’t realize we had an “atmospheric river” bearing down on us. Earlier storms had already left the coastal areas saturated, and our first clue was the detour on the Valley Ford Road west of Petaluma due to flooding […]

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