Big Sur

Elephant seals were the random element of the day, today. I saw a whole bunch of people standing on the edge of the beach looking at something and decided to pull over and see what it was all about. As it turns out, there is a whole colony of Elephant Seals that happens to mate and give birth on that particular beach. Neither of those two things were happening just yet, but it was still cool to watch them hang out on the beach, swim around, fight, and make some really trippy noises. Mating season is in January, and things are supposed to get really interesting then, with lots of fighting and fucking all day long - might have to swing through on my way home!

For the last two days I have been making my way south from San Francisco. Yesterday morning I had a yummy breakfast at Mama's in the North Beach neighborhood of S.F., bought some christmas presents, and then headed south to Monterey. The beach at Monterey ended up taking up my whole afternoon, as once I started walking on it I just couldn't make myself stop. I probably walked four miles down the beach until I hit a seawall and had to turn back.
Today I drove down the Big Sur coast to San Luis Obispo, stopping along the way for an eight mile hike up in the Big Sur State Park (above). So far, I've gone for hikes/long walks every single day and am really enjoying it. Prior to this trip I haven't hiked in decades, but I'm finding it very relaxing and rewarding. Driving past all of this cool stuff is frustrating, there is so much to do and see, I feel like I'm constantly missing stuff. Getting out of the car and wandering off into the woods and mountains makes me feel like I at least didn't miss that part of the landscape.

Todays hike was the first one where heat was an issue, I didn't wear my coat and I got a little overheated a couple times! It's definitely warming up as I get further south. There was also a lot more wildlife on this hike: hawks, deer, quail, and tons of birdsong from the bushes. I wonder if the northern forests weren't so quiet because of the cold.

The climate has gotten a lot drier as I've gone south too. The hills pictured above are a lot different from the Cascade Ridges of a few days ago. Even the Redwood Forest near Crescent City was quite wet, with the under-carpet of ferns I'm used to from the rainforest on the Olympic Pennisula. Down here the trees are mostly oaks and they only grow in scattered patches.
This was a really cool mini-mountain sticking up out of Morro Bay. You can just make out two tiny little people on the beach on the right side of the mountain to give you a sense of it's scale.

Tomorrow I'm heading down to Santa Barbara and from there I'm going to head east and north again into the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevadas, and Death Valley. I've decided to skip L.A. and San Diego this trip as a big messy, urban sprawl that I'm not really that interested in anyways.