Every time I come out to California, I feel a need to travel down to the Pacific Coast Highway between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. It’s wonderful. The yellow cliffs, the long beaches, the sea fog close to the shore and the huge breakers. It’s a magical place. Here are some photos I took yesterday.
Are you interested in unsolved mysteries?
This very short video clip shows a rock feature that I came across some time ago while walking the Cork coast. It’s a vertical rock face about 3 metres high and 10 metres across. Dotted across its surface are large holes, so that it resembles a gigantic block of Swiss cheese.
I have no idea how these holes were formed. It is likely that this rock face was a horizontal sea bed some 350 million years ago and that it was impacted somehow by many pillow sized boulders. Evidence of these boulders is everywhere in this particular area. Was it a volcano? A tsunami? Or something far more mundane? Your guess is as good as mine.
I’m happy to show you this place, if you have a head for heights.
I spent most of the day yesterday in transit between Cork and San Francisco. It was a relatively uneventful flight: reading about the Afghan quagmire in Newsweek, watching a pretty good Leo de Caprio movie (Body of Lies), getting some sleep, listening to a pre-recorded Skeptic’s Guide podcast, reading my book on the Permo-Triassic extinction event, and then listening to some Mozart on my iPod. The jouney was comfortable and although I had a small twinge in my back after the jouney, I didn’t feel the 10 hours pass by.
After dropping our bags off in Cupertino, I and some work colleagues decided to drive down the coast road (Highway 1) between Pescadero and Santa Cruz. The weather was foul: cold and rainy, so we confined ourselves to the car apart from one foray down to a beach near Pescadero.
The coast here is very different to home. Gone is the intimacy of the rocky Irish coastline. There is a great sense of scale: the cliffs and beaches stretch into the far distance, conveying the impression that it’s like this all the way down to Patagonia.. The cliffs are soft and chalky, and there is active erosion here. Not great places to be in a large earthquake, I’ll bet.
Total darkness had set in by the time we reached Santa Cruz. The journey back to the hotel was difficult for me with heavy rain, twisty roads, oncoming night-time traffic and the looming burden of sleep deprivation all taking their toll.
A quick bite to eat and I was in bed by 8.30, utterly, utterly exhausted.
I managed to get myself up very early last weekend in order to take a few photos down by the coast while the sun was low in the sky.
This photograph, of the fields, the mist and the windswept bush in the foreground, was taken on my way down to the beach. I love it.
The above are a few photos taken of the coast and the rocks as they are bathed in the orange searchlight glow of sunrise. Check out the rock monster poking his head out of the ground!
Over the last few days we have had a continuous barrage of gale-force and storm force winds. Curiously, the weather was meant to be dreadful today but it didn’t turn out like that in Cork at least. It was actually quite a pleasant day..
In any case I still had to get down to the sea to take a few photos. I don’t know about you, but there is nothing like the sea during a storm.
Passive Impressions 
