Abbott’s Lagoon


Length: 1.5 miles out to the Great Beach and your choice of miles along the ocean.

Difficulty: Easy.

Best time: For birds, all year; April and May for wildflowers. In summer it’s cooler than inland but can be foggy. Always expect wind.

Highlights: Solitude.

To Get There: Just south of the town of Point Reyes Station turn off Highway 1 onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Follow it along the western shore of Tomales Bay through tiny Inverness Park (bakery, deli, art gallery) and slightly larger Inverness (grocery store, restaurants, and public library). The road winds through forest and occasionally peeks out on to the bay, passing architecture whose inspiration comes from as far away as colonial New England and tsarist Russia. Turn right on Pierce Point Road and go 3.4 miles to the signed entrance to the Abbotts Lagoon parking lot.     

Getting there is part of the Abbotts Lagoon experience. After I pass Tomales Bay State Park, the trees disappear, revealing a stark landscape open to sky and wind. The hills look as if they’ve been sheared. For at least five thousand years the Coast Miwoks and their antecedents lived here and shaped the coastal prairie by burning, pruning, and harvesting. The 1849 gold rush brought to this remote peninsula European dairy farmers who liked the cool, moist climate. The area became one of the earliest and largest examples of industrial-scale dairying in California. Point Reyes grew famous for its first-quality butter that ended up on the linen-draped tables of San Francisco’s finest restaurants from the 1860s through World War I. Along Pierce Point Road I pass a couple of these historic ranches, still working dairies. (See my essay on Chimney Rock for more information on the unique history of this place.)

The trail: At the parking area, which has recycling bins and solar-powered restrooms but no water, the first thing I pull out of the car is my windbreaker. The air smells clean and pure as it tugs at my clothes. A sandy path snakes one and a half miles from here to the beach. The trail is wide and well maintained, but it hasn’t always been that way. In the old days, thirty years ago, my kids and I loved this trek because it was always an adventure. The trail quickly devolved into a faint footpath that often disappeared completely. It descended into goopy marshes and straggled across pastures occupied by cattle we didn’t trust. The lagoon has two arms that are connected by a narrow channel of water that was sometimes ankle deep, at other times just muddy. One spring day we brought our inflatable raft. Even neatly folded it was large and ungainly and took all the energy of two people to carry it. At the channel we discovered that, because of the unusually wet winter, the water was too deep to wade across, so we inflated the raft and even ferried two strangers across. Nowadays there is no mistaking the trail, which has been relocated and tarted up with benches and information boards. There is even a sturdy wooden bridge between the two arms of the lagoon.

The trail begins some distance from the upper freshwater arm of the lagoon, which sparkles in the middle distance. Water seems so far away at this point, but close by the path, not far from the parking lot, a small pond glitters, ringed with a collar of marsh pennywort and frequented by swallows and blackbirds. Nearby grows a tumble of salmonberry; its dark pink flowers remind me of raspberry sherbet. Farther on, a tight, disorderly clump of willows shelters many small birds. The trail dips into a muddy wallow where I find patches of the large yellow blossoms of marsh beaked-buttercups. Tiny pink and white Siberian montia abounds here, with water parsley and potentilla. I also discover luxuriant yellow monkey flower and tall, dark pink coast hedge nettle. The path rises and dips again, finally veering close the ruffled waters of the lagoon. Looking back I see the white buildings of a large dairy spread out on the farthest rank of hills. Sometimes the erratic wind brings with it a pungent whiff of the barnyard.

I like this walk best in springtime when it’s full of wildflowers and birds. Many of the flowers are small and I have to search for them. They get lost underneath the waist-high baccharis and yellow bush lupine. During the winter the bracken fern has gone dormant and turned an ugly brown; now it’s beginning to put forth new green fronds among the mustard and blackberries. This is one of the places in the park where the California poppies are not orange but butter yellow and in the bowl made by the petals shimmers a pool of gold where the stamens gather. Poppy companions include chickweed, yarrow, bird’s-foot trefoil, several kinds of clover, and the elusive scarlet pimpernel. I also find orange amsinkia, called fiddlenecks for their curving flowerheads, and wild cucumber climbing over all else.

My favorite plant on this walk is the cobweb thistle. Its appearance reflects the harsh conditions in which it thrives. The leaves are prickly and rough, felty white on the upper surfaces. The large pink disk flowers are surrounded by spiny bracts covered with woolly white “cobwebs.” I want to touch it, but I’m afraid it bites.

Sparrows and goldfinches flit and soar. Quail scurry in and out of the brush. Northern harriers, their white rumps conspicuous, course low over the bush lupine. Turkey vultures are always present as are cottontail rabbits. One day I spotted a bobcat bounding through the tangled shrubbery.

Goat Hill looms on the left and it’s worth the short, steep climb to the top. From March to May it’s covered with tiny wildflowers—masses of goldfields, as is only fitting in California; a furry lavender calochortus called pussy-ears; and the cheery yellows of lomatium and suncups. The expansive view of the beach and ocean is another reason to make this detour.

Huge sand dunes slide down into the green cattails along the upper lagoon, a good place to look for an egret or heron. But I’ll save these dunes for later. I cross the bridge, under which float rafts of marsh pennywort, and follow the curving edge of the lower lagoon out to the Great Beach. The path has disappeared, but the way to the ocean is clear.

Now the plants are completely different from what I’ve been seeing. Here they hunker down out of the wind: pink sea-rocket, modest white seaside heliotrope, aptly named brass buttons. In the water bobs a collection of birds that might include tiny horned grebes and majestic white pelicans. Sandpipers, godwits, and plovers sometimes stroll along the lagoon’s edge. Beyond the rim of this brackish body of water lies a barren, seemingly infinite country of sand. The beach stretches away into misty distances north and south, the sky is huge, and I feel small. Always the sound of the wind and below the wind the deep rumble of the ocean surge.

I look back toward Goat Hill and see a hillside of radio antennas, a strange sight in this pastoral landscape. Beginning in 1913, Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer of wireless radio, built radio stations in west Marin County. Ultimately, transmitting and receiving stations in Bolinas, on Tomales Bay, and here at the Great Beach reached out across the Pacific to provide communications to ships and airplanes at sea. Station KPH, the maritime radio station owned by Marconi and, later at various times by RCA, AT&T, and MCI, signed off in 1999. Pacific Ocean radio service is now handled elsewhere and the historic station, reached by following Sir Francisco Drake Boulevard toward the lighthouse, is open to the public once a year.

A few miles’ walk north along the edge of the breakers is Kehoe Beach and the steep cliffs of Tomales Point with their feet in the restless ocean. To the south loom Point Reyes Headlands and the lighthouse, often wrapped in a fine mist. I have heard this area called Thirteen-Mile Beach and it certainly looks that long from my viewpoint, about five and a half feet above sea level. The beach and the dunes are favorite places for university, park service, and Point Reyes Bird Observatory research projects, such as mapping vegetation patterns or studying the use of fog water by dune plants. A minimal fence of stakes and string marks as off limits the nesting sites of the endangered snowy plover. I spot three of these tiny sand-colored birds with sand-colored legs sprinting like windup toys across the plover-colored sand. One moment they are there, the next they have disappeared.

The beach looks as if just this morning it had been swept clean—no shells or stones, hardly a speck of kelp or jetsam, and a disappointing array of driftwood. One time I was amazed to find underfoot millions of pale blue Velella velellas. These open-ocean dwellers, known as hydroid polyps, often wash up on beaches where they die and disintegrate. All that was left in the sand was the nearly transparent float, from which the polyp and tentacles used to hang.

Another time, my granddaughter and I found a great mass of dead gray whale putrefying in the wet sand just out of reach of the surf. Most of the time, though, I encounter only whimbrels and sanderlings and willets at the water’s edge and brown pelicans and scoters in the water.

I like to walk north for less than a quarter of a mile and look for one of the low, unmarked passages through the dunes. I trudge up through the loose sand, angling to the left, and soon I’m at the top looking down on the giant dunes I saw earlier from the bridge. Up here I find a wide swath of cream-colored wallflowers and white beach strawberries, with patches of purple ice plant, yellow bush lupine, and the red succulent, Dudleya. Pink armeria and yellow sand verbena grow here too. From the bridge this area appears lifeless.

Fog saunters in, and sky and water become the same pale gray. The sand is only a slightly warmer tint. Along the upper lagoon, sedges stand up out of their wavy reflections. It’s so quiet, just the wind and the surf, and the sand shifting beneath my feet.