Length: Flexible; up to 7.5 miles.

Difficulty: Easy.

Best time: Any season.

Highlights: Wildflowers, views, geology. As the sign says: "No horses, no dogs, no camping, no fires, no bikes." Just hikers.

Directions: Take State Highway 1 north out of the town of Bodega Bay for about ten minutes. Park at Wrights Beach, Shell Beach, or Blind Beach (all signed). Leaving the car at Shell Beach gives me the option of putting together a short or long hike or extending my route inland to forested Pomo Canyon.

Trail: This mostly level walk along the coastal bluffs—what geologists call a marine terrace—offers expansive views as well as intimate close-ups of wildflowers and lichens. This grassland seems akin to the ocean that spreads out westward to infinity—it’s always moving and on it float islands of trees and rocks. I can make the day longer or shorter as my mood or the weather dictates. While away hours on sandy beaches or climb rocky outcrops—these are also options. There’s not much variety of landscape, but it’s quiet and peaceful and, although in sight of the highway, I feel quite alone. In most places the trail is just scraped off the top of the cliffs, dry and cracked in summer, muddy in winter. On sunny days I can spot the route of the coastal road, gray barns on the verge of falling down, isolated farm houses, and weekend cottages, and from the highest point see all the way back the way I came, shimmering in a golden mist above the shimmering sea.

            But the trail is not always bathed in sunlight. I remember the last time I did this hike—a mid-August day socked in by fog, with less than a quarter-mile visibility. I park at Shell Beach with its handy rest room and trail map. No other cars are there—I like to start early. The air smells fresh and unused, not at all of the sea. No wind and not cold. I hear the chirping of song sparrows and the murmur of the restless surf.

            Heading north out of the parking lot, I realize that the trail has recently been rerouted with new signposts blazoned with golden arrows. I can still make out some of the old markers of hip-high weathered wooden posts as they wander along the edge of the cliffs. They have faded to almost the color of the vegetation and it was easy miss them and stray into a dead-end tangle of dense shrubbery. Some of the adventure of this trail has now vanished.

            The Kortum Trail is part of the California Coastal Trail and Sonoma Coast State Park. It’s named for Bill Kortum, a Petaluma veterinarian, former Sonoma County supervisor, and active member of several conservation organizations. He was a leading light in the grassroots struggle during the late 1960s and early ’70s to keep the coast accessible to the public and safe from nuclear power plants and other development. Bill also loved to hike. Every time I walk this trail I feel as if I’m celebrating his work and the many people who helped save this area so I can come here anytime to enjoy its beauty.

            Small unsigned paths lead off in many directions. I can’t get lost, but I can get sidetracked. Erosion has had its way, carving steep ravines filled with impenetrable brush. Some gullies have seasonal streams. A few inlets boast of pretty little beaches. Trails down to the sands can be steep and loose.

            Now that it’s August most California native plants are dormant, hunkering down from the heat and so many rainless months, but right away next to the trail I pass yellow madia, a.k.a. tarweed, and equally yellow hill lotus. I also see red paintbrushes as well as the pale yellow variety. Seaside daisy and beach aster stand out against a backdrop of dried grasses and sedges. Blackberry vines twine in and out of everything. Dandelions and thistles crop up everywhere. I come across clumps of cow parsnip, all dried up now, and gatherings of coast angelica in full white-headed bloom. At the stairway that leads down to a cheery little creek grow dark pink coast hedge nettle and a colony of coast buckwheat, mimicking the color of the gray ocean seen through the wispy fog. Pennyroyal and nude buckwheat show up too. Occasionally I discover tufts of Armeria maritima, which sometimes appear in local nurseries labeled sea thrift, a well-behaved garden plant with tall stalks of pink flowers.

            The trail follows the contour of the continent, at times near and at other times not so near the water. Today it’s too foggy to see the ocean but I can hear it. The dark sand lies empty and trackless. Great rock monoliths, known as sea stacks, lie moored in the breakers. Rock islands adorn the bluffs too. The largest piles, dubbed Sunset Rocks, are popular with rock climbers for practice sessions. I wander around the foot of these mini mountain ranges charmed by the red, orange, green, and black lichens adhering to the boulders. Mosses, Lichens, and Ferns of Northwest North America by Vitt, Marsh, and Bovey helps me identify most of these oddities of the plant world.

            The path begins to climb toward a 400-foot summit. A side trail leads to the windy top. Tarweed and rocks of all sizes outline the main route, lower down. One boulder about as big as a washing machine supports a collection of six different species of lichen.

            Now the trail drops to the asphalt and I am soon at the Blind Beach parking area. A narrow dirt track leads down to Goat Rock. Looking back on the route I have come, still wreathed in fog but allowing minute glimpses of the flat gray Pacific, I think of lines from Robinson Jeffers’ poem Continent’s End:

 

. . . I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me

Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and doubled stretch of water. . . .

 

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me

Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean. . . .

 

 

            Here I am, perched atop that smorgasbord called the Franciscan Complex, a jumble of sedimentary rocks included in what one scientist referred to as the "train wreck" of California geology. I do feel very much at the continent’s end, on the boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, where one slides beneath the other in a classic subduction zone. It’s all so quiet and still. Impossible to believe in the immense forces at work under my feet. But clues in the exposed rock make this place a geologist’s classic field area, known worldwide for its amazing topography.

            I return to Shell Beach after about an hour and a half. Still no one there. I head south toward Wrights Beach into a whole range of different flowers:  orange sticky monkey flower, pearly everlasting, and pussytoes, all in a slightly damp area. Coast angelica covers the slopes together with the usual California denizens—yarrow, fennel, mustard, and radish. I recognize a coarse lupine lifting its spikes of blue flowers. The large, pale pink blossoms of beach morning glory wind through the grass.

            The trail leads through a vacant parking lot near some empty-looking houses. Sadness permeates this seemingly abandoned area. Smaller paths leading out from it snake along the edge of the bluff and rejoin the main route. In low areas willows crowd together and I come across red and gold kniphofia, an escaped garden plant originally from South Africa. It’s probably the remnant of a rancher’s front yard from many decades ago. The find of the day turns out to be one ladies tresses orchid standing up small but sassy right by the trail. There must be water close up under the dry earth.

            The smell of skunk suddenly surrounds me and it takes a few minutes to walk out of it. The only mammal I have seen is a cottontail bunny. Turkey vultures, black phoebes, swallows, cormorants, pelicans, and gulls make sporadic appearances in these doldrums of summer.

            I come to newly built boardwalks over patches of wet and a gravel road that leads to the turnoff from Highway 1 to Wrights Beach. Here I meet just one naked lady, that’s the pink Amaryllis belladonna that blooms along roadsides during the month of August.

            Time to turn around again. I had thought the fog would have lifted by now, but it’s still hanging low and a breeze has kicked up. I come upon a few stray California poppies and red-leaved poison oak—am I paranoid or does this vile plant follow me around like a devoted puppy.