Length of hike: About 5 miles round-trip
Difficulty: Easy
Best time: Any time of year
Highlights: Bird life in the marsh, solitude
To get there: From California Highway 1 (Shoreline Highway), just south of the town of Pt. Reyes Station, turn west onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and then left in about a half a mile onto Bear Valley Road. Take a right at Limantour Road and in eight miles you’ll reach Limantour Beach. Water and a phalanx of clean, well-ventilated restrooms wait just below the parking area.
The trail: The spit separates Drakes Bay from Limantour Estero, called an estuary by Spanish explorers but actually an inlet of the sea. Walk on the marsh side of the spit going out and on the ocean side returning. This way, the wind that is almost always present on the ocean side will be at your back. The sunset will also be at your back. Even so, a walk here on a clear evening is world-class.
Soon after you leave the restrooms and the park information boards, you’ll find a birdy pond on your left, always worth a stop. The usual coots and mallards share the area with yellowlegs, killdeer, gadwall, and many others of the duck persuasion. You might see a furry swimmer, the shy muskrat, along the reedy edges.
A little beyond the pond, take the narrow path that meanders off to the right just before the asphalt gives way to sand. Most people go straight ahead up over the dune and spill out on to the broad sand that stretches for miles embracing the bay. Few venture beyond the hundred yards that bracket the beach entrance, so this walk will be lonely. But it isn’t long, and you won’t be far from the madding crowd, if that gives you comfort.
Once on the narrow spur, overgrown with gray-green lupine bushes, look for a small, impromptu trail on the right, just about even with the first grassy hillock. Follow this unsigned trace down into the marsh and continue to your left.
Walk lightly over the marsh. It is resilient, but also tender, and one of the few untouched-by-humans places remaining to us. Although some spots might be squishy and slippery, the ground is mostly dry except during a very high tide, the highest usually occurring in January. A tide table will help you time your visit. You’ll see more birds and have easier walking when the tide is more out than in.
A faint trail can be discerned in places, but you won’t want to keep to it. Tread with care on the green and red pickleweed, lavender marsh rosemary, purple frankenia, and yellow jaumea, plants that keep a low profile and exhibit high tolerance for being inundated by salt water several times a day—they have unique salt-eliminating mechanisms that allow them to thrive in such an inhospitable environment. Pickleweed sends excess salt to its outmost branches, which turn red and drop off.
Look for tall grindelia, or gum plant, notable for its large yellow flower with a mess of sticky white goo in the center. Cord grass (the taller) and salt grass (the smaller) grow in patches. In the fall you might see tangles of orange threads wrapped around the pickelweed. This is dodder, a parasite. It sometimes bears tiny white blossoms. Native coyote bush and beach grass of an alien variety cover the dunes that separate the marsh from the bay.
Across the unruffled estero, Drakes Head and other nameless scarps form a cloistral backdrop. I have sometimes heard a kingfisher’s rattling call from a small copse on the other shore. In fall and winter gulls, terns, and shore birds gather on the near shores or float in the deep. Godwits, curlews, plovers, turnstones. Brant’s geese, herons, egrets. Sandpipers. Above the water, a solitary osprey or a squadron of brown pelicans. Over the dunes course northern harriers—I prefer their old name, marsh hawk. You don’t need to be a birder with field guide and binoculars to enjoy this exuberance of life.
I hardly ever see anyone once I’ve gone down into the marsh. Perhaps a stray soul in the distance, but we avoid each other, no offense taken. People come here because they want to be alone. Photographers seem to like it for the stark possibilities.
Follow the water’s edge or cut across Gobiesque expanses of dune to the end of the spit. Sometimes harbor seals, like torpid sausages, nap here. The sea rushes through the narrow inlet with a roaring and a hissing, fraught with tension. You have reached the halfway point. Now turn toward the ocean and start back along the strand to the parking lot.
I prefer to be out here at the far end of the spit on a sunny day or a day with towering clouds, but not on a foggy day or one with featureless overcast. Especially not when mist blots out the headlands and erases the line between sea and sky and all around me is bleached of color. I feel too open and vulnerable, as if remembering when my ancestors feared to leave the forest to hunt on the savannah, as if the gods could then easily rub me out with an empyrean thumb. I feel a loss of attachment . . . to people and to landforms that anchor me to Earth. It’s a sort of anticlaustrophobia and sends a tingling to the back of my neck.
Even on the ocean side you’ll see few other souls. You and you alone are held in the gentle curve of the bay that breaks the force of the mighty Pacific. These rollers might be small but there is nothing weeny about them. They were created by winds below the horizon and have traveled far to dash at your toes. When we were kids, my brother and I believed the ninth wave was the largest. It is impossible, though, to count them. Their rhythm is hypnotic and, when the sun is right, the green-gold glass of their translucent inner curve distracts you.
Scoters and loons ride just beyond the surf. Willets and sanderlings on the beach follow the waves in and out, in and out. Watch for the dark, squarish heads of harbor seals to pop up in wave troughs. These curious pinnipeds often stare at you and swim along in silent companionship as you stride the beach.
A faint scribble of delicate seaweed marks the high tide line. A few pieces of broken shell, fragments of jellyfish, a scattering of small stones. There isn’t much here—just a minimalist landscape limned in variations on French ultramarine and burnt umber.
Soon the sight of beach umbrellas and ice chests brings you out of your brown study. The Frisbee crowd is a signal that you have to start searching for the way off the beach to the parking lot. Look for the densest knot of humanity, then scan the base of the dune for a small, dark-colored sign (which prohibits dogs), and you have found the exit. On a weekday there probably won’t be enough people for this to work. But if you climb the dune when you come to the cypress trees, you will easily spot your goal.
Step in the dimples in the steep sand hill. These are where people have already trod and caused the particles to settle. When you step in them, you won’t slide down. Pause at the top of the dune and look back the way you came—at the long stretch of empty sand.
