The San Andreas Fault runs out of California and into the Pacific at Alder Creek, and you can stand right on the trace of it. Once you’re up there you can see the whole thing laid out in the landscape, creeks knocked sideways where the ground moved under them and sag ponds strung along the line, and the shape of this entire coastline suddenly makes sense.
We’ll walk out to the beach at Manchester first thing, which is where all of that is, and where the 1906 earthquake did things you can still read in the ground a hundred and twenty years later. The driftwood piled up along there comes down the Garcia River. Then lunch in Point Arena, and the lighthouse in the afternoon for the other half of the 1906 story, what the fault did to the building and what they did about it.
If the tide’s out we’ll finish at Bowling Ball Beach, and this is the one you’ll be showing people. A flat wave-cut platform covered in enormous, almost perfectly round stone spheres, laid out in rows like something somebody put there. It’s one of the strangest and most beautiful sights in California and there’s every chance you’ll have it to yourself. It needs a low tide and a steep scramble down, so if either of those is wrong we’ll go to the Garcia River wildlife area instead.
We’ll have you back at camp around five, and the sauna will be lit.
