Sea caves in Palos Verdes

I'd wanted to visit Palos Verdes for a while- it's the community on the hill at the south end of the beach (you can see photos of it at the bottom of this post from October).  One of the hiking meetup groups had a hike last Saturday to the sea caves in Palos Verdes- cool!  I hadn't even known there were sea caves out there.

Here's the start of the hike, our trail is seen in the shrubbery on the little hill at the right:

This is an unusual hike (for the L.A. area) in that we start at a high point and hike down.  Here's a view of where we're going, the first cave we'll see is at the end of that point at the left, you can't see the cave yet:

 

The trail down is steep, and has some switchback: 

 

We came to another spot where you could look the other way and see the point where the second cave is located, it's at the end of that point, and again, you can't see it yet:

 

Down at beach level:

 

   

These rocks below at the tidepools are beautiful!

 

 

Here's one end of the first seacave, it has a pillar in the middle and the waves were washing through it.

 

Tidepools:

 

Look!  Starfish, sea anemones, and crunchy shelled things too!

 

This is another sea cave that we couldn't get to, I'm looking at it across the back entrance to the one with the pillar:

 

This poor seal has a wound on it, I'm not sure if that's why it didn't swim away from us when we went by.

 

Close to the next sea cave, there were a bunch of big birds, I had thought they were cormorants but I've looked at internet photos since and I don't think so... anyone know what they are?  Pelicans?

 

Sea cave #2 (or #3, if you count that one near the other we couldn't get to):

 

Heading back up from the beach.  It was a big group of around 60-70 hikers, and this is only around half of them in this line:

 

There are always dogs on these hikes.  Here's one cute little beast of burden:

 

This one got a ride in a baby carrier- it has two broken legs!  No, not hiking injuries, I think she said the dog broke them jumping off the bed or something like that:

 

The sun was getting low at the finish of the hike.  That's Catalina island (yes, the salad dressing is named after it) on the left horizon: