Elfin forest and the Morro Bay sand spit

On Sept 13 we went for a couple of hikes.  The first was a short one through the Elfin forest, a reserve of coastal scrub just south of Morro Bay.

The main feature of this reserve are the stands of twisted oak trees, they are pretty cool:

They have lots of black sage, also very cool looking:

There are also good views of tidal mud flats where a river meets the bay:

The sand spit hike was in Morro Bay state park, although you get to it through the Montana de Oro state park.  You hike down from the dunes to get to the sand spit:

I love beach walking.  I'll spare you too many photos as they're pretty similar to each other, but I liked this one of the birds waiting to see what the next wave would wash in.  The sand spit was almost empty of other humans, it was very quiet out there.

These dunes are huge, the photo doesn't do them justice.  They're closed to hikers for a few months over the summer (including September, so we couldn't hike into them) for shore bird nesting.

Seaweed sometimes looks like a carrot:

Point Buchon hike

When I checked on the internet before our trip to Morro Bay, to see what hikes were the best in the area, this one kept coming up.  It's on private land, owned by the power company, and you had to reserve a spot (or so they said) and sign in at the trailhead.  Sounded complicated, but I did it, and on Sept. 12 off we went.

It's a hike along the sea cliffs of the central coast:

There were many freestanding pieces of the old cliffs left in the water as they had eroded away:

The formations reminded me of elephants:

Towards the end of the trail, what's that?  Why ... it's a nuclear reactor!  Now it's more obvious to us why we had to sign in at the staffed trailhead:

We hadn't noticed this sign before the hike, we did on the way back though:

Just a couple more photos from the day, it really is a beautiful place:

A view of Morro Bay, taken from a lookout as we drove back into town:

Morro Bay trip

OK, I am really behind on my blogging.  Back in September, we did a short trip to the San Luis Obispo area in the central coast area of California, basically to make sure we didn't want to move there instead of back to Canada.  We decided living there wasn't for us, but we had a great time making sure about that.  In the next few days I'll post some photos from our trip.

Here are some from Sept. 11, when we walked out just before sunset to Morro rock.  This sculpture below had me going, at first I thought someone really had left some garbage behind at the harbour:

Me with the iconic rock in the background:

This bird hopes you are some kind of scofflaw: