Montana de Oro State Park

Montana de Oro State Park offers several hiking trails.  The first one we chose turned out to be a dud (it was a canyon hike, but was very overgrown and the canyon was a bit of a snore) so we hiked along the shoreline instead, and it was fabulous.  This is from September 14.

This is the trail that we gave up on after around half an hour, the Coon Creek trail:

This is more like it!  We went and did a piece of the Bluff trail instead:

I liked this square-ish sea arch, with another cave in the background behind it:

Another arch, this one was 3-sided:

There's a linear pattern to the shoreline on the coast here that points out to sea:

After the Bluff trail, we dropped by Spooners Cove and had a look around:

For the last little hike of the day, we went to see the tide pools near Hazard Reef.  We had trouble finding the official trail though, and ended up on one of many trails that hike over the sand dunes down to the tide pools:

This is steeper than it looks ... the sand was HOT and the footing was unstable, being deep sand:

The tide pools were OK, pretty slimy and no interesting sea creatures, but I liked the pockmarked rocks that were everywhere:

Back up the dune trail.  This is the only hike I've ever been on where I had serious doubts as to whether we'd make it or not, the sand was so steep in places and the surface gave way with every step.  Here is Ed following me up:

Yay, we made it!

A great end to a great few days of hiking in and around this park.