Since it has been raining a lot lately, we figured that most of the hiking trails in Sonoma County would be muddy, slippery, and miserable. But we wanted to go for a walk, so we thought of Bodega Dunes. We could walk along the beach, and take trails back through the dunes to the starting point. Best of all, sand drains very well so none of the trails would be muddy or even wet on this warm sunny winter day. Of course it costs five dollars to get into the Bodega Dunes park, but that is the price we were willing to pay to stay dry. We packed a picnic lunch and drove to Bodega.
We read up on the Dunes as we drove down the coast: These dunes had been over-grazed until the sand started shifting, threatening homes and even the possibility of filling in Bodega Harbor. So in the 1930's European beach grass was planted to stabilize the dunes. Now it is a 900 acre state park between Salmon Creek Beach and highway one, from the mouth of Salmon Creek almost to Bodega Harbor. Just south of Salmon Creek Beach, Mussel Point is part of the UC Berkeley Marine Biology Laboratory, and they have their portion of the dunes fenced off as an ecological restoration project. They are trying to restore the native dune plants, which also survive in a few other pockets of the park.
When we got to the park, we discovered that we had forgotten our map of the trails, and the ranger station there did not have one. All they had was maps of all the camping spots where people park their trailers and motor homes. I figured I could remember the directions, so we crossed the boardwalk over the dunes (to protect them from our feet) to the beach and headed south. We saw a lot of shorebirds running up and down the wet sand, and a family of surf scoters. The surf scoters would swim almost up onto the beach, and just dive under the breakers as the waves came in. The swells at sea were too rough this weekend for me to go kayaking, and the waves on Salmon Creek beach looked like murder to me. But the birds didn't seem to have any trouble with it.
We spent so much time looking at the ocean that we walked right past all three official trails going up into the dunes. We walked all the way down to the end of the beach and started back. The park allows people to ride horses on the dune trails, and there is a dude ranch across highway one where you can rent a horse. So there are always a lot of horseback riders on the beach and up in the dunes. They have beaten a lot of trails into the dunes from the beach, and we didn't know which one was the right one. We turned in too soon and found the fence bordering the UC Berkeley project, then went along a trail on the top of the first row of dunes until we found a trail inside the park boundaries.
The sand between the tufts of dune grass was littered with little white flecks. These got larger as we headed farther into the dunes, became pieces of spiral sea-snail shell, and eventually there were complete shells everywhere. I'm equally divided between three hypotheses to explain these shells: 1) They are fossil shells that have been washed out of the sand. 2) Being round, they are easily blown up here by the wind, where they quickly bleach white in the sun and just look old. 3) Local native American tribes collected and ate sea-snails in this area, and this is the remains of a great pile of shells they left behind.
True to our predictions, the trails in the sand were as dry as could be. In fact, it was quite tiring trudging through the sand. We weren't even sure if we were on the right trail, the dunes were larger than we had expected, and we still had not found the trail back north towards the parking lot yet. Marty was soon aching all over, not from the hike but from an oncoming virus it turned out, so we went back to the beach. We had our picnic lunch sitting on the sand leaning on a log. We watched sand pipers run up and down the beach and surf scoters surfing. Then we walked back to the car by way of the beach, where we could choose the density of the walking surface by how close to the water we walked.
On the drive home, it occurred to Marty that we had not seen any great blue herons on this whole trip. I have often joked that we always see an average of 2.6 great blue herons every time we go down near the mouth of the river. So Marty started looking and soon found one in a field on the north side of the river. I had my eyes on the road so I missed it. But as we were driving towards Duncans Mills, I noticed a bunch of birds up in a tree on the south side of the river. Marty shouted "Those are all great blue herons"! So we turned around, drove back, and backed into somebody's driveway to get a better look. Sure enough, there were at least eight (by my count) and probably a dozen (by Marty's count) great blue herons roosting in a tree. Now this is going to perturb my statistics about how many great blue herons (average) that we see on a typical trip to the coast!