Daylight savings time has started here in California, and for us that meant “Hooray, we can do THE LOOP out to the coast!” During the winter, the days are too short and there just isn’t time to do a 20 mile loop and finish with enough daylight left to make the drive home.

But some snafus happened first thing in the morning (unexpected things came up that required making phone calls and sorting out) so it was 9:30 am before we were at the Bear Valley trailhead at Point Reyes Nat’l Seashore. So we opted for a shorter version of “The Loop”, and shouldered our “training packs” to head out.

Point Reyes in springtime is just beautiful. Everything is green, the earliest wildflowers are out, and the creeks are running.

We did the moderate climb out of Bear Valley up to Divide Meadow (we call that part of the trail “The Icebox” because it is so COLD early in the morning) then to the junction with the Glen Camp trail, where we began the “short loop”. This involves a very long and often steep climb up to where we finally get a “view of the blue” (the ocean) and then a long downhill to what we call “Wild Kitty” (Wildcat Camp).

The ocean was very still–no wind, no whitecaps–and sadly, we could see offshore THREE large ships just sitting there. We figured they were cruise ships in quarantine because of the stupid coronavirus/Covid-19 thing.

We had lunch at one of our favorite spots–a perch high up on a cliff overlooking Wild Kitty and the whole coastline from Point Reyes and all the way south to where Alamere Falls comes tumbling over the cliff into the sea.

It is glorious. We scanned the ocean looking to see if there were any late migrating whales going by, but didn’t see any. (There are times we can sit there and see lots of whale “spouts”).

On the way back we met a guy with a Vermont “Long Trail Patrol” shirt on and said, “Hey! We’re headed your way this summer!” Turns out that yes indeed, he DID do patrol work on the Long Trail and he has also helped on the AT. So that was kind of exciting to meet him!

But thanks to the virus thing, our order of freezedried food is on backorder (the folks at LDP foods are pretty frustrated right now) and Delta Airlines (we are flying Delta to Atlanta) sent us an email saying, “No worries, you will be safe from the virus when you fly with us!” It will be so good to get into the woods and forget about all that civilization stuff and face the much more down to earth challenges of the trail!

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