Natural History Wanderings

Daniel sent this report on Kehoe Beach, Abbott’s Lagoon and Chimney Rock at Pt. Reyes from a trip he did on 4/13/15.

I went hiking on three different trails at Point Reyes National Seashores. I started out going to Kehoe Beach and here is where I saw the highest concentration of flowers together. Granted many of the flowers were yellow mustard and small white & pink flowers. However, there were small patches with a high concentration of California poppies together on the hillside near the beach. For a short hike and to see a lot of flowers, the path to Kehoe Beach is the place I would recommend.
I next hiked to Abbott’s Lagoon. The first half of the hike is though a grassland area with spots of California poppies all along the trail. However, the vegetation is this area is at least one third dried out. When you get to the Lagoon area there are more variety of wildflowers with spots of Douglas Iris, yellow bush lupines, and even goldfields on the hills. I saw one good size patch of yellow flowers (California buttercups) but other then that the flowers were not as concentrated together as compared to Keyhole Beach. As for wildlife, I saw some song sparrows and quail roaming around the grassland area.
The last stop of the day was hiking the trail to Chimney Rock. There are a lot of Douglas Iris flowers as reported but they seemed to be spread out over a large area on the trails and the fields along Sir Francis Drake Blvd. There are many spots with several flowers close together but no large concentrated patches for those looking for a flower field wow factor location. The Chimney Rock trail did seem to have the most variety of different types of wildflowers such as blue eyed grass, paintbrush, different types of lupines, morning glory, ect. There are also two good locations to view the elephant seals on the beaches.
On a side note, last Friday, April 10th I went abalone diving and camping at Ocean Cove near Jenner, CA. When taking the cliff-side trail from the Ocean Cove campground to Stillwater Cove, I was nicely surprised to see many wildflowers along the trail. One can imagine that there are many similar small hidden wildflower spots all along the Northern California coastline.