Pescadero Memories

Story & Photos by John Vonderlin
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Hi June,

On Friday I drove over a hundred miles to visit San Mateo’s most southerly coast. I wanted to investigate whether the beach access/exit of a hundred years ago for the old route around the Waddell Bluffs used Hank Bradley’s jeep road as I had opined previously, or an old road remnant further south.

Using the info from the 1972 picture from the California Coastal Records Project (CCRP) (#7219051) as a guide, I attempted to reach the road, where indicated, just north of the Santa Cruz/San Mateo County border. Yow. No wonder I’d never investigated this area. It’s covered by the most luxuriant growth of poison oak I’ve ever seen on the coast!

Bounded by a hundred foot cliff on the west, I had to attempt to reach where I believed the road to be from the north, south, and east, with no luck.

Finally, I noticed that the poison oak patch thinned out under a Monterey pine tree perched on top of the twenty foot berm to the west of Highway 1. So I crawled on my hands and knees beneath the tree until I reached a heavily brush- covered slope on the west side of the berm. And I promptly fell down it when the branch I was steadying myself on snapped and broke. Only slightly cut and scraped (though it’s amazing how much blood flows out of even small cuts when your heart rate is way up) I picked myself up. There I was, standing on the road remnant.

While the unpaved road was overgrown with brush, the poison oak was thin enough there to allow me to make my way downhill towards where I thought a house had been. Before I got there, the poison oak rallied, blocking my way again.

Daunted, I surrendered, and went back up the unpaved remnant until approaching the top I encountered asphalt remnants of the road perched on the cliff edge.

If there was a house here decades ago they enjoyed one of the most spectacular views in San Mateo. But, based on its position, so close to the Waddell Bluffs, I’m quite sure the road was just a driveway and not a remnant from the oldtimer’s bypass.

Satisfied, I headed to the beach to meet Meg and her Beach Watch partner, whom I could see as little dots far to the north from the cliff.

My first act upon reaching the beach was to use handfuls of wet sand to scrub off the sticky sap, loaded with urushiol oil, picked up by brushing by or tumbling through the poison oak. I’m happy to report that, as the experts say, if you can remove the oil within 15 minutes, or so, you shouldn’t suffer an allergic reaction.

I’m also happy to say that my beach hike rewarded me with a couple more unusual sightings and one unique one. I picked up a few of the odd rocks that litter this stretch, the ones that I call, “eyeballs.”

I love to use them in my Marine Debris artplay pieces.

I also collected a few of the green, mossy algae balls I occasionally find.

I used to know what the name of these were , but I can’t recall right now. Perhaps, one of your readers can help me with this, as they did when they previously identified the clump of clear, sausage like things I found at Invisible Beach as “squid egg cases.”

Lastly, and most unusual for me, Meg and her friend identified the large, dead marine mammal I’d seen from the clifftop, not as an immature Elephant Seal, but rather an immature, male “Steller Sea Lion.”

They are often called Stellar Sea Lions, probably because of the word stellar, but were actually named after naturalist Georg Steller, who first observed them in 1741.

These endangered pinnipeds southern range ends at Ano Nuevo these days because of the mysterious, but possibly catastrophic decline in their numbers in the last few decades, making finding their carcasses on our beaches a rare thing. That’s probably why this is the first photo of one I have in my “ISeeDeadThings” file.

I’ve attached a photo of Hank Bradley’s Jeep road I took from the beach. As you can see by the large trees on its edge it has the look of a road that has been there a long time.

Finally, although I originally named this place “Eyeball Beach”, for obvious reasons, I now call it Bradley Beach because the Ano Nuevo rangers and “Beach Watch” folks use that moniker but I noticed somebody added “Boot Rock Beach” to the CCRP captions recently. Apparently there are lots of names for this place. Complicating matters further is Patricia Page’s book, “Shadows on a Nameless Beach,”

a description of the author’s experiences in this area. Coupling that with the names (“Acid Beach,” the third one I know of on the South Coast and “Tim’s Beach,” named after one of the many owners of Coastways Ranch) author Patricia Page used in her book about her experiences in this area, “Shadows on a Nameless Beach.”

The beach may not be name-less at all, but a beach with the MOST names on the remote South Coast. Perhaps, that’s a fitting circumstance for this rugged gateway to San Mateo’s spectacular coastline to the north. Enjoy. John.

[This is mostly unedited material from the original manuscript. Even though it’s repetitive at times, I feel there are worthwhile historical details.]

By June Morrall

“L. Coburn locked the gate leading to Pebble Beach and positively forbids anyone from trespassing upon his grounds,” according to the San Mateo newspaper on September 12, 1891. “He claims Pebble Beach and all its pebbles. The people are a unit in expressing their indignation at this move on the part of Mr. Coburn; even the schoolchildren are in open rebellion at the usurpation of what their considr their lawful…playground…”

Pescadero is “disgusted, indignant and angry, for one of its greatest attractions…Pebble Beach…has been formally closed against all,” wrote another newspaper. “L. Coburn, who owns the land lying between the county road and the ocean, has locked the gate on the road leading to the beach which has been open to the public for 30 years, and emphatically forbids trespassing on his property. As there is no other access to the beach, the action appears a piece of spiteful officiousness. What Mr. Coburn’s motive is we cannot conceive, as the road through his land does not injure it in any way, and as he is one of the largest land owners in this section it seems that he would be vitally interested in the progress and popularity of Pescadero, instead of depriving it of its chief attraction…”

The Pebble Beach War, 1891

“In question is the farm famed locally from Shasta to Tia Juana as a producer of precious stones; it lies on the ocean edge and is off the highway. The access to it has of old been by way of a gate opening with a pasture field then down a wagon track to a camping spot.”  [from a newspaper article.]

“This matter was got up by a few speculators picking pebbles to sell them…” Loren Coburn

“…Sunday is the day for mobs….” Sarah S. Upton Coburn

In the eyes of the locals the crooked cow trail that led from the village to Pebble Beach was a public road.  They called it the Pebble Beach Road. It had been a custom, a gesture between good neighbors harking back to the ranchero days, of allowing travelers to pass over privately owned land without exacting a toll.

Loren Coburn cut the heart out of the neighborly feeling when he crisscrossed his land with fences laced with barbed wire. He nailed up Keep Out signs.

Trespassers had good reason to fear Coburn:  his hired men had murdered popular Scotty Rae during a struggle over Pigeon Point Landing.

Pebble Beach was located on Loren Coburn’s 150-acre Pocket Ranch, part of the much larger Butano Rancho, home to a dairy farm where hay and other grains were grown. He was running cattle on the ranch and there were cattle trails everywhere. But besides “growing pebbles” at Pebble Beach, this was “great strawberry country,” some 1,000 acres of luscious berries, red and black. They grew in a sandy soil easily sifted away by the sea winds.

“You go through a gate and you go right along to Pebble Beach,” explained Alexander Moore, who had been there in 1851 before [almost) anybody else. “If you want to go down to the dairy houses you have to go to the right, but you keep to the left if you go to Pebble Beach.”

Despite the fences, nobody seriously believed that Loren Coburn would lock the Pescaderans out of Pebble Beach. Yet, in September 1891, he did exactly that.

Taking the Cape Horn Exit From the Coast Highway

Story by John Vonderlin

Email John ([email protected])

Hi Russell,

Email John Vonderlin ([email protected])

Hi Russell,

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2. Medicine The anatomical structure of a specific area or part of the body.
3. Mathematics The study of the properties of geometric figures or solids that are not changed by homeomorphisms, such as stretching or bending. Donuts and picture frames are topologically equivalent, for example.
4. Computer Science The arrangement in which the nodes of a LAN are connected to each other.

Story & Photo by Russell Towle

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Interesting to see the old photo. A good indication of how remote that part of the coast was, way back when.

I never heard that rock called “Alligator Rock,” nor “Cape Horn.”

“Cape Horn” would seem to have been a favorite name for a rocky prominence around which some tortuous path must be followed; we have a Cape Horn here in Placer County, which was turned by the Central Pacific Railroad in 1865, at great cost. Prior to then it was simply avoided by travelers, teamsters, whatever. But the railroad had to maintain an easy grade. And that easy grade led right across the cliffs of Cape Horn.

The flat-lying strata exposed in Alligator Rock look suspiciously like the Monterey Shale Formation (MSfm) which also composes the Waddell Bluffs. The trace of the San Gregorio Fault is quite near, but here, at least, it may not bring two disparate formations into faulted contact; but I do not have my good old geological map of the area at hand.

The old photo reveals that Alligator Rock is the base of a prominent spur projecting from the Bluffs. It is always somewhat humbling to me to find that geological formations are not uniform. I like exact solutions, such as, the diagonal of a unit square is the square root of two. Hence I want geological formations to be uniform and homogeneous. Here we see that for some reason, very locally, the Monterey Shale Formation was more resistant to erosion, than were other seemingly identical parts nearby. I wonder why. I remember Hank Bradley telling me once that the light-colored shales of the MS fm. were thought by some to be related to the extensive rhyolite ash deposits here in the Sierra, also Miocene, or earlier Oligocene, in age. The model proposed was that as these widespread, voluminous, light-colored, siliceous ash deposits were eroded from the Sierra into the Pacific, they accumulated at depth to become the MS fm.

This is fairly plausible; it has its problems; but I wonder if the idea has gained or lost currency since 1970. Howsoever, the MS fm. is a light-colored shale of a siliceous nature. Do I recall that it is diatomaceous? If so, then the shale may be largely composed of siliceous skeletons of diatoms, and the Sierra’s rhyolie ash was proposed as the thing which made so much silica available to those diatoms.

Here in the Sierra we have huge areas of metasedimentary rocks, often slates, broadly speaking, which also vary within formations. For instance, five hundred feet thickness of slate can give way to fifty feet of chert, and then another five hundred feet of slate. In such a case the chert will resist erosion more than the slates, and (since all the strata are tipped up to nearly vertical), if exposed on a canyon wall, this bed of chert may become a spur ridge, the slate areas flanking it, broad ravines.

So with the Bluffs and the Alligator Spur perhaps we should wonder whether chert could be involved.

In the Pliocene siltstone cliffs north of Alligator Rock and verging into the south side of ANP, there are lenses of shell fragments, and also very interesting local variations in the siltstone, which seem to have to do not so much with hardness, but with cohesiveness. For a harder rock may be fairly friable and easily dissected by erosion, but a softer rock with greater cohesion may more stoutly resist erosion. From those brown siltstone cliffs erode very curiously curved nodules of siltstone, which are like so many Beniamino Bufano sculptures. I still have one of these pretty nodules; a photo is attached.

Hank told me the chert of the Indian Mounds at Año Nuevo was from the Monterey Shale, but in years of hiking up in the Chalks I never once found an exposure of chert. That chert is so distinctive, it may well have come from a single quarry. I wonder if that quarry is known. I have found Indian chert quarries here in the Sierra.

My recollection is that the beach at the base of Waddell Bluffs runs right up to the south side of Año Nuevo Point. We used to drop right down to that beach from the low cliffs at the north end, right by where the side road for ANP ended in a little parking area. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s. Hank had his own little jeep trail from Highway 1 down to that beach. I couldn’t swear to it, but my guess would be that Coastways Ranch land extended down to the county line. Hank used to say they had a “mile” of beach. He assumed it would be purchased by the State Park. I guess it still hasn’t been so purchased. He patrolled that beach pretty much every day in his jeep, handing out his permission slips to anyone he found, thus safeguarding the beach’s value when it came time for the State to buy it. His reasoning was that the State would not be able to say,”That one mile of beach is not worth so much, because it is already in free use by the public.”

Hank Bradley was a tall angular man, quite friendly and gracious, he and his wife Betty often made me welcome at their house, and I loved to listen to his stories. He gave me the free run of Coastways, which property, as you will know, contains the very northernmost natural grove of Monterey Pines in existence. If you follow the ridge containing that grove up into the Chalks, you will soon encounter a closely-related species, another member of the “closed-cone pine” sub-genus of the genus Pinus, the fire-adapted Knobcone Pine. The two species hybridize right there above Coastways Ranch, where the one meets the other. Higher up that same ridge, I used to gather native blueberries and huckleberries. I was up on pretty much all those main ridges behind Año Nuevo Point. It was often pretty rough going, but sometimes not. Once fully up in the Chalks and above the humid coastal belt, one got clear of most of the Ceanothus, and entered an elfin forest of chaparral, manzanita, hucklberries, and remarkable stunted Douglas Fir and Coast Redwood, sometimes only a few feet tall. In that elfin forest there were many areas of bare shale. This made travel possible.

Yes, the old photo is interesting. People found a way. One can be pretty sure that the teamsters never dared to let a loaded wagon onto the sand beach itself; from the photo, one sees that the track was cut into the base of the Bluffs. That is workable for a loaded wagon. Teamsters faced many such challenges here in the mountains, in the Sierra, where an endless number of mining camps needed supplies, many inaccessible by road.

So one might have to skid some tons of equipment, a stamp mill, say, for crushing ore, right down the canyon wall to the mine. This might require the services of some mules. But it was a terrible nuisance, so a good teamster, who could get that stamp mill as near as possible, by hook or by crook, before the dreary bone-crushing business of skidding masses of iron began, well, a teamster like that was pure gold. Perhaps a tree must be cut, here; to allow the wagon to pass; perhaps a boulder must be pried out of the ground, there; and over here, a bunch of bulders must be piled up purely ad hoc, just to allow the wagon wheels to crawl up and over a larger, immovable boulder. The teamsters were experts at all this. And those wagons, whatever else were there problems, had great ground clearance on those large wheels.

In the winter, if need be, giant sled-runners were bolted on, and the loaded wagon would be drawn over snow twenty feet deep. Steam sawmills were moved over 7,000-foot passes in the dead of winter in this way. One of the first parts of such a job was breaking a trail in the softsnow for the teams pulling the loads. It was anything but trivial.

But the worst enemy of all was soft ground. To see your noble four-foot-diameter wagon wheel axle deep in red clay, your mighty oxen standing patiently, straining against the yoke when asked, but to no effect, to no effect. Hours of digging were required. Perhaps the wagon would need off-loaded for there to be any chance. You could pull your wagon, with its standard eight-thousand-pound load, out of one mudhole, only to see it sink in another, ten feet away.

Knowing this I suspect the teamsters avoided the sand, at least, when loaded. An empty wagon would be a different story.

I once got a ride all over the area in a small plane which landed on my beach at low tide, picked me up, and landed me there again half an hour later. And I know Hank Bradley’s jeep preferred the wet sand exposed at low tide to the dry sand higher on the beach.

R

Story & Photos by John Vonderlin

Email John ([email protected])

Hi Russell,