California’s coast, its bluffs and wildlife star in Obi Kaufmann’s new book

The California coastline is a geologically sculpted masterpiece jagging and jutting for 1,100 head-turning miles. It starts with the Tortilla Wall poking into the sea at the U.S.-Mexico border and angles northwest to what some describe as California’s loneliest beach – a wild stretch of yellow grassy dunes, hard sand and chunks of driftwood at Pelican State Beach this side of Oregon.

Don’t bother trying to define this heterogeneous seaboard through a single stretch of shore. It has been carved into disparate sections that speak to California’s richness.

But the Bay Area is as good as any place to launch an exploration of the landscape and wildlife. The 100-mile strand from Santa Cruz to Point Reyes National Seashore has towering, forested mountains, plunging brittle bluffs and steep, chaparral-covered canyons brimming with wildlife. It has rickety piers, historic lighthouses and a marine sanctuary filled with elephant seals, sea lions and predatory white sharks.

Atmospheric moisture creates ghostly summer tableaus when cottony fog conceals rocky coves, sandy beaches and the narrow opening to San Francisco Bay.

It was on just such an overcast morning recently that Oakland author Obi Kaufmann visited Mussel Rock, a Daly City beach of geological significance. Kaufmann, 50, is an artist, poet and one of the foremost communicators of what California landmass represents. His latest in a series of extraordinary field atlases is “The Coasts of California” (Heyday, $55), which tells the multilayered story of the shoreline through visually striking watercolor paintings and maps, insightful conceptualizations and doctoral-level proficiency in the natural sciences.

“Inexpressible fertility” is how one early explorer described the Bay Area, Kaufmann writes. “Over a thousand species of animals still make their home here in this place that is now as ecologically compromised as it is fathomlessly beautiful. Metropolitan industry has overtaken most of the Bay, yet on its margins, hundreds of thousands of birds still recognize this essential landing spot on their annual migrations up and down the Pacific Flyway.”

I’ve experienced an abundance of plant and animal life throughout decades of tramping on Bay Area coastal trails, beaches and parks, such as San Bruno Mountain State and County Park. The book describes it as 2,416 acres of habitat for 662 plant species, 42 butterflies, 195 birds, five bumblebees, 30 ant species, 24 mammals, 13 reptiles and six amphibians.

Kaufmann writes that the Half Moon Bay coast has an evolutionarily significant unit of coho and steelhead salmon; the tiny tidewater goby found in the brackish water of lagoons, estuaries and marshes; and the red-legged frog. The redwood forests above the Pacific are potential habitats in the southernmost range of the marbled murrelet, an old-growth-nesting seabird.

Such field notes scratch the surface of what thrives in the wind-whipped littoral. I’m awash with wonder when the artichoke, pumpkin and berry fields of Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties come into view on Highway 1 below riparian ridgelines of redwoods and eucalyptus trees. I revel in ascending above the old, moss-covered evergreens of Muir Woods National Monument before dropping into Stinson Beach along the lush Dipsea Trail.

Then there is Mussel Rock, a sea stack on the Daly City/Pacifica borderline where the San Andreas Fault first intersects with the ocean, where the worlds of the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate come together uniquely. Mussel Rock is the virtual epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

“What am I thinking at Mussel Rock?” Kaufmann says, repeating my question. “I’m thinking of how this place has changed so many times. How it ended and began, ended and began again and again. California has always been a perilous place. Always up for a fundamental geological rebound. That reassembly is not going to stop.”

Three-story high Mussel Rock has come to evince a geologic timekeeper. Kaufmann said the Pacific Plate would continue to push north at this intersection and eventually rip California in two in the next 5 to 10 million years.

Perhaps not many visitors at the edge of land consider such weighty forecasts while watching paragliders catch bubbles of rising air to soar from sea cliffs. Below them, wind-whipped waves march toward shore before folding into an ephemeral foam as if prepared at nearby Philz Coffee.

“The Coasts of California” declares the theater of life plays out on a geologic stage: “The restless, fractured earth between the continental and oceanic plates that constitutes California’s borderland of terrestrial and marine ecology influences biogeography, or the distribution of life, more than any other physical factor.”

Significant coastal landmarks exist beyond Mussel Rock. Kaufmann directs me to where the land splits in two along the San Andreas Fault in Tomales Bay. The fault, he says, “is key to understanding the evolutionary island that is California.”

The tectonic boundary between Point Reyes and the rest of North America divides two land masses. Oceanic soil covers one side of Tomales Bay and continental loam soil on the other.

“You have the Bishop pine forests looking across to the inland farmlands of West Marin,” says Kaufmann, whose next book explores the California deserts. “Throw land policy on top of that, and you get a very dramatic shift in policy within just a mile.”

The book uses geology to outline the historical arc of the coast. Kaufmann writes that the shoreline forms “a laboratory of inquiry into the much larger question of our continued place, and rank, in the biosphere.”

It’s part of the broad concepts he and fellow author Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, broach in their video podcast “Place & Purpose,” which explores how the ancient natural world connects to modern California.

Meanwhile, “The Coasts of California” also presents details at a granular level for every imaginable precinct. “Even in those seemingly violent landscapes where the relentless wave action pummels the shoreline, so, too, do we have life finding purchase in every crevasse,” Kaufmann says. “Even in grains of sand, there are ancient ecologies at work. Niche nutrients are available for a vast array of biodiversity.”

Striking an optimistic tone, Kaufmann says the California coast enjoys a high rate of endemism – the state of a species found only in a single defined geographic location.

The Pacific oceanfront is at the heart of the vibrant social, cultural, political and economic fabrics that make the Golden State a global innovator and lead authors and artists to weave a distinctly Californian narrative.

“I wonder if it is the coastline that is the state’s nervous system,” Kaufmann says. “In many ways, as we think of our attitude toward self and society, between the public and the private, between rights and responsibilities, the coast of California calls all that into specific focus. It’s a landless piece of the most important land in California.”

Something about the endless horizon forever calls to me. As a child, I explored intertidal pools to find science-fiction-looking creatures clinging to slippery rocks and rode the frothy whitewater of the Laguna Beach shorebreak on a belly board. Decades later, I surfed waves rolled like filo dough at the private Hollister Ranch north of Santa Barbara and once followed a whale hugging the storm-battered shoreline in the remote Lost Coast of Humboldt.

“We can’t help but feel like there is an inkling of the transcendent,” Kaufmann says. “It is wired in us. The California sunset is one of the most romantic views in the world.”

The timelessness of the coast is evoked on a trek to Alamere Falls in the Point Reyes National Seashore. The 40-foot cascade attracts hordes from the Bay Area metropolis because of its rarity – a tidefall flowing directly into the ocean.

California has only two such marvels. The other is the even more popular McWay Falls in the heart of Big Sur.

I usually approach Alamere Falls from the outskirts of Bolinas. It offers cinematic views of Drakes Bay and ecosystems of lakes, prairies and dunes.

Vegetation such as coast shrubs, golden poppies, Indian paintbrush and Douglas firs blanket the solid bedrock of granite that originated in the southern Sierra Nevada about 100 million years ago.

Inhabitants include bobcats, deer, foxes, quail and various waterfowl. Pelican Lake and Double Point are protected areas for harbor seals to breed and give birth.

The 6-mile trail ends at an open meadow, where Wildcat Campground lies defenseless against bracing sea gales. In 2020, the Woodward Fire scorched almost 5,000 acres reaching Wildcat Beach, near where the waterfall splashes over rugged sandstone cliffs.

The National Park Service advises against climbing the vertical escarpments as a timesaving alternative route to the falls. Rangers say visitors are injured weekly. And I have suffered from contact with poison oak on the shortcut. So, I prefer hiking the official trail to the untamed beach where migrating whales, dolphins and multitudes of sea life live offshore.

Point Reyes feels primeval. Then thoughts of the grinding of overlapping plates in the convergent boundary remind me of the constant change underfoot.

I shelve such conjecture to gulp salty air, as spray from Alamere Falls catches sea gusts to shower me. It feels good.

For now, the California coast is dear.

Almond is the author of Surfing: Mastering Waves From Basic to Intermediate (Mountaineers Books, 2009)