A Small Pocket Beach through the Seasons
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Mention “Pebble Beach” in California and everyone thinks of the famous beach and golf courses on the Monterey Peninsula. My non-exhaustive review of a Google search for beaches in California named “Pebble Beach” returned beaches in four coastal counties (Monterey, San Mateo, Sonoma and Del Norte), one on Catalina Island (Los Angeles County) and one on Lake Tahoe (Placer County).
The images in this gallery are from the small pocket beach in Sonoma County bearing that name and near my home.
This Pebble Beach is only about 500 feet (150 meters) long. This beach has been created by storms and surf eroding a generally soft portion of the ocean bluff over centuries or longer. My home is very near this beach and I visit it frequently. Many landscape photographers travel far and wide in their quest for outstanding images. Sometimes overlooked, I’ve found it very important to repeatedly visit a location as I pursue landscape photography. The light, tides, surf, sky are never the same twice. I’ve included twelve images taken across the year to provide a sampling of all this little beach has to offer.
The beaches of northern California are great places to observe migrating Pacific Grey Whales. Alone among the whale species, the grey whale spends its entire life in relatively shallow waters over the continental shelf. That shelf is only about 10 miles (16 km) wide in northern California and many whales can be spotted from the shore. Indeed, in the hour I spent recently watching the sunset light on the beach (see “November Sunset” in the gallery), I counted eight grey whales within 200 yards of the shore. The whales were on their annual southbound migration from their summer feeding grounds off the coasts of Alaska to the warm water lagoons of Baja, Mexico, where pregnant mothers give birth to their calves.