Rocky shore, with loons

... Following along in our attempted peregrination around the Lower Mainland shoreline ...

A week ago, before the bad weather hit us, we went looking for the "1000 steps" that Cicero had told me about. Starting at the Ocean Park mall, we explored the streets to the west and south. Most end in a few blocks at big houses built right on the bluff, occasionally at wild bush hiding muddy cliff faces, unclimbable except on all fours.

But at the end of 15A Avenue, there it was; a place that looked like a parking area, with prominent No Parking signs, a trail head, and a notice; "1001 STEPS". We found parking a block up the hill, and walked back.


It was a steep climb, but didn't live up to their advertising; there were only 236 steps in all. Enough, though.


(The lighting was strange; bright, dazzling sunlight, shining straight in and reflected off the water, but deep shade under the brow of the hill. My camera couldn't handle it very well, and Laurie's seems a little off. Even my old eyes protested.)

On the slope, the trees, a mixed bag, respond to the lop-sided exposure by twisting and angling themselves into the light and out of the wind.





Almost at the bottom. Below us, just the railroad track, a short scramble over tumbled rocks, and the shore. Not a beach.


Difficult walking. But quiet, so very quiet. Just the rustling of falling leaves, and the lapping of a retreating tide.

There were only two other people on this segment of coast, a man and a small boy. They walked ahead of us, almost to Kwomais Point (marked by a heron silhouetted against the water), then crossed the track into the bush.


After they had gone, we moved away from water's edge, and tried to work our way up to the heron and a bit beyond, to be able to get a clear photograph. He sat, unmoving, until we were almost there, then squawked once and left. Oh, well.



Laurie, at the Point, wishing for a heron.

As for other live things, this shore bears a different mix than the sandy areas to the north, and around the Point into the White Rock beach. The rocks were bare, well-scrubbed. There were few crabs, no dead crab shells, no sign of seagull feeding. A few white clamshells, sun-bleached. Barnacles, small ones, at the water line. No mussels. And none of those invasive batillaria mud snails. (Yay!) The few snails among the barnacles were smooth and dark, fatter and shorter than the batillaria.


At the high tide line, dead kelp wound itself around the bigger rocks. I don't remember seeing eelgrass, and there was no sea lettuce, which shows up on every other stretch of beach in the area. But in the cracks between some of the bigger rocks at the water's edge, I found a few small clumps of these, that I had never seen before.


Deep purple seaweed. Growing only in the deep shade in cracks between the rocks. I had to put the camera right into the crack and rely on the flash to show it up; to my sun-dazed eyes, this looked almost black. When the flash was too close, edges of the weed flared orange.

Back over the rocks, we climbed to the railroad track, under a fence, and through a bit of bush, making a shortcut to the steps. Up, all 236 of them, up the hill to the car -- my legs were aching -- and back to the mall for a bite at the deli. Where the proprietess told us of another set of steps, a shorter one, that would take us to the south side of the Point.

More on how we tried to find them yesterday, in the next post.

Oh, and the loons? Here they are, doing what loons do; diving as soon as you get anywhere near, coming up 'way over in the distance.