Home Bay, Drakes Estero. Point Reyes National Seashore, California. July 21, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Fog rolls in over Drakes Estero beyond Home Bay, Point Reyes National Seashore.

This little late-July visit to Point Reyes was an opportunity to re-learn a few lessons about going out to make photographs. I had driven up to San Francisco, where my wife was to be engaged in a music performance that would take the full afternoon and evening, with the plan being to drop her off and then drive on over the Golden Gate Bridge and out to Point Reyes. Point Reyes is often a cold and windy place, even in the summer, but this was a very warm period and it looked like the coast might be clear of fog or at least see the fog bank lurking just offshore until the evening. With this in mind, it seemed like it might be a good time to either visit the Limantour Beach area or else hike out towards Drakes Bay.

I should have sensed that things were about to evolve in ways that I had not planned for when, during a brief stop at the Point Reyes visitor center, the rangers announced that the road to Limantour was closed since a fire had just started in the area! With that option gone, I figured that Drakes Bay would be my objective, and I had images of afternoon and evening light on this day of little or no fog. I drove on out to the Estero trailhead where it was, in fact, quite sunny, though a bit windy. I loaded up my camera pack with a few lenses and a tripod, and set out on the trail towards Drakes Head, thinking I might be able to make it there for late afternoon light. As soon as I started hiking I began to see the telltale puffs of incoming fog clouds above me, and soon I came around a bend in the trail to see that the fog had already moved in to my west and over Drakes Bay. Fortunately, I like for, and in most cases I would rather photograph in “interesting” weather than in so-called perfect blue sky weather. At a point where the trail descended to cross a dike at the head of Home Bay, I saw this conjunction of near and far forms, with the distant bluffs under the incoming fog, so I stopped to make a few photographs before moving on. To make a potentially long story a bit shorter, the temperature quickly dropped and the wind picked up to levels that made photography increasingly difficult. I managed to work with one other scene that included a curving snag in front of the bay, but it was already becoming difficult to find a calm moment in the wind to click the shutter. I kept going, finally reaching the trail junction that heads off towards Drakes Head, only to realize that I would never get all the way out there in time to return before dark. Cutting the hike short after a bit more than an hour and a half of hiking, I began to retrace my steps back to the trailhead.

In the end, this is really the only photograph that I came away with – despite carrying that fully loaded camera pack out and back! But this reminded me of a first lesson, namely that it is worth the effort even if I only come back with a single shot that I like. This one, to me, evokes the relative isolation and quiet of this spot in the upper reaches of the calm waters of Drakes Bay, with the fog bank beginning to assemble across the distant bluffs. A second lesson is that sometimes on a photographic quest, it is OK to simply enjoy the surroundings. A practical photographer can remind himself or herself that scouting is a good thing, and that things not photographed this time may well be on a future visit. And a long-time hiker can – and did – remind himself that sometimes it is just fine to leave the camera in the pack and just enjoy the wind and the space.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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