The trail to Tomales Point begins at the end of the road on the Point Reyes Peninsula. Beside the parking lot is a collection of whitewashed ranch buildings: a spacious barn, with a hard-packed dirt floor and bands of light falling through cracks in the walls and the ceiling. This is Pierce Point Ranch. Old houses and outbuildings are arranged around a mowed but desolate lawn. A museum piece. A structure of a life that once was, and is no more, and the structure alone does little to evoke what has been lost. The heart guttered out of this place years ago, along with the people who lived here. Looking around, it's hard to imagine their vanished, hard won lives; their unconventional luxuries under the relentless wind. Descendents of the original farmers of the point talk about the pride of a tough, practical people. How they loved and hated and scraped a living from that desolate, treeless tongue of land, endlessly licked and smacked by the Pacific. The heart of this place was abalone feasts and cattle ranching and community and a long, long dirt road into town. All gone now, leaving just a patch of grass and a few buildings at the edge of the tarmac. These ghosts serve their purpose, though – reminding us of how far we have come, or gone, from a recent yet barely imaginable past.
Just beyond the buildings, history is quickly erased by the feeling of being a small wanderer under a very large sky. The trail begins at the corner of the barn, and heads northwest, toward the open water. For the next four miles, the ocean runs along your left hand. Always there, dressed in epic blue. Right now, the trail is like a garden path surrounded by spring wildflowers. Fields of hip-high wild radish blossoms of pale yellows and purples, whites and an odd, rosy caramel hue all tossed together. Banks of Douglas iris and yellow lupine, and among them are the poppies and daisies and blue-eyed grass and on and on. Lizards scamper in the dust; caterpillars shrug their way along leaves, house sparrows call from the shrubs while red-tail hawks and buzzards soar overhead.
Because there are no trees, the trail unfurls like a long lazy ribbon over the hillside, a lure to beckon the hiker on. The eye can wander ahead and the feet long to follow, to feel the lay of the land for themselves. And so. You continue. It is a warm day, but the wind is incessant, chill around the ears and drying out the eyes. There are unexpected treats: a cliff that has eroded into columns of soil: flanking a ravine, feeding a beach. In a sheltered basin between two low hills, a herd of tulle elk grazes by a small pool near the trail. In another basin a row of cypress stand, hinting of another homestead long since vanished into history.
After three miles, the trail narrows and turns from dusty earth into sand. Heels sink and walking gets harder. Soft limbs of lupine and the occasional stiff dry branch or sharp thistle brush against your legs. Here and there, bracken fern fiddleheads are emerging into the sunlight, modest green knuckles pushing up out of the sand. The land has become narrower, closing in on Tomales Point: to your right is the bay, the tree-bristled hump of Hog Island in the middle, the small cluster of beachside buildings that indicate Lawson’s Landing, the vacation village of Dillon Beach a brown smear of buildings on the hillside beyond. To the left are wild cliffs that fall to rocky beaches, bird-whitened rock islands. At last there is one final rolling crest and the trail dips down to the edge of the land. Waves crash at odd angles; cormorants and oystercatchers dry and feed on the toe of rocks that stand just off the shore. Here you can admire the spray, the color of the water, the shifting patterns of seaweed, the vertiginous feeling of being on the edge of a continent; and then you can turn around and head home.
