Hiking the Cliffs - Rancho Palos Verdes, CA (Day 3)

Off the Beaten Path

Today we decided to go down a much more treacherous path than we usually take on our daily walks. In my last post, many of you noticed how well maintained and paved the walkway is around the golf course.

Hardly anyone comes down these trails, most likely because it is a little bit dangerous. In fact, while we were on the beach, we saw several couples begin to walk down the switchbacks leading to the beach, but they turned back about 1/3rd of the way down every time.

As you can see in the above image, it looks benign enough. When you first come to this particular fork in the trail, this is how it looks from the top. However if you poke your head over the edge, you see this:

You think to yourself, "Well, that looks pretty nice at the bottom. But how bad could the trail be? Looks a bit scary, but let's give it a try"

Essentially, the entire trip down you are zig-zagging on switchbacks which seem to be very precariously held together by loose soil that can erode away at any moment.

I tried to take some pictures to capture the precariousness of it all, but I just couldn't get it into context. It looks much safer in the pictures for some reason.

Finally Made it Down

After a careful descent, we made it down to the pebbled beach. The first thing we encountered were all these sea birds pecking at massive piles of seaweed in the largest swarm of flies I've ever seen. I thought it worthy of taking a video:

I'm not sure if the flies can even be seen in the video but there were absolutely thousands of them. In fact, we weren't sure if the birds were pecking at flies or seaweed. There was plenty of both.

We walked a bit further down the beach and came across some smaller black birds doing the same thing. The interesting thing was watching how they behaved when the water crashed against the rocks. They didn't really seem to care much, and let the water splash over them.

If you look closely at the above photo, you can see one just chilling on the rock in the middle of the photo. The water completely submerged him about a second later and he hardly moved.

I managed to capture this bird (the only one with any sense) flying out of the way just as the water crashed over the rocks. We thought it would be nice to sit down here and wait for the sun to set before heading back up, but ended up leaving a few minutes earlier because we didn't want to get caught in the middle of the crazy switchbacks in the dark.

Finally we were back on the main trail, and headed back to the car. That concludes this 3 part post on the trails in RPV, California; unless we come across something really worth posting about in the future. I know there are plenty more hidden trails to explore down there but I don't know what unique features they'll have to offer.

Until then, have a great night, and stay active!