Bright Clear Day on the Marin Coastal Trail
Drove down from Truckee for a piece of the California Coastal Trail — the Marin section runs 72¾ miles, almost 59 of it on actual trail and beach, and the stretch we picked starts at Muir Beach, about five miles round trip.
Before dropping to the coast we stopped on a ridge above San Rafael, where the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge stretched across the bay with the San Francisco skyline behind it, faint in the haze. Out on the trail itself the haze was gone. The route hugs the bluffs above southern Marin's jagged coastline — cypress trees bent hard away from the water, sea stacks offshore, one big rock split down the middle like a heart with surf working through the gap below it.
We scrambled down to the water near the turnaround point. The boulders at the tideline are crusted solid with mussels, black and packed shoulder to shoulder, waves pushing white foam between them. Up the coast the bare brown headlands ran off toward Rodeo Beach, which is where another segment picks up and carries the trail to the Golden Gate Bridge. Next time, maybe.
