Point Awesomeness

I love California.  Monterey is great and all, but the real amazement is in the surrounding areas of Monterey Bay.  I drove down to Point Lobos after a crappy 5 mile run yesterday.  Point Lobos is my new favorite spot in the area.  It has a wide variety of plants and animals and is a great environment for recreational activities such as running, hiking, and SCUBA diving.  Check out the website to see what it has to offer!

http://www.pointlobos.org/home

I got there a bit after 3:00 and started walking down the first path on the right, just passed the entrance to the park.  Only a few hundred yards down the path I saw about six deer just hanging out feeding in the woods.  I stood there and watched as these beautiful animals quietly engaged in their natural behaviors not more than ten feet from me.  I believe these are black-tailed deer and I watched them for about ten minutes until some other people walked up the path and the deer started moving deeper into the woods.  They did not startle immediately though as I would have expected, instead they just gracefully worked their way off the path.

I also saw some cool looking mushrooms:

And a giant rat's nest (Dusky-footed woodrat):

It's there, I swear!

The path was about a third of a mile down to the water where it then split.  I went left and stumbled upon Whalers Cove and the Whalers Cabin Museum, a small little hut with some artifacts and natural history on whaling at this particular location and in general in Monterey Bay.  Just down from the museum is a boat launch and an entrance for divers.  There are supposedly a bunch of great underwater pinnacles and I cannot wait to get in there and find them!  

From Whalers Cove I walked up a bunch of stairs to another overlook where I stayed put and started looking through my binoculars out to the coast.  Two puffs...what???  Two more puffs...it was a really choppy, somewhat windy day with many whitecaps, but I was SURE I saw something.  I kept looking through the binocs and then NO WAY I just saw two whale spouts probably a mile from me but only a few hundred yards off the far point.  I didn't actually see the whales but I've seen enough whale spouts in my life to know what I was looking at!  Pretty cool stuff, this place is amazing and I'll definitely be heading back soon either to hike or run, but in general to spend more time there because I only had about an hour plus of daylight.

Check out some pics (not of whales) but of the scenery:

I saw the whales just off those two small rocks