Morro Bay

This weekend I did some relaxing hiking with Christian in the Morro Bay area, which is half way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. There are so many beatiful beaches, but there is only one problem...

The whole summer not a single shaft of sunlight is seen here as the fog covers all. Well, but we were here for hiking and not for swimming anyway ;-) And pretty soon we were above the fog limit:


And also pretty soon we were at our first peak as mountains are here rather about 1.400 feet instead of 14.000 feet high - you would not think what difference such a single digit can make!

After the hike, we explored the cliffs at the coast, which was a bit dangerous because of the big waves and the slippery stones.

In the evening we checked in at a "Motel 6", but we still wanted to go to the top of "Morro Rock", which is a 500 feet high volcanic mountain. We were very disappointed when we found the following sign:
This is very typical: They built a large parking lot and a broad street around the mountain, but they do not think of building a trail to the top. That's real nonsense! There were some other very interesting warning signs at the beach:

"NEVER Turn your back on the Ocean" - are you supposed to walk backwards when leaving the beach? Well, we stayed at the beach to watch the beautiful sunset...


The next morning we started another hike in the area of the 1500 feet mountains. After a while we came to the following sign:
"Not a through trail"? or "A tough trail?" - we decided that we nevertheless give it a try. But this was one of the signs that actually have a meaning. Well, only if you presume that the following signs that we discovered after about a mile:


We had to backup but finally reached the destination "Hazard peak". It was very hot that day and the trail was partly pretty sandy. As a horse campground was nearby, we met a lot of people riding horses.


This day we also took a trail to the beach, which was very nice as there was nearly no one there!


We got some refreshment in the Pacific. The water wasn't so cold. But the wind on the beach!


After spending some time at the beach we got back to our car. There was another car parked beside it. Well, probably compared to this real CAR you would not call my Ford Focus one...

There was still a short hike to a local peak on our list. There we could again see that we are not real Americans. We parked the car on what we thought was the trailhead, but in fact after gaining most of the height to the peak we found the real parking lot... We should've really known in advance that there must be a parking lot near the top of every peak that has a trail! Afterwards, we finally earned our meal at the Burger King where I ate a "Triple Whopper" - 1230 calories ;-)