Hikers Get Perspective on County Beaches, Canyons : Recreation: Coastwalk offers participants the long view of California coastal resources.

Most of them wearing boots, all of them toting day packs, more than 50 participants in Orange County’s first Coastwalk looked somewhat out of place as they picked their way around the more scantily clad sunbathers stretched out on the sands here Thursday.

This was no ordinary seaside stroll. The day’s destination was the campground at Doheny State Beach, about nine miles from the starting point at San Clemente’s Calafia Beach County Park. And that was only the beginning; the hikers will end a four-day journey at Crystal Cove State Park north of Laguna Beach.

Thursday’s walk was entirely along the sand, but today the walkers will stride across the normally off-limits Dana Point Headlands and later turn inland to explore some of Orange County’s coastal canyons.

“I’ve always been interested in those canyons back there, living in Orange County for so long,” Emmett Berkery of Santa Ana said as he walked. “This is a chance to see them.”

Coastwalk started 10 years ago with a hike along Sonoma County’s coastline and has expanded to other counties every year since. With this year’s addition of Orange and San Diego counties, only two holdout coastal counties remain: Los Angeles and Ventura.

The inaugural Orange County Coastwalk has drawn hikers from as far away as Payson, Ariz., and Marin County in Northern California, but most of the participants are locals who want a closer look at their own back yard.

“I’m not really a big hiker, but I want to learn about these areas,” said Tom Andrusky, a city planner from Huntington Beach. He said he was particularly looking forward to a tide pool walk at the Orange County Marine Institute, along with walks through El Moro and Laurel canyons. “I’ve been driving by them for 11 years, but I haven’t been in them.”

Some of the areas on the four-day walk are on private property not normally open to hikers, but most are state or county parkland.

“It’s really amazing to me what we have in Orange County, but most people are too busy to take advantage of it,” said Virginia Gurr of Laguna Niguel.

Coastwalk is a nonprofit organization that works to increase awareness of California’s coastal resources and to lobby for creating a trail along all 1,000 miles of state coastline.

Some of the people who founded the group, including statewide coordinator Richard Nichols, are along for the Orange County walk.

Also along are Bill and Lucy Kortum of Petaluma, founders and pioneering coastal activists. He was an architect of the landmark California Coastal Act of 1972, which created the California Coastal Commission.

“Every time we participate in a more urbanized county, we’re surprised by what we find out there,” Bill Kortum said.

Most people, he said, visit the coast by driving to a single point. “We tend to view the coast in a vertical way. We don’t connect these points and get an idea of its totality,” Kortum explained. “The thought of actually walking the coast in a longitudinal way was actually kind of new. . . . It gives us a much broader perspective on what’s happening on the California coast.”

Robert Joseph, a former Coastal Commission employee who now heads the Caltrans advance planning branch in Santa Ana, took part in a Coastwalk event in Santa Cruz last year, then was pressed into service as organizer of the first Orange County walk. The task began in earnest in January with the recruitment of volunteer help and coordination with county and state agencies and private landowners.

Putting together a continuous walk of 30 miles through highly developed Orange County was no easy task, but before the first steps were taken Thursday, Joseph was already talking about next year’s walk.

He hopes that trek will go through the northern half of the county’s coastline, taking in such spots as the wetlands in Upper Newport Bay, Bolsa Chica and maybe even Anaheim Bay, at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station.

Joseph also said he was dedicating the walk to County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, for his work in protecting coastal areas.

Thursday started with a group orientation at Crystal Cove State Park, before a bus trip to the walk’s starting point. The first leg of the walk, from Calafia Beach County Park to the San Clemente Pier for lunch, went more quickly than expected. And the gray skies, no doubt a bummer for other beach-goers, were a blessing for hikers who enjoyed the cool temperatures.

Nichols said that Coastwalk events often draw mostly retirees but that the Orange County walk participants are of a wide age range, as well as wide range in hiking experience.

At age 12, Erin Berkery of Santa Ana and Jenny Byrd of Alpine in San Diego County are the youngest in the group by a solid decade. Strangers before Thursday, they had become fast friends before the walk had even gotten under way.

Erin was happy to find a companion her age, while demonstrating the skewed age perspective of youth: “I was a little worried. I got here early this morning and everyone seemed 40 years older than me,” she said, a remark that earned a playful “Hey!” from her mother.