California’s lost coast

Here I stand, somewhere in the middle of California, watching surf crash beneath sandstone cliffs. In the deep water below, the skeleton of a derelict pier throws long shadows. A few paces away from me, cars zoom into the distance on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Where exactly am I? The cars are pointed north toward San Francisco. The area code is about to change from 408 to 415. Fresno is almost directly east of here.

And if you’re a bit hazy on the geography beyond that, you’re not alone. For all the bragging we do about our coastline, those of us at California’s southern end seem to have overlooked a remarkable chunk of it.

Here, between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, we have about 60 miles of ocean bluffs and tide pools, row crops and lighthouses, redwoods and banana slugs, sea lions and small towns, all within easy driving distance of the San Francisco and San Jose airports. The population of this entire coastal area is less than 25,000.

Those who live here, deep in battle over new development and wary of creeping commuterism from Bay Area urban centers, aren’t likely to describe their backyard as forgotten real estate. But for millions of Southern Californians, this is a sort of lost coast.

I’ve given myself four days to find it. I catch a flight to San Jose, rent a car, warily thread my way west through the Santa Cruz Mountains on winding, perilous California 17, then join the coast highway at Santa Cruz.

*

Soon the scenery goes rural and I’m passing tidy rows of working farms blanketed in late-October pumpkins. About 11 miles above Santa Cruz, Davenport turns up.

Davenport was founded in the 1860s by Capt. John Davenport, a whaler from the East Coast looking to capitalize on the annual whale migration route near this coast every winter. The community’s dominant feature these days is the cement plant that forced the town to relocate about half a mile south in 1906 and is still in operation. But forget the cement plant.

Davenport is its own small world, with a church, a bar and grill, a bakery, a Mexican restaurant, a few blocks of houses, a school, about 200 residents and a pair of offbeat galleries. David Boye Knives on Old Coast Road specializes in cooking knives as well as blades for hunters and divers. Lundberg Studios next door sells art glass. There’s a scenic beach just across the highway, and a few hundred yards north, the skeletal remains of Davenport’s old pier--a haunting view at sunset.

I meet a friend for dinner at the New Davenport Cash Store, the community’s nicest restaurant, and I spend the night upstairs at the Davenport Bed & Breakfast Inn, the only lodging in the area. (The inn, which has rooms accented by folk art, offers upstairs rooms with partial ocean views and downstairs rooms in an adjacent building.)

Here’s a clue to the relatively forgotten nature of this stretch: In the busiest summer months, when the Pacific Coast Highway at Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles carries about 66,000 vehicles per day, CalTrans figures show 11,600 daily vehicles on PCH at Davenport. Heading north to Pescadero and San Gregorio, as I am about to do, the traffic thins even further.

Before those towns, however, comes the prospect of love among the kelp: the dunes, grasses and seal-strewn beaches of the An~o Nuevo State Reserve. Every winter, under protection from state park rangers and volunteer docents, thousands of elephant seals gather to mate and give birth on these beaches, a smelly, noisy spectacle that has come to draw more human observers than it does elephant seals. (Travelers are urged to book reservations in advance for the Dec. 1 to March 31 mating season; telephone [800] 444-7275.)

The female elephant seals, which typically deliver about 11 months after conceiving, last year birthed about 2,000 pups. But a pup who gets in the way of a bull seal intent on mating runs a mortal risk. The bulls arrive in December weighing as much as 5,000 pounds. They mate, fight and fast for three months, and leave 2,000 pounds lighter in March. Call it the An~o Nuevo One-Ton Diet.

In other months, the scene is far sleepier. Parking and hiking 1.5 miles out to An~o Nuevo Point, I find 100 or so young elephant seals and sea lions. Some jostle in the shallow water. Others lie on the beach, occasionally barking at the blue sky or flipping sand onto their torsos.

Next the highway passes the lonely Pigeon Point Lighthouse, then Bean Hollow and Pescadero state beaches amid miles of ragged coastline. Then, at the edge of a wide marsh, Pescadero Road leads past a few acres of farmland and modest houses to the sleepy crossroads that is downtown Pescadero.

*

If Pescadero sounds oddly familiar, there’s a reason. It is the hometown of Jessica Dubroff, the 7-year-old girl whose much-publicized effort to fly a small plane across the country ended April 11 in a Cheyenne, Wyo., crash that killed her, her father and her flight instructor. Six months later, the American flag is back at full staff on the pole at the center of town.

Pescadero has a gas station, a handful of handsome old wooden houses and about half a dozen antique shops and vintage clothing boutiques that open on weekends, but the main attraction for an out-of-towner is Duarte’s Tavern. Pronounced Du-Arts locally, (and if you live in Los Angeles, you can’t very easily make fun of them for that), the enterprise dates itself back to 1894, when a man named Frank Duarte is said to have put a barrel of whiskey from Santa Cruz atop a bar and started charging 10 cents a shot. Today, the place is run by a fourth generation of the same family, regionally renowned for its artichoke and chile soups.

At 2 p.m. on a weekday, the local lunch crowd is thinning but the friendly, fast-moving waitresses are still seating fresh arrivals who are clearly from out of town. I take my tasty chile soup at the seven-stool counter, walk the main drag and head north again, now heading for San Gregorio.

There are two ways to reach San Gregorio from Pescadero. One is the coast highway, which runs past the sands, shorebirds and dramatic bluffs around Pomponio and San Gregorio state beaches. The other is the old Stage Road, a rising, falling, winding, farm-skirting, two-lane adventure about five miles long. Either way, you know you’ve reached San Gregorio when Stage Road meets La Honda Road, also known as California 84. On one side of the road stands the San Gregorio General Store, an expansive 1930s Spanish-style building that houses the community post office, pumps gas, serves drinks, hosts live music on weekends, stocks a tourist-friendly, self-consciously countrified inventory of books and gifts.

The second building at the intersection is the crumbling Stage Stop Cafe, once a saloon and lodging for southbound stagecoach travelers from San Francisco in the 1860s, now a sort of open-air museum piece.

Passing it early on a Wednesday morning, I find a handful of local ranch hands hanging out on the porch, smoking cigarettes, handing around a guitar and goading a big dog into doing tricks. Inside, a 100-year-old bar runs to the back of the room. Out back, flowers sprout roughly around the weather-beaten walls of a former outhouse, a former livery stable, a former dance hall and a former hotel (25 rooms, one bath) that hasn’t been fully active since about 1916.

Everything’s closed now. The last member of the family controlling the property died about two years ago, and estate executors are sorting out what to do next with the site. Kathleen Armstrong, whose husband, Tom, serves as caretaker, gives me this background and speaks hopefully of assembling a nonprofit group to acquire and preserve the property.

And that’s about it for downtown San Gregorio, unless you count the sign at Bear Bulch Road announcing the Whirled Peas Farm. I continue east up Highway 84, winding through thick forest to La Honda, climb further to Woodside, then retreat to spend the night at the welcoming, well-appointed Rancho San Gregorio bed and breakfast, about 10 miles down the hill from Woodside.

A spacious five-room inn on 15 acres, five miles inland from the coast highway, this turns out to be my favorite lodging of the trip. And the next morning it’s followed by my favorite detour.

Abandoning an uneventful stretch of PCH, I veer northeast for 4.5 miles on Purisima Creek Road until it ends, and I get out and take an hourlong hike on Purisima Creek Trail, amid the 100-foot-high forest of the Purisima Creek Redwood Open Space Preserve. On the path, I encounter one person, one banana slug and tall trees beyond counting. Then I head back to the coast highway on pleasant, rural Higgins Purisima Road and continue, exhilarated, toward downtown Half Moon Bay.

*

It’s midday and chilly. All around town, merchants and farmers are making ready for the Art and Pumpkin Festival that is staged every October. Along the town’s old-fashioned Main Street, the historic wooden buildings stand prosperous and tidy.

Then a curious orange blob creeps into my field of vision, looming on the loading dock of the Half Moon Bay Growers Assn. building. I have a suspicion about this blob, so I park and walk over to make sure.

Yes. This is the Great Pumpkin, unadorned. In two days, the pumpkin festival, grandest event of the civic year in Half Moon Bay, will officially begin, and this 808-pound mass of orange vegetable will be celebrated as the largest pumpkin submitted. For the moment, however, it sits on an Astroturf-padded pallet at the loading dock.

Granted, there’s plenty about greater Half Moon Bay (population: about 13,000) that seems more newfangled than old-fashioned. A splashy new two-story retail building has risen to half-surround the 140-year-old Zaballa House B&B; on Main Street, the oldest building in town. Then, in a category all its own, there’s The Beach House, a.k.a. The Conservatory, a wildly controversial three-story hotel-condominium project near the beach. In late April, an arsonist burned the project down, winning widespread admiration in the development-resistant community, and eluded capture. Now the developer is rebuilding, with tighter security, and planning on being finished in February.

Still, Half Moon Bay remains a town with a pedestrian-friendly Main Street and a pleasant nucleus of stores and restaurants in its downtown core.

Once you’ve done downtown, you might take a horseback ride on the open land just west of PCH or walk along the beachfront path that runs roughly from the foot of Kelly Avenue to the marina in Pillar Point Harbor. Or you can tramp around the 1914 Montara Lighthouse in the early morning or late afternoon. (Since it’s now a functioning hostel, it closes between 9:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. daily.) Usually you also have the option of driving north a few miles to have a sunset, ocean-view drink at the Moss Beach Distillery restaurant, but management plans to close until January for renovation.

*

In 48 hours or so, I sample all these possibilities except the horses. Both mornings, I warm myself with coffee at La Di Da, a cheery, colorful and very busy local coffeehouse on Purisima Avenue. I find time, too, to head north on PCH through Devil’s Slide, the rocky, unstable area where storms closed the highway in 1993. (In the Nov. 5 election, about 70% of the voters in the area threw their support behind a proposal to build a tunnel through Devil’s Slide instead of rerouting the freeway inland, which CalTrans has long favored.)

On the north side is Pacifica, its priciest homes clinging to the slopes of Point San Pedro, surfers and windsurfers sliding around on the whitecaps.

But this feels like a different territory than the one I’ve been in these last few days. The stretch from Davenport to Montara is an ideal target for a lazy, countrified weekend or, even better, a lazier handful of weekdays. But with its denser population, the development and fast-food restaurants along the highway, Pacifica feels like the beginning of the metropolis. Just north of it lies Daly City, after all, and then The City itself. I’ve left the Lost Coast behind. Clearly, it’s time to turn around.

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GUIDEBOOK

Coastal Comforts

Getting there: Driving over the mountains via California 92, the journey from the San Francisco airport to Half Moon Bay is about 15 miles. From the San Jose airport, it’s about 40 miles.

Where to stay: The Davenport Bed & Breakfast Inn, 31 Davenport Ave.; telephone (408) 425-1818, fax (408) 423-1160. The inn has 12 rooms, some above its restaurant (mostly Italian fare; weekend brunches are popular) and gift shop (international folk art) with a sliver of ocean views and some highway noise. Other rooms are on the ground floor next door, with no view, less traffic noise. Full breakfast. Rates for a double room: $75-$125.

Rancho San Gregorio, Route 1, San Gregorio, (about five miles inland on California 84); tel. (415) 747-0810, fax (415) 747-0184. The inn has its own pond and apple orchard on a 15-acre site, and innkeepers Bud and Lee Raynor are gregarious and longtime residents of the area. Double rooms: $85-$145, with full breakfast.

Cypress Inn, 407 Mirada Road, Half Moon Bay; tel. (800) 832-3224 or (415) 726-6002, fax (415) 712-0380. The upscale hotel on Miramar Beach offers 12 rooms in two buildings done up in a handsome Spanish colonial/postmodern design mix. Double rooms: $150-$250, $275 for an upstairs suite with 180-degree ocean view; full breakfast.

Zaballa House Bed & Breakfast Inn, 324 Main St.; tel. (415) 726-9123, fax [415] 726-3921. In downtown Half Moon Bay the B&B; has nine spacious rooms and three elaborately furnished suites that are actually upstairs in a new adjacent retail building. Rooms for two: $75-$170, $140-$250 for suites.

The Seal Cove Inn, 221 Cypress Ave., Moss Beach; tel. (415) 728-7325, fax (415) 728-4116. Tucked into a residential area north of Half Moon Bay the inn has 10 rooms with old-fashioned trimmings and garden that overlooks the James V. Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. Double rooms: $165-$250, full breakfast.

Point Montara Lighthouse Hostel (P.O. Box 737, Montara; tel. (415) 728-7177. For budget travelers, the spectacularly located hostel offers 40 beds in dormitory-style rooms ($13-$15 per person) and four rooms for couples ($40 nightly). Often booked weekends.

Where to eat: In Davenport, see the Davenport Bed & Breakfast Inn (listed above). In Pescadero, Duarte’s Tavern (202 Stage Road; local tel. 879-0464) is admired for its green chile and artichoke soups ($3.50-$4). Dinner entrees $11-$16. In Half Moon Bay, Pasta Moon (315 Main St.; tel. 726-5125) has a mostly Italian menu, good food, often slow service. Dinner entrees: $11. The San Benito House (356 Main St.; tel. 726-3425) offers accomplished Italian-Mediterranean fare. Dinner entrees $11-$16.