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California's Highway One, seaside village of Pescadero to Pigeon Point Lighthouse
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Along California's Highway One near Half Moon Bay
Curvy Highway One runs merrily along the coastline below the Santa Cruz Mountains, heading south from the harbor town of Half Moon Bay into agricultural lands. Cows, sheep, horses and a few farmhouses are scattered on windswept headlands above a necklace of wild beaches, among them, San Gregorio State Beach, a driftwoody strand at the mouth of San Gregorio Creek. An estuary and a freshwater marsh fan out into lush habitat stalked by such birds as shearwaters, godwits, willets. Sometimes sighted is the marbled murrelet, a threatened species that nests in the tops of redwood trees in nearby Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve.
About 4 miles further south, Pescadero Road heads inland between fields of artichokes and aromatic herbs to the historic village of Pescadero. A stagecoach stop in the mid-1800s, a seaside resort at the turn of the century, the tiny town is today a couple of blocks of clapboard, falsefront buildings and weathered farmhouses that now house antiques and curio shops. The steepled Pescadero Community Church, built in 1867, is the oldest surviving Protestant church on the peninsula. On weekdays, the place is so quiet that visitors walk right down the middle of Stage Road, the main street, drawn to the irresistible aroma of warm artichoke and garlic-cheese bread wafting out of Arcangeli Grocery. The breads and other goods are “half-baked” all day, and packaged for buyers to take home and bake later.
Crowded on sunny weekends, Duarte's restaurant in Pescadero has since 1896 served seafood cioppino with a spicy Portuguese accent, artichoke soup, abalone sandwiches and olallieberry pie. Local ranchers belly up to the Old West-style, knotty pine bar.
Pescadero near California's Highway One, San Mateo Coast
Once a cow’s milk diary, circa 1910, Harley Farms has been transformed into a goat milk dairy and cheese-making parlor. Yorkshire, England-born, Dee Harley welcomes visitors to mingle with her goats, enjoy the edible flower garden, and learn how cheese is made. Early spring is a popular time, when about five hundred kids are born each year.
Up the road a mile from Pescadero, Phipps Country Store and Farm is a combination produce stand, plant nursery and menagerie of exotic birds and farm animals. Among the cacophony of sounds are parrots' squawks, green and orange canaries' songs and peacocks' trumpetings. There are fancy chickens, big fat pigs, a variety of bunnies and antique farm equipment. Visitors may pick their own strawberries, raspberries and olallieberries, and eat them at a picnic table in the middle of a flower-filled greenhouse.
A little farther up Pescadero Road, an 8,020-acre parkland known as Pescadero Creek Park makes a pleasant stop for a walk beneath towering redwood and Douglas fir trees. On a hike into the valley uplands, hikers come across Santa Cruz cypress, a variety of oak species, and big leaf maples, and are rewarded with sweeping views of Butano Canyon and the coast. Pescadero Creek, which flows all year round is the park, is an important steelhead trout-spawning stream (fishing is not allowed).
Pigeon Point Lighthouse & hostel, California's Highway One
Where Pescadero Road meets Highway One, the vast Pescadero Marsh Natural Preserve, the largest marsh between Monterey Bay and San Francisco, is a haven for birds and for birdwatchers. You can stand on wooden observation decks with binoculars binoculars and peer into the willows and the tules to see diving ducks, great egrets stalking in the shallows, and blue herons nesting in the eucalyptus trees––fall and spring are the best times to see nearly 200 species of birds. Barely 5 inches long, long-billed wrens hide in the grasses, calling out sharply, chick-chick. They fasten domed nests to the stems of reeds, deposit their dark brown, spotted eggs, and sometimes build fake nests, to fool predators. One of the most common of Western birds, the red-winged blackbird is shiny black with bright red and yellow shoulder patches. Northern harriers circle above and dive-bomb for small birds and rodents on the edges of the marsh. The Sequoia Audubon Trail meanders between the south shore of North Marsh and the north bank of Butano Creek.
Across Highway One from the marsh, Pescadero State Beach is two miles of tidepools, huge dunes and trails. Sea lions and the seagulls like it here, as do the fishermen who catch steelhead and salmon in the mouth of Pescadero Creek.
5 miles south, the foggy coastline and its offshore rocks and sea stacks caused shipwrecks in the nineteenth century. Built in 1872, ten-stories-tall Pigeon Point Lighthouse was named for the Boston Clipper ship, "Carrier Pigeon," which went down off the point at night in heavy fog. In 1896, the liner "Columbia" ran aground and locals scavenged barrels of white paint from the wreckage, using it to paint the town of Pescadero, which today continues the tradition of white houses. Pigeon Point Lighthouse Hostel provides comfortable, affordable accommodations in the restored lighthouse keeper's quarters. Whale-watching and sunset soaks in the hostel’s communal hot tub are reasons to linger a night or two.
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