The Jewel in the Crown in the Crown Jewel of California State Parks
Cypress Grove Trail, Point Lobos: A photo essay
Story and photographs by David Laws
The scenic coastline, biological diversity, rich cultural history, and cool summer climate support Point Lobos State Reserve’s reputation as the “crown jewel” of California State Parks. And a network of trails offers easy access to explore the extraordinary variety of plants, wildlife, and scenery, packed into just over 500 acres of forests, meadows, coastal scrub, and rugged shoreline.
As a volunteer docent, I greet visitors at the entrance to help them choose trails that best meet their abilities and interests. To first-time visitors on a tight schedule, I typically recommend the Cypress Grove trail. Except for a short stretch of steep, rocky steps, this is an easy, under-one-mile loop trail around a rocky headland through the magical Allan Memorial Grove of ancient Monterey cypress trees within constant sight and sound of the surf.
My fellow docents may offer other suggestions, but to me, this grove is the jewel in the crown of the reserve. The following images and notes highlight some features I point out along the Cypress Grove Trail.
Punta de los Lobos Marinos
The Rumsen indigenous people of the Monterey Peninsula called this area Ishxenta long before Spanish explorers named the promontory Punta de Los Lobos Marinos (Point of the Sea Wolves) for the loud barking of sea lions hauled out on the point. With tan coats blending into the rocks, they are difficult to see without a scope, but raucous cries announce their presence even on the foggiest summer mornings.
Sea Lion Point, the headland in the center of the photo above, reveals a geological discontinuity where softer sandstone rocks lay exposed above the solid granodiorite (a coarse-grained form of granite formed while dinosaurs still roamed the world) that underlies the reserve. Fashioned over millions of years of tectonic activity along the San Andreas Fault and eroded by wind and waves, this contorted landscape fascinates geologists. One section is so jumbled and tumbled that they named it Nightmare Cove.
Strange food
The trail leading to the grove is lined with plants of the coastal scrub community. These low-growing, gray-green shrubs can tolerate high wind, low rainfall, poor soil, and salt spray, where they provide dense cover for birds, rabbits, dusky-footed wood rats, and other small mammals. The predominant vegetation is California sagebrush, Coyote bush, and Poison oak; while nutritious food for wildlife, the latter should be judiciously avoided.
The botanical name Toxicodendron diversilobium tells all — toxic oil (urushiol) on the branches and “leaves of three” causes severe skin irritation. However, it is one of the most important native plants supporting the reserve’s biodiversity. The berries are excellent winter food for migrating birds. And, as shown in the photo, our black-tailed deer dine happily on the salad bar of shiny leaves for their high concentrations of calcium, phosphorus, and sulfur. Indigenous people used the leaves to protect baking food, and the stems were prized for basketry warp.
Nowhere else in the world
Monterey pines (Pinus radiata) are native to just five locations on Earth — the Monterey Peninsula, Cedros Island, Mexico, and three other coastal spots in California. At the peak of the last ice age, the Monterey cypress (Hesperocyparis macrocarpa) was widely distributed along the coast. Today, it is limited to just two places — Point Lobos and across Carmel Bay at Pebble Beach. Both, however, are cultivated worldwide: cypress as an ornamental and pine for lumber. At Point Lobos, they intermingle as co-dominant canopy trees, with cypress favoring the rocky coast and pine the sandy inland soils.
You can compare them side by side near the Allan Memorial Grove sign at the trail junction. The pine has long needles and large, pear-shaped cones, and the cypress has tiny, overlapping, scaly leaves and walnut-sized cones. Indigenous people harvested pine nuts for food and extracted essence from cypress for medicinal purposes.
Rehabilitating the Grove
In 1933, the state purchased Point Lobos from the heirs of prior owners Alexander and Sadie Allan to create the reserve. The family donated this 15-acre cypress-covered headland as a memorial grove to their parents.
When young, the Monterey cypress is narrow and cone-shaped. As it ages, it spreads and grows to 70 to 90 feet high. In its native environment of foggy, windswept coastal headlands, trees can live for up to 250 years. Although those in the photo above are likely less than 100 years old, invasive species crowding the forest floor prevent the seedlings that will eventually replace them from establishing a foothold. Historically, naturally occurring fires cleared the intruders. Now restrained by safety concerns, the last evidence of a burn 100 years ago shows in charred trunks near North Point.
To encourage cypress cones to germinate, volunteers of the Point Lobos Native Plant Patrol regularly remove selected areas of perennial veldt grass and other invasives, including the yellow Bermuda buttercup (Oxalis pes-caprae) that dominates the coastline in early spring.
Dead or Alive, they’re still admired
The Reserve’s sculptural, windswept cypress forms and picturesque cliff-edge locations have inspired generations of painters, poets, and photographers.
In her book Preserving Nature, Point Lobos docent Cynthia Wagner Weick identifies Raymond Yelland’s 1879 portrait of the Old Veteran as one of the earliest of numerous later representations of this tenacious survivor clinging to the crumbling edge of Cypress Cove. Impressionist artists Childe Hassam and Armin Hansen produced more expansive views of the cove from an overlook along the trail. Franz Bischoff’s “A Lonely Headland” (c. 1925) peeks through the trees towards Sea Lion Point.
Legendary photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston found inspiration in the forms and textures of the bleached silver skeletons of long-expired giants. Their distinctive, semi-abstract black-and-white images are in museum collections worldwide. A still upright tangle of bare branches reaching for the sun overlooking Headland Cove is known as “The Weston Tree.”
From his handbuilt Tor House on Carmel Point, Robinson Jeffers looked directly across the water to the trees on the North Point headland that inspired his 1925 poem “Granite and Cypress.” Later bards of this setting include Robert Hass, Gary Snyder, Eric Barker, Stephen Meadows (a member of the Rumsen Ohlone Tribal Community), and docent emeritus Ann Muto, whose poem “Cypress Grove Trail” proclaims:
Even in death,
Their weather worn
Silhouettes suggest a legacy.
Lettuce but Not Food
Three kinds of “lettuce” grow in Point Lobos, but you won’t find any of them on the salad menu.
Bluff lettuce (Dudleya farinosa) is the most visible. A species of succulent plant in the Crassulaceae or stonecrop family, its powdery white rosettes of leaves cling to rocky bluffs above the reach of the surf. An attractive presentation drapes over an eroded granite outcrop above stone stairs near the Pinnacle overlook. Bluff lettuce became such a popular house plant in Asian countries that California passed a law prohibiting their removal.
Sea lettuce (Dudleya caespitosa), also known as Coast dudleya, is a cousin to bluff lettuce. It has long, pale green, fleshy foliage and reddish stems holding around a dozen bright yellow flowers.
Marine Sea lettuce (Ulva latuca) is not even a plant — it is a green alga with “leaves” that are only two cell layers thick and vary in color from pale to bright green. It grows in intertidal areas around Point Lobos attached to rocks or seagrass and is most easily seen at Weston Beach at low tide.
Weird Stuff on the Rocks and Trees
By the time they reach the grove, most visitors have noticed and wondered about the long, flat, green lace-like drapes that hang from tree bark and branches throughout the forest. Often mistaken for Spanish moss, Lace lichen (Ramalina menziesii) is a symbiotic combination of an alga and two kinds of fungus. It is celebrated as the state lichen of California and provides animal food, habitat, and nesting material.
Another form of lichen prefers locations even closer to the moist ocean air. Beard lichen (Usnea perplexans) forms grey wooly tufts on exposed cypress branches. Both lichens often grow on sick or dying trees as the loss of canopy leaves allows for greater photosynthesis by the algae, but neither is parasitic.
Many rocks and trees near the salt spray are cloaked in orange-red algae. Trentepohlia aurea is naturally green and is colored orange by carotenoid pigments produced by the alga. All three of these growths are indicators of excellent air quality.
Framing The Pinnacle
The Pinnacle off the northern point of the reserve is another favorite subject of painters and photographers. Thomas Moran, famous for generating congressional support for Yellowstone National Park, included a distant view of the Pinnacle in “Point Lobos, Monterey California” (1912).
Naturally grey, this pyramid-shaped stump of granodiorite typically appears brilliant white above the high waterline from nesting cormorants' droppings of guano. Artists portray the image centered in various natural frames: a black silhouette of dead cypress boughs, through a lush green window of vegetation, rising from a meadow of spring flowers, or shrouded in a blanket of chill marine fog.
There are many other pinnacle-like rocks around the reserve. Divers report spectacular underwater monoliths coated with anemones, stony corals, and sponges rising from a sandy-bottom canyon near Blue Fish Cove.
“The greatest meeting of land and water”
This panoramic view of the Big Dome headland from a vantage point along the Cypress Grove trail is one of the many reasons why Australian-born artist Francis McComas, a Pebble Beach resident in the 1920s, called Point Lobos “The greatest meeting of land and water in the world.”
At 240 feet, the pine-crowned peak of Big Dome is the second-highest point in the reserve, just three feet lower than Whalers Knoll. Claims that Robert Louis Stevenson used the distinctive profile of Big Dome for Spyglass Hill in the novel Treasure Island are supported by his daughter-in-law’s assertion that he “drew on Monterey scenery for his description of the island.” His depiction of “pines and a great number of contorted trees” on the island further adds to their credence.
However, novelist Ann Fisher’s suggestion in No More a Stranger that RLS searched for buried treasure at the blowhole near Sea Lion Point is almost certainly fiction. Historians believe he probably glimpsed the headland en route to his fateful horseback adventure in Carmel Valley, but there is no record of his walking at Point Lobos.
Spring and summer floral color
Point Lobos is one of the most accessible places to enjoy the wide variety of native plants that thrive on the Central Coast. The California Native Plant Society has identified nearly 400 species in the reserve.
A free pamphlet, Guide to the Plants of Point Lobos, published by the Point Lobos Foundation, illustrates 40 of the most common flowers. Red, white, and blue (represented by three species of ceanothus) blossoms make up half the list and tend to bloom earlier in the year. Brilliant yellow varieties that comprise the balance are most visible in the early summer months when golden yarrow and lizard tail blanket the coastal scrub meadows and sticky monkey flowers glow orange-yellow in the forest.
A handy field guide, Wildflowers of Point Lobos State Reserve, developed initially to aid docents and now on sale at the Information Station, illustrates 203 species.
The Best View
There are many fine views to be enjoyed from the reserve. Each visitor will have their personal favorite spot. This couple appears to have found theirs.
Resources
[1] Point Lobos Foundation, Visitor Information
[2] Edward Clifton, “Ancient Submarine Landslides in a Submarine Canyon Fill — The Carmelo Formation at Point Lobos.” (May 3, 2014)
[3] Katherine Renz, “Toxic Relationship or Supportive Partner? Learning to Love a Scorned Species” Pacific Horticulture (Fall 2023)
[4] Bocek, B.R. 1984. “Ethnobotany of Costanoan Indians, California, Based on Collections by John P. Harrington,” Economic Botany, 38(2): pgs. 240–255.
[5] Cynthia Wagner Weick, “The Monterey Cypress “Contributing to the Beauty of the Monterey Peninsula,” Carmel Magazine (Spring/Summer 2022)
[6] Eric Barker’s poem “Point Lobos Cypresses” is published in Directions in the Sun. pg 20 (1956)
[7] Katherine D. Osbourne, Robert Louis Stevenson in California. Published by A. C. McClurg, Chicago, 1911.
[8] Ann Fisher, No More a Stranger, Stanford University Press, 1946, Chapter 12, pg.111.
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