Salt Point State Park

Salt Point State Park delivers one of the most dramatic stretches of California’s Sonoma Coast-sandstone bluffs, sculpted coves, offshore sea stacks, tidepools bustling with life, and on a clear day, blue horizons that make you want to walk and walk. For decades, hikers celebrated the park’s coastal trail as a seven-mile wonder, linking Salt Point to Horseshoe Cove in a long, unforgettable ramble above the restless Pacific.

These days, the magic hasn’t entirely faded, but it has changed. The middle section of the trail-between Stump Beach and Fisk Mill Cove-has gone mostly unmaintained. Deadfall, erosion, and neglect have made passage tricky at best. I hiked this stretch as a Boy Scout, back when bishop pines rose in thick stands along the coastal slope, their resin-scented cones waiting for fire to open. It felt like a walk through one of California’s most distinctive coastal forests. Now, years of drought stressed the trees, pine pitch canker arrived, and the bishop pine population collapsed. The result: a forest turned graveyard. The deadfalls are legion, the skeleton trees a reminder of how fragile even “forever” forests can be.

For me-and for any hiker with history here-the loss is personal. Bishop pines were a quirky, beloved conifer, found in only a handful of places along the coast. Salt Point was one of their strongholds. To walk among them now is to see climate change made tangible: a once-thriving forest reduced to ruin. You still hear the ocean, still see the tafoni honeycomb rock that gives the park its name, still picnic on Stump Beach, but the pine forest experience is no longer what it was.

Yet not all is bleak. The northern third of the trail, still hike-able, leads to Grace Rock and Horseshoe Point, where gulls ride the updrafts and wave-cut terraces tell the story of ancient seas. The views here-fort to cove, cliff to horizon-still stir the spirit. If you look carefully, you’ll even spot iron eyebolts drilled into the bluff edge, relics of the days when cables lowered timber to waiting schooners. History, like the ocean, lingers.

Spring hikers get a consolation prize of another kind: a riot of pink blossoms just across Highway 1. Kruse Rhododendron State Reserve, once part of the old Kruse Ranch, bursts into bloom from mid-April to mid-June. A two-mile loop through redwoods and tanoak leads you into a floral cathedral where rhododendrons, shoulder-high and taller, festoon the understory in soft clouds of color. Visit in May and you’ll see why this pocket reserve is a local pilgrimage.

So yes, Salt Point is scarred, diminished, no longer the seamless coastal trek I loved in my youth. But it is still worth your boots and your time: the tidepools alive with sculpins and anemones, tafoni rocks sculpted like beehives, bluffs where the sea pounds and roars, and in spring, pink petals floating on the forest air.