We awoke early on this day and went to The Ravens restaurant at the Stanford Inn for breakfast, an "acclaimed vegetarian restaurant" in Mendocino right on the banks of the river. It was excellent food and a good way to get ready for another fairly long drive day.
We headed further up Hwy 1 out of Mendocino before connecting with Hwy 101 at Leggett. Here we continued north through Eureka with a stop at Arcata before going into the Redwoods National Park near Orick. The campers were in full force for the holiday weekend and we were glad we reserved a spot. We drove into Prarie Creek campground to find Roosevelt Elk grazing all along the roadway so we stopped to watch a bit before setting up camp.
After setting camp we took off to Gold Bluffs Beach, a remote beach down the worst road of the trip. Catherine took a walk up the beach on a section of the Coastal Trail while I tried to find surfperch in the breakers. It was a fun few hours of fishing and I finally did managed to land some surfperch along the northern coast as well as catching one crab! I headed up to meet up with Catherine and we walked back, she telling me of the Peregrine Falcons that she'd encountered further up the trail.
Here is
our camp and one of the big trees right next to it:
