Julie and I are on a trip to California, primarily to see Mom and Dad. We are staying at Shell Beach, which is South of San Luis Obispo and is part of Pismo Beach. We are staying in a motel on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The scenery is exquisite and is similar to the fabled Big Sur area to the North.
The cliffs are part of the Franciscan formation, which is a jumble of rocks resulting from the Pacific tectonic plate sliding under the North American plate. Because most of the rock is sedimentary, you can tell its horizontal position when it was laid down. The process of subduction has resulted it this sedimentary rock being scraped off and left, helter-skelter, in and above the trench and forming the mountains of the Coastal Range in California. As I said, you can tell what was the horizontal position of the sediment when it was laid down. Now the sedimentary rocks go at all different angles, with some slabs very close together but at 90 degrees to 120 degrees different in angle. It makes for a very confusing sight.
The onslaught of the Pacific's pounding surf is eroding the cliffs in dramatic and scenic fashion. The sedimentary rock is rather loosely bound and contains lots of gravel, so it breaks apart fairly easily. Dad tells me that California now prohibits most efforts to impose barriers to stop erosion, so the cliffs will continue to gradually be consumed by the ocean.
We had quite a day on Saturday with Mom and Dad. We went to the Pismo Beach monarch butterfly grove, a rural retail site-cum-petting zoo called the Apple Barn, and two central coast-area wineries. In all we were on the go for about five hours. I thought that was quite a feat for 89-year-old Dad and 87-year-old Mom, and I was the one who cried "uncle" and called it a day.
The monarch butterfly grove had some butterflies, but not a lot. Its relevance is that it is a winter sanctuary site for monarchs from west of the Rockies. Monarchs east of the Rockies migrant to a particular region in Mexico. Those west of the Rockies migrate to the California coast. This grove in Pismo Beach consists of eucalyptus trees--probably no more than a couple hundred trees, and can hold millions of monarchs in clusters on the branches. Scientists don't know exactly why they cluster. A logical assumption is that they do so to withstand the cold, but apparently they have also been known to cluster in warm weather. The normal life cycle of a monarch butterfly is about six weeks, so several generations pass between winter migrations, yet they always arrive at the same place. The monarchs that arrive for winter go into a state similar to hibernation, and they survive in this way for up to eight months, then emerge, lay their eggs and die, and their children then make the summer migration back to the Rockies.
Mileage: 410.
