Gold Bluffs Beach and Fern Canyon

In the spring of 1850 a party of prospectors walking north along the beach from Trinidad saw glittering specks in the black sand beneath these bluffs. The gold was real. The trouble was that it was dust, so fine and so mixed with heavy black sand that the men could save only a fraction of it. Word reached San Francisco anyway and grew as it travelled: investors heard of sand worth up to ten dollars a pound, and that December a ship sailed north crowded with fortune-seekers. Most went home with little. Companies kept at it, off and on, with sluices, tunnels and schemes to dredge the offshore sand, until mining at the bluffs finally stopped by about 1920.

The bluffs are soft sedimentary rock, and Home Creek has cut a narrow slot through them about half a mile long. Its walls rise fifty feet and more, and they are hung top to bottom with five-finger and sword ferns, kept wet by seeps that run all year.

Roosevelt elk graze the meadows behind the beach, often close to the road.

The road in is miles of gravel and closed to trailers. In summer the creek gets footbridges and the area needs a day-use permit; in the wet months expect to wade.