Salt Point and Gerstle Cove

The name is older than the park. Seawater dries in the hollows of the sandstone here and leaves salt behind, and Kashaya Pomo people scraped it from the rock with abalone chisels, for their own use and to trade.

From the 1850s the stone itself was the export. A San Francisco company quarried the sandstone around Gerstle Cove, and it went south as paving and building stone for the city and for the navy yard at Mare Island. Walk the Salt Point Trail north from the cove and the evidence lies where the quarrymen left it: squared slabs on the terrace, and lines of drill holes in an old sea stack that the rising land has since left well back from the surf. On the rocks either side of the cove, rusted iron bolts mark where ships were held while stone, tanoak and cordwood came down to them by cable and chute.

The honeycomb weathering in the same sandstone is tafoni, carved as seawater soaks in, dries out and crystallizes, season after season.

In 1974 the cove became one of California's first underwater reserves, and nothing is taken from it now. The tide pools along its edge are worth timing a visit to a low tide.