From With the Sea Beside Me

At Orcutt, you can take the 135 into Santa Maria and reconnect with the 101, but that’s simply boring. Unless you are hungry or tired, there are not many reasons to stop in Santa Maria. Just stay on One which quickly becomes rural again. A short drive past Vandenberg Village, you can turn left on San Antonio Rd. West, for a more scenic route, one that takes you to the village of Casmalia. You’ll see Point Sal Road, but that doesn’t go to the point. It ends at some ranches, miles from the point. If you continue on and down to the stop sign, turn left. The road isn’t marked, but you are back on Highway One. After about 4 or 5 miles you’ll come to Brown Road. The sign says Point Sal 9 miles. However, the road washed out in 1998, and it now ends just over three miles in. The road isn’t used much these days, and on my last visit a very skinny coyote shared the road with me. The old road wasn’t great by any stretch, but it’s now more popular as a six mile hike each way, but you only need three miles to view this fascinating point, one that makes a huge “L” shape, the rest of the trail winds down to the beach. Point Sal Beach is just beyond the edge of Vandenberg. There is, however, one other possible way to get there.
    About a mile and a half north of Point Sal is the start of the dunes, called Pismo, Oceano, Guadalupe-Nipomo, depending on where you’re standing.  You can access the dunes and the next actual coastal access from the next town, Guadalupe, a little town with a main street maybe three blocks long, a town that looks like one you’d find in northern Mexico. Half the commercial buildings are empty, and all the restaurants are Mexican except the King Falafel, a place for falafels and burgers.
    At the southern end of town, at Main Street, you can turn and go 4.8 miles to Guadalupe Dunes County Park, another coastal access not used by many people. Even though it doesn’t cost, there’s someone at the gate, handing out literature, apparently to keep  people informed about the sensitive bird habitat. Drive through the dunes to the parking lot at the beach, where you can hike beachward of the fence. The rest of the dunes are protected for the terns and plovers. This 18 mile, 22,000 acre stretch of sand dunes extends from Pismo Beach to Point Sal. This particular preserve, with public access, is 592 acres and is available for hiking, surfing, wildlife viewing, photography, fishing and picnicking. It’s a fragile ecosystem with endangered species, and 200 species of birds migrate through here. People have been enjoying the area for a long time, perhaps 9000 years, when the first Chumash people settled in the wetlands.
    The other way to see Point Sal is to walk a mile down the beach, over Mussel Rock, a 500 foot sand dune, to Paradise Beach and over private land to the point, something you probably don’t want to do unless you really love to climb tall dunes.
   However, just north along the beach is the wide lagoon that’s the mouth of the Santa Maria River, a shorter and possibly more interesting walk.
    However, before leaving Guadalupe, take a photo, because it still lacks the strip malls and chain stores that typify most other towns.
    About three miles north of town there’s another intersection, Oso Flaco Lake Road, which leads, in about three miles, quite coincidentally to Oso Flaco Lake, which is part of the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation area. If you don’t access the beach anywhere else along here, I encourage you to do it here. For your $5 parking fee you can hike a one-mile trail to the beach. The first quarter mile is on a paved road, under overhanging trees and brush. Then the trail turns left and becomes a boardwalk over the lake, with views of ducks, cormorants and occasional osprey. On the other end of the lake the boardwalk continues through the thick vegetation of the back dunes, with sage, willow, lupine and other plants, nature’s secret garden, nestled among the wide and forbidding dunes. Then the back dunes give way to the more sparsely vegetated mid dunes, before the boardwalk rises to the end at an observation platform above the beach. From there, it’s a short walk down the fore dunes to the water.  As you walk along, you can see open dunes on the north and south, areas where the dune buggies roam. Also, you can look south to the mouth of the Santa Maria River.