Leon Turnbull Photography

Just a short distance above stunning McWay Falls lies a lovely little tiered waterfall which I call Upper McWay Falls. It is fairly easy to get to and flows on the same creek as the lower McWay Falls. In other words, it also flows year-round.

After shooting McWay Falls at sunrise, I took the short hike up to the upper falls. It is an easy hike to the bottom of the 3 tiered waterfall, but it is a bit tricky scrambling up to the upper tier, which is the prettiest section. It drops 32 ft. into a hidden alcove. It reminds me a lot of Hole In The Wall Falls in the Columbia River Gorge, Oregon because of how it curves around inside the alcove. I spent quite a lot of time here shooting this one, and I may or may not have removed a lot of ugly logs and debris that may or may not have been at the base of the waterfall. I can’t really remember. Photographers have a very short memory when it comes to things like that.

Anyhow, it was a fun morning. I grabbed some coffee in Big Sur on my way back to Monterey to meet my family, and we spent the rest of the day enjoying the beach, playgrounds, and touring the Carmel mission (which was quite interesting), and then enjoying a big pizza dinner, followed by a walk on the fisherman’s wharf where we saw a cute baby sea otter from up close.

With my new job starting this week we decided to make a quick trip over to the ocean at Monterey Bay to celebrate the new job and get a last vacation before the new job started.

We went over on Saturday morning and spent the day at the aquarium. Lots of fun of course for the kiddos. Lots of fun for me too because we saw quite a lot of wildlife this trip: dolphins, seals, sea lions, sea otters (including a very cute baby). The next morning I got up super early to drive down to McWay Falls. It is the only waterfall flowing at the coast right now so I wanted to get down to see it even though I have been here many times before and already have good photos of it. I know this is a sunset place not a sunrise place but this was the only time I had to go there. I wanted to do something a bit different here so I decided to arrive well before sunrise and try photographing the waterfall in the pre-dawn hour. This was my result. The exposure is F/8, 30 seconds, and was taken 25 minutes before sunrise. It was fun being at the overlook in the dark and being the only one there. It is such an amazing place. There were no clouds and no interesting sunrise but I did hike up to the upper falls before going back to the hotel to meet up with the family.

I did see some writing on the beach made by some idiots who went down there in recent days. It is not legal to go down to the beach here. The cliffs are crumbly and delicate and even one person going down would cause a lot of environmental damage. I do not think it would be too difficult, however, to get down. I would never do it but I do (rather often) think about doing it. I think though that if I ever did go down here it would forever ruin the location for me afterwards. From the overlook the waterfall and beach seem so pristine, so stunning, and so out of reach. It would not be so after going down to it.

When we were at the Coast last month, we went one day to the Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing. We walked around there, and saw plenty of bird wildlife. Afterwards, we stopped at the beach there for lunch and to let the kids play on the beach. They had a lot of fun playing in the waves. Daddy had a bit of fun too taking pictures. These little sanderlings were running along the beach while we were there, scooping up little tidbits to eat that they found on the shoreline. They let me get pretty close to them, until a jogger came running along to the beach and scared them away. All in all, it was a very fun day.

This is a sunset we saw at the Monterey coast. It was nothing very spectacular. In fact, it really bombed. This was the most color that I witnessed and it did not last very long. At first though, the sunset seemed quite promising. We were going back to our motel from the day’s outing, and the clouds looked not too bad, so I suggested to my wife that we go down to the beach for sunset. She was all game for that of course. So while the kids played on the beach, I was off to take pictures. I decided to walk up on the dunes overlooking the beach and ocean and settled on this spot. Another photographer had this plan also, and he also agreed with me that the sunset bombed that night. Oh well.

In the meantime, my wife and kids found about a “million” dead jellyfish on the beach. I did not see them as I was up on the dunes, but she said it was very odd. It was also around this day that a large number of fish had washed up on shore south of here. And interestingly enough, this was the day before the big earthquake in Japan. Was this all a coincidence? I wonder.

We found these harbor seals hanging out on the rocks at Point Lobos State Reserve, near Monterey. They kept looking up at us as we peered down at them, no doubt wondering why we were looking at them for so long. It was interesting because there were quite a few people in the area, but we were the only ones that were watching the seals. There was even an old lady sitting back on a chair looking at the ocean, but oblivious to the presence of the seals below. I had the strong feeling while we were at the coast that things like seals, sea lions, and cormorants, etc. are so common over there that the people just say, yeah whatever, another seal, what’s the big deal? For us inlanders, though, seeing animals like this is cool. It is not like we get to see them very much in Sacramento. 🙂