Over the course of our time in California, we visited Natural Bridges State Beach twice. It was early-to-mid-March and on the colder side for the beach, but on the supposedly warmest day of the trip (70 degrees!), we decided to take advantage and make our first drive down to Natural Bridges, an area of protected coastline in Santa Cruz.

When we arrived, it was early morning, between 9 and 10. We found free parking on the street before the entrance to the park and walked down to the beach. I had overzealously worn shorts, and the sun could not budge through a dense layer of fog. A few stray people were walking on the beach, but certainly no one had come to sunbathe. I even saw someone wearing gloves—they must have thought I was just as crazy for wearing shorts as I thought they were for wearing gloves in 60 degrees.

Behind the beach area is where Moore Creek ends in a saltwater marsh, and hiking trails follow it back throughout the rest of the park to freshwater wetlands. Ducks paddled along the creek, and great egrets poked along the remnants of what high-tide washed in.

The most iconic and stunning part of the beach is the arch that rests a little ways off shore. You can see in the pictures below (some taken the first day we went to the park, some another day) just how foggy it was the first time we visited.

The park is named for its stunning mudstone arches, which were formed by sediment deposits and carved out of the cliffsides by the Pacific Ocean. When the cliffs eroded away, these standalone arches were left. Three such arches used to be found at this beach, but one fell during the early 1900s and another during a storm in 1980. The only remaining arch is also at risk of collapsing due to natural processes of erosion.

If you climb the rocks at the far end of the beach, you’ll find the beginning of the Natural Bridges State Marine Reserve, a protected stretch of rocky coast. Twice a day, the tide recedes, changing what used to be a fully submerged marine habitat into dry (or damp) shore pockmarked by tide pools.

The first day we went to the park, we (well, I) didn’t realize from my online research that the tide pools were part of this park, so we arrived well after low tide and missed our shot. We did some reading on the sand, ate a picnic lunch, then cut our losses when the sun still refused to provide its promised 70 degrees of warmth. However, we made sure to check the tidal schedule and leave ourselves plenty of time to spare on our second trip to Natural Bridges.

This was my first time ever going tide-pooling, and I was so excited to see this beautiful habitat. Below, you can see photos of aggregating anemones, which form large colonies of hundreds of anemones packed together, and solitary anemones, which are bright green with pinkish tips on their tentacles. We also saw limpets, which are part of the mollusk family and related to snails, and California mussels, which close their shells to form a waterproof seal when exposed to the air and breathe for several hours through the water stored in their body cavity.

After tide-pooling, we also took a walk along the ocean bluff trail that runs behind the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, where we saw their gray whale skeleton. We had hoped to maybe catch a glimpse of migrating gray whales, sea lions, or otters, but we didn’t have any luck. We possibly saw a dolphin, but it was too far off the coast for us to be sure.

Even though both of our days in Natural Bridges State Beach were cloudy and not the warmest (notice, I did learn from my mistakes and wear pants the second time around), it was still a stunning ecosystem to explore. If I ever make it back, I’d like to visit in the early spring to see the monarch butterfly migration, as the thousands of butterflies that overwinter in the eucalyptus grove leave the park for the Rocky Mountains.

Up Next: Seeing sea otters for the first time in Point Lobos State Natural Reserve!

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