Camping on the beach with the soporific ocean waves was great. Dan and I agree these three nights were actually the best nights sleep we have had during backpacking. I usually need white noise to sleep because I'm a fairly light sleeper, so I thought it was awesome. I did hear a crab or something near our tent that first night, but figured it would leave us alone and it did...
Our first morning was great. We got a little extra sleep because we only needed to make it a little over 5 miles to Norwegian Memorial. The clouds broke a bit and we saw some blue sky, which didn't last much past mid-morning, but it provided for some neat photos while we made coffee and breakfast.
We packed up and headed out for our second day on the beach. We saw a bald eagle perched on its nest surveying its domain, right away. There were several bald eagles we saw on this trip. they love these tall rocky spires halfway out into the full ocean along the beach. They probably nest up there and it offers full 360 degree views of their domain. Majestic creatures.
We got to the point along the trail that should not be passed at high tide, right before high tide (we had a tide chart with us!). So we decided to string up the hammock and relax for a bit during high tide. We broke out the wine too, and just listened to the waves.
When high tide passed, we took off and almost immediately ran into another interesting creature: a wild raccoon! We were crossing some very slippery rocks and I turned around for a second (Dan was behind me) and we see this bugger curiously looking at us. Thankfully, the raccoon looked pretty skittish and was not trying to come up to us for food. Looks like we startled it as much as it startled us. Dan was able to pull out his camera and zoom in to get some really great shots. These make it look like the raccoon is closer to us than she is, but she was a good 5-10 yards up the rocks from us. She looked very healthy. I'm sure she gets plenty of food from the beach and ocean ecosystem.
We again got to our campsite at Norwegian Memorial fairly early so we had plenty of time to rest and recuperate. By day 2 our feet were really sore from walking along the uneven and slippery beach. I'm really glad we broke up the mileage into small snippets so we could take as much time as needed. We found a campsite, this time just inside the tree line, and strung up the hammock once again to relax and drink some more wine. The beach at this campsite was very long and shallow with lots of cool rocks sticking out from the ocean.
As we were relaxing, I spied an otter floating fairly close to the beach just inside some rock out-cropping. So we both ran over and took a closer look. Sure enough, it was a lone otter grooming and lazily floating around the rocks. The back flippers bobbing up and down with their heads give these little guys away (that's how I spy them from the surrounding rocks). We also looked around and saw some seals. They were everywhere on the rock out-croppings, just chillin'.
The rest of the evening we spent making dinner and watching silly seagulls play in the freshwater spring that we used to fill up on water. They were making a lot of noise so definitely woke me up in the morning, but hey seagulls need their fun too. Onto day 3!