Drakes Head

On August 3, 2025, I wrote that I caught a Golden Gate Transit bus at Bush and Van Ness. I arrived quickly in San Rafael where I transferred to the 68. My trip up Drake Boulevard involved many of the same kinds of loops as the other rural buses in Marin.

At Fairfax, I downloaded to my map cache to get a better look at all of the different driveways and turns along the way. The drive followed a lot of road cyclists and I felt the driver was very polite, turning out in several places.

At Olema, I learned my friend was nearby so I got off the bus and got some coffee. I was there for barely a second before getting into her car. We drove to Inverness Park. She got us a sandwich and a Coca-Cola. Then we continued our drive, climbing past Pierce Beach Drive.

While we were driving, I noted that the trees around Tomales Bay are a source of inspiration for an artist I am acquainted with in the town of Point Reyes Station. The trees are generally funny looking and she had done a lot of true-to-form vernacular paintings of them.

At Estuary Drive, we packed my backpack and descended to Drakes Bay on the Estuary Trail. I noted that Open Street Map calls it White Gate Trail.

On the walk-through a small forest, we encountered a man with a bike and a companion, who said there was a boy of ahead of us whose mother is using chocolate to bribe him to catch up. Sure enough, about a quarter mile ahead we encountered a boy taking his time and his mother waiting ahead. We decided to jog by him.

After that, we encountered a small bridge and while crossing we found that the estuary was going through a slack tide. We didn’t stop but instead ascended a small hill and descended to another lagoon. This one had a levy and no bridge.

We then ascended to a loan eucalyptus and we tried to set up for a small snack, but it turned out there were bees underneath the logs there. So, we moved onto to the next lagoon – our third this time – and onward to the Drake‘s head trail fork.

That highpoint was Drake’s Head proper, but the trail takes you down to the prominent point from which you can see much of the estuary. Unfortunately, we didn’t take the fork over Drake’s Head but instead descended into what I later learned is named Sunset Beach. This caused uncertainty since at the time we thought we were going to Sunshine Beach.

We passed between a series of small ponds and as we moved along there were a bunch of spots where the gating was designed to channel cows away from the trail edge. I noted that it was a kind of natural grading. As we descended into Sunset Beach we passed a lagoon and a few people on the trail.

This was clearly the end of the trail. We ended up between the head lands out near Lemantour and Drake’s Spit which seem tantalizingly close but are actually on the other side of the estuary. We sat on the rocky shore there and ate our sandwich and drank our Coke.

My notes called it a beach but it was a rocky shoreline. There was some sand but the spot we were at was obviously a marginal location, and more or less was the end of the trail. We looked at rocks. Everything was sandstone. My companion pointed out a phenomenon called tafoni, where the ocean’s action causes pitting in the rock. She explained that the seaweed was actually called eel grass. We also identified the carcass of a seal or a sea lion.

We could’ve continued down the shoreline around Drake‘s Head to a point where both spits are visible and even eventually connect to the Drakes Head trail. However, we concluded that it would be best to turn back. Had we wanted to go to Sunshine Beach that we should have gone left before descending from Drakes Head.

Walking back we noted that the seagulls were fighting over stuff in the estuary as the slack tide switched to a rising tide. Back on the trail we told everyone we saw that the trail had petered out for us. We returned to the lagoon and while climbing the trail we noted how the cows had left their mark everywhere. We saw giant black stink bugs.

Back on top of Drakes Head, we passed a lady with a stroller which puzzled me given how far we out we were. I noted, as we passed the trail fork, that turning right would take us to Sunshine beach, which was my companion’s memory at that point. However, we were done and going back to the trail head.

I noted that there is no trail to Sunshine Beach on the Google app. However, we did not have any cell phone service. We walked back past the small ponds and the three lagoons. We also passed cyclists and discovered we were only a few steps behind a couple.

The last two hills were really difficult so afterwards we stopped at the bridge. The air was nice there. The slack tide had clearly ended.

The rest of the walk was pleasant and quiet. We packed up and drove to Inverness. I looked at Mount Vision on the map. I noted that the hills are impressive and obviously made of something more substantive than sandstone. I couldn’t figure it out though.

We passed through Inverness, stopped in Inverness Park and continued into San Rafael to eat at Sol Food. The meal was really good – even the hot sauce.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.