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New Year’s Walk at King Tide

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4K Video of Low Tide Walk from New Brighton to Capitola

On January 1, 2018, Santa Cruz county rang in the new year, and Mother Nature provided an incredible way to greet it: with a King Tide. A King
Tide is simply the very highest tide, and the flip side is a very low tide. When the tide is very low, it’s possible to walk from New Brighton Beach to Capitola Beach, right along the base of the cliff, without having to get wet.

My wife and I decided to take the kids for the walk, because this kind of super-low tide doesn’t happen every day. The weather was fine, just a tad under 60 degrees, with scattered high clouds. We started off from New Brighton Beach around 1 PM, with the lowest tide to come at 4:18 PM.

It took us a little more than an hour to make the walk to Capitola Village, exploring the rocks and tide pools exposed by the receding waters. We checked out countless sea anemones and hermit crabs, but were unable to find any starfish. Some folks said they had seen a small red octopus, but it vanished into the rocks.

We made it to Capitola shortly after 2 PM, and headed down for a late lunch at Paradise Beach Grill. By 3:30 we were again on the sand, walking back. On our way home, we ran into a lot of people we knew, so it took closer to two hours for the return trip. Which was fine, because the sunlight was sublime and it was great to be able to spend so much time with Mother Nature and so many members of our community.

We are so thankful that in less than a five minute drive from our house we can get to the beach for an experience as spectacular as the one we enjoyed as a family on New Year’s Day. Before we left, our youngest boy Evan was complaining about another trip to the beach, but he was amazed by all the “discoveries” we made, frolicking in the tide pools. Another priceless family memory, courtesy of our beautiful Monterey Bay. Happy New Year everyone!

[Home-Price-Callout]

A Walk on the Beaches of Aptos

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A Walk on the Beaches of Aptos
A Walk on the Beaches of Aptos

I’ve always enjoyed going on a nice walk, and Aptos is a wonderful place to go for a stroll. For those looking to seriously exert themselves, there’s always the lovely Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, which has miles and miles of hiking trails through this 10,000+ acre forested beauty. However, many folks instead choose to go for a walk on the beaches of Aptos.

There’s no shortage of great beaches for walking in Aptos. The other day, I wanted to go on a walk, and I thought I would start at New Brighton Beach, then make my way down to Pot Belly Beach, and then Seacliff Beach, before cruising up the Aptos Beach Gate path before eventually making my way back home.

Aside from just exercise, I had another objective. I wanted to go to a place I hadn’t been to in years – maybe a couple of decades, actually. Back in my college days, when I was living up on the bluff above the Cement Boat, my friends and I would go to the beach now and again to hang out. One of our favorite spots to go was this really cool ravine, which is at the southern end of Pot Belly Beach.

I thought it would be a great place to take my kids sometime. Since I hadn’t been in a while, I decided to take a moment to reconnoiter, since I was in the neighborhood. Back in the day, my friends and I would wander quite far up the ravine, but on this trip, the creek was so high that getting up into the ravine would have involved getting wetter than I was planning on.

So I didn’t make it up the ravine, alas, but I took a few pictures and I’ve made a note to come back soon, with the kids. As I was standing there looking at my phone, I happened to notice that the ravine is actually the end of Borregas Creek Gulch – which, coincidentally, was also the original border of Aptos Rancho, back in the 1840s. Small world!

The ravine itself is very cool, with sandstone cliff walls climbing dozens of feet above the creek bed. It’s really cool to look at all the sea shells embedded into the walls of the ravine, and I can’t wait to go back with my kids to explore and talk about our local Aptos geology.