Año Nuevo Weather Miracle

Año Nuevo is a point along the coast where the Elephant seals come every year from about December to March to rest, have their babies from the last year and mate again. The rest of the year you can walk around this beach and all the fun trails whenever you please, but during this time you can only go out there if you buy tickets and have a guide take you out to see the Elephant seals for safety reasons etc. The tickets get sold pretty fast, so you have to buy them ahead of time, and then hope for good weather because there are no refunds unless they cancel a tour. This only happens if there is a severe storm, and thunder or a tsunami or something. Well all during the week it rained, and Friday the forecast was for rain also--even a possible thunderstorm. We decided to drive out there anyway and take our chances since we already forked out the money. We couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day!! The sun was shining--it did rain once but only for five minutes, then the sun was out again--we took off our coats. It was beautiful!! Then that afternoon (Friday) it poured and has been pouring nonstop since. I'm telling you it was a miracle!
----Just a warning--LOTS of pictures----


Curt, Isaac and the old man in the sea
The kids would plop down and play in the sand dunes whenever the guide stopped to talk to us.
In the picture below, you can see the elephant seals were scattered throughout the sand dunes where we were walking. We got pretty close to some smaller ones.







Any resemblance?

I felt like we were in the middle of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom--does anyone remember those shows? I can sing the song for you if it would help you remember. The younger baby ones have darker coats.

They made the weirdest sounds . . . when the males would do this (below) it sounded like a slow deep motor of some really loud old motorcycle or something. The baby ones made noises that sounded like crazy monkeys. Or some tropical jungle bird or something. We had a few guys in our tour group making lots of "comments" you'll hear in the video below, but you can also hear the guide talking. This is kind of a cool video because one male moves in on another territory and the other ones comes over and chases him away . . . sort of. The guide was saying that dominance had already been decided) probably earlier in the season with a fight or something, so all the one had to do was snort and show his nose and the other one high tailed it.





I got in trouble for this picture below--I stopped to try and get this picture (I eventually suceeded) but it took a couple of tries with a two year old--and we got too far behind the guide. He yeld at us to keep up. It was worth it!
Aren't the views beautiful?! This was so great to be out hiking around in the fresh sea air--(I'm sure I feel the same way about mountain hiking--it's just been a while) with the beautiful views, I couldn't get enough. It makes me happy.
Nicole examining Elephant seal specimens--I think that is some elephant seal hide


Nicole and Isaac hiked the whole way (3+ miles round trip) and did great! Ryan probably could have done the whole thing too, but he couldn't keep up with the group, so he got carried for some of it.