La Jolla Sea Caves (Sunny Jim Cave)

Author's Comments

There is something almost absurd about the entrance. You pay a few dollars at a small shop on Coast Boulevard, push through a door at the back, and suddenly you are descending 145 wooden steps into the cliff. The tunnel was hand-dug more than a century ago, and it feels like it. The walls are damp sandstone. The air cools as you go down. And then the cave opens, and the light at the far end is doing something you did not expect. Sunny Jim is the only one of the seven caves you can reach without a kayak, and that fact alone makes it feel like a small secret kept in plain sight. The mouth of the cave frames the Pacific in a rough oval, and on a bright morning the contrast between the dim interior and the sea beyond is severe in the best way. A figure standing at the lower platform reads as silhouette against blue. The sandstone catches whatever warm light bounces in and holds it. I come in the morning because the sun angles into the opening rather than glaring across it, and because the water inside the cave is calmer before the day picks up. Bring a wide lens. A tripod helps more than you think it will. The exposure range from the back of the cave to the open sea is wider than your eye registers, and you will want to bracket. It is a small place. You will not spend an hour here. But the descent and the framing and the strange quiet of being inside a cliff while the ocean works at its other end - that stays with you longer than the photograph does.

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