Table Rock Beach

Author's Comments

The staircase down off Table Rock Drive is the kind of access that keeps a place honest. There are no signs, no parking lot, no easy way in if you do not already know it is there. You park where you can on the residential street above and you take the stairs down, and what opens up at the bottom is small and quiet and almost always uncrowded. The rock itself does what the name suggests. It sits flat and broad at the edge of the surf, low tide exposing the tidepools that ring its base, and on a calm evening it functions as a natural platform a tripod can love. I have set up there for thirty second exposures at golden hour in November and watched the water go to silk around the base of the formation while the cliffs behind me caught the last warm light on their layered sandstone. Those cliffs deserve their own attention. The striations read like pages of a book left out in the weather, and detail shots at the right hour can be as strong as anything wider. Check the tide chart before you go. This is not optional. The rock is a different place at high water than at low, and the access route can disappear faster than you expect if you have not been paying attention. Spring and fall are the cleaner months. Winter storms bring drama if you time it right and patience if you do not. What I love about Table Rock is the restraint of it. It does not announce itself. You have to want to find it, and once you have, you tend to keep it quietly to yourself.

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