Okay. Summer’s gone. So is vacation time. Halloween is looming, you need to get away, and you only have the weekend. I have the perfect recipe, the perfect landscape, and the perfect haunt for you and your mate, especially if you’re here in California.
Back in the mid-eighties when I first learned to drive, my pals and I spent our autumn evenings and weekends exploring the California coastline between our hometown of Santa Cruz and the bustled peaks of San Francisco. The object was to catch the most intense sunset, and to delve into the cacophony of haunted beaches along the coast. Most beaches along the stretch of Highway One between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, California, are fierce and isolated and were once notorious for attracting and destroying clipper ships. These majestic beaches define mystical with gnarled Monterey pines and weathered purple sage that leans into the hard wind as if to try and stop it. There is nothing short of postcard beautiful with craggy rock cliffs and foaming combers clearly marking the edge of western civilization. If you stand on the cliffs just right, no one around but you, you’ll clearly hear music-box chimes from times gone by, the wails of lost loves and women who wear black veils.
Wanna bet?
Franklin Point is located in the Año Nuevo State Reserve, San Mateo County, California. It is named after the clipper ship Sir John Franklin. I love Franklin Point for its towering dunes of sand, brown pelicans, surf-zone rock formations that look like melted chocolate, and, of course, the fact that there are buried pirates right there on the beach.
The Sir John Franklin was bound for San Francisco and in heavy fog struck rocks off of the point on January 17, 1865. The ship was destroyed. The bodies of only six of the victims were recovered, four seamen and two officers. The seaman were buried on the point; the officers in San Francisco. The Franklin Point site is designated a cemetery on the 1955, U.S.G.S. Franklin Point, 7.5 quadrangle. A monument, now missing, to the memory of Edward J. Church (a sixteen-year-old crewman of the Franklin) and the other seamen lost on the Franklin was placed on the point. Prior to the wreck of the Franklin, the clipper ship Carrier Pigeon ran aground west of the Point (without fatalities) on June 6, 1853. Following the wreck of the Sir John Franklin, the Coya went aground near Ano Nuevo Island on November 24, 1866, killing twenty-seven individuals, including the captain’s wife and child. Thirteen of the bodies were recovered and buried on Franklin Point. On November 21,1868, the Hellespont, ran aground killing eleven sailors and six scallywags. Much later the Columbia became stranded on the rocks in 1897, and two sailors drown.
Yes, my fellow adventurers, Franklin Point is booming with bodies and ghosts and grisly deaths begging to be revisited this Halloween.
Okay. So now you want to see Franklin Point, but how far is it really from Santa Cruz or San Francisco? Not far from either city. From Santa Cruz take Highway One and drive north for an hour. From San Francisco take Highway One and drive south for an hour. Franklin Point is a state park and is well marked on state park maps.
What will you find at Franklin Point?
Towering and vibrant dunes with clean and easily navigable trails. Flowers and birds and vines that thrive in the harsh cold and wet and windy environs of the coastal plains. A cemetery overgrown and barely visible; plots for the dead filled with century old sailors put to rest by the rocks and sand and the sea (a plot for you and your mate, if you’re not careful).
Uh-oh, a word of warning: there are no bathrooms or picnic tables, so you’re going to have to rough it a bit. My suggestion is visiting Duarte’s Tavern in nearby Pescadaro for some artichoke soup. Last time I ate soup at Duarte’s, one mouthful made my eyes roll back in my head.
The best part of the deal, the icing on the cake: a quarter-mile down the highway is one of the largest pumpkin patches in all of San Mateo County.