Lost on the Mendocino Coast: Where the heck is Blues Beach?

Looking for Blues Beach. Photo by Nathan DeHart.

When’s the last time you asked someone for directions? And by someone I mean a live person, another human being you talked to face-to-face —something I call “Old School GPS.”

 

While you’re trying to remember, I’ll tell you why I had to dust off my ancient searching skills very recently while trying to find something on the Mendocino Coast called Blues Beach.

That was cool.

Why? Because it was fun to actually look for something again, to physically search for a place that couldn’t be virtually located for me. More importantly, it was comforting to know that there are still places in this world that my phone can’t find, locations that an electronic voice can’t give me driving directions to mere seconds after I type a name.

 

Like Blues Beach, which I read about every week in an email I get from Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, which alerts media outlets to upcoming road projects in your area that will affect traffic. 

 

And for months now that email has included something called the Blues Beach Trailhead, words that made me picture a trail along the gorgeous Mendocino Coast that I hadn’t been on yet. And as someone who loves both trails and the Mendocino Coast, I decided I had to find the Blues Beach Trailhead.

 

So I set out with my friend Nathan to do just that. Like most drives I take, it started off with a mistake, because I turned onto the wrong highway to head to the coast. But Nathan shrugged it off by declaring: “We're on an adventure, right? We’ve got plenty of time, just start over!”

 

And so I did, turning around and heading back to drive to the coast on Highway 20 instead of Highway 128. Once we reached Highway 1, I didn’t ask my phone where Blues Beach was because I knew it was near Westport, and I figured there had to be a sign. After all, the beach used to be owned by Caltrans, and who makes more signs than Caltrans?!

 

But also, we were on an adventure dang it! I didn’t know it yet, but I secretly wanted a mystery to unravel, a puzzle that my human brain had to solve, using only clues provided by other human brains.

 

Like this rock a birder friend told me about. Back in the pre-digital days like the 1980s, he said, there was a rock near Mono Lake where birders kept a list of the birds they had seen in the area. So instead of just getting an email telling you of recent sightings, you had to find the rock, lift it up and pull out the piece of paper people had written on.

 

I loved learning about that rock; loved picturing that list tucked under it, waiting for the few fingers that knew they could pull it out and read it. 

 

And yes, I want there to still be things like that: knowledge transferred from one human to another the old-fashioned way: by touch, taste, sight, smell or sound.

 

Like how my mother spent her weekends listening to records of bird calls so she could identify the sounds she heard coming from the trees. But now? Now you can just ask your phone to tell you which bird is talking.

And maybe my mother would have liked not having to memorize the calls herself because a phone app could just tell her, but I doubt it. And I don’t want to ask a phone either.

 

Like when I was at the grocery store shopping for turnips, and found only purple ones instead of white.

“What’s the difference between purple turnips and the white?” I asked the man stocking vegetables next to me.

“I don't know,” he said. “But I can Google it for you.”

 

“No, thank you,” I said, because I didn’t want to ask a phone. I wanted to ask a person who had obtained facts through experience, then could offer them firsthand to someone else.

So I think I wanted it to be harder than it needed to be to find Blues Beach. I realize now that I could have just taken the mile marker off the email and found the turnout that way. But I wanted a mystery to solve, an analog path we had to find ourselves by picking another human brain.

Which is what we did to find Blues Beach, finally asking the camp host at Westport-Union Landing State Beach for directions, which she happily provided while explaining why we couldn’t find them online: “Because only locals call it Blues Beach, so you have to ask a local!”

So while Blues Beach was definitely not the prettiest beach I've been to on the Mendocino Coast, especially because of the fresh tire tracks on the sand, it was definitely the most satisfying to find. 

And has one of the best signs I’ve ever found at a beach, a placard nailed to a telephone pole that declares “Go Jump in the Ocean,” which I think we should all do every chance we get. Why? Because you can’t take your phone with you! 

And that is really cool.