Out to the Seashore

We stopped at a nice vista on our way to MacKerricher State Park to catch a peek of the beautiful view and to ease our tummies from the winding road trip.


At the visitor's center we stopped to take a look at the whale skeleton. Here's Hayden next to the whale's humerus.


We looked at all the whale's "arm" bones and Isaiah showed us where he broke his radius and ulna. We also saw where Ry broke his scapula.

These are the remnants of the whales "leg" bones. Since they no longer have a function, they're called vestigial structures.

The Peterson's on their way out to the tide pools.


It was tough to get too many pictures of the critters in the tide pools, but I got a few that turned out. The green looking blobs are sea anenomes that are closed up to keep from drying out. The shells belong to the hermit crabs that stole them from snails. We saw the crabs fighting over bigger shells that they wanted to move into and teeny tiny crabs the size of an ant running around all the kelp and trying not to get eaten by the big guys.














Here you can barely sea a purpley sea star clinging to the rock.














After the tidepools we went out to Glass Beach. I remembered going here in junior high and the beach was all colored glass that was left from when the area was used as a dump. There was still a little bit of glass, but it was mostly just a bunch of of metal and junk...

You can see old pieces of cars and who knows what else. The water here is all discolored from the metals dissolving and leaching into the ocean.
So sad...










It was kind of a sad way to end the trip. I hate when you have a memory of a place and then you go back to find that it wasn't like you thought it was originally. At least I can use this to show my students and help them learn to respect the planet.