Marin Headlands, Memorial Day 2018

First things first - I saw this on Tennessee Beach, just north of San Francisco (shoe for scale.) Any guesses what it is?


It's baleen, from the whale that washed up ten days before, a 35' gray. The fine tips felt like cat's whiskers, and as each column thickened toward the base it became like very hard thick polypropylene. There's hardly anything left except this and a few ribs and vertebrae with the barest covering of skin; a combination of the biologists who carted off some of it for necropsy, and birds and coyotes and whatever else gnawed on it for dinner. If the decomposition process is that fast, then it's amazing that Lewis and Clark saw a dead whale (ekola in Chinook) on the beach when they reached the Pacific - in a matter of days they would have missed it.













Probably the coolest texture I've yet photographed. Bits of the rest of Ms. Whale was laying around the beach too.













But there was more to the run than just a whale. It was warm, maybe 80 F, unusual for the coast, due to a big high pressure bubble over Norcal. In the skyline shot, you can see that Salesforce Tower is clearly the tallest building in San Francisco now. I'm really not okay with that. The City should be kept under glass in the exact condition it was during my roaring twenties. But never mind that! Enjoy the flowers and blue sky.